One of the motivations of hyper-heuristic research is to investigate the development of adaptive decision support systems that can be applied to a range of different problems and different problem instances [5]. One possible approach is to dynamically adjust the preferences of a set of simple lowlevel heuristics (or neighbourhood operators) during the search. Hyper-heuristics have been used to ...

The development of multiagent vaccines offers the advantage of eliciting protection against multiple diseases with minimal inoculations over a shorter time span. We report here the results of using formulations of individual Venezuelan equine encephalitis (VEE) virus replicon-vectored vaccines against a bacterial disease, anthrax; a viral disease, Marburg fever; and against a toxin-mediated dis...

I describe a real-time implementation of Ull-man's visual routine processor (VRP) theory of intermediate vision for visual search. The system performs serial self-terminating visual search and computes 2D spatial relations of objects from live color video using low cost hardware. I present a formal model of a VRP with unbounded resources and quantify the amount of external control structure req...

We have recently identified a novel ligand of the vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) family termed VEGF-related protein (VRP), which specifically binds to the FLT4 receptor. To characterize the signaling events after VRP engagement of its cognate receptor in hematopoietic cells, a population of human erythroleukemia (HEL) cells, termed HEL-JW, expressing high levels of FLT4 receptor was ...

Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV) is the causative agent of one of the most devastating and economically significant viral disease of pigs worldwide. The vaccines currently available on the market elicit only limited protection. Recombinant vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) replicon particles (VRP) have been used successfully to induce protection against influenza A vir...

We propose an algorithmic framework that successfully addresses three vehicle routing problems: the multi-depot VRP, the periodic VRP, and the multi-depot periodic VRP with capacitated vehicles and constrained route duration. The meta-heuristic combines the exploration breadth of population-based evolutionary search, the aggressive improvement capabilities of neighborhood-based meta-heuristics,...