Geometric constraints are used for a variety of applications, like the representation of consistency conditions or the determination of geometric aspects. For many cases geometric constraints form a system of non-linear equations. For geometric constraint solving there are iterative and symbolic methods. Iterative approaches are easier to be implemented and often successful, while symbolic appr...

A number of effective techniques for constraintbased optimization can be used to generate either diverse or high-quality solutions independently, but no framework is devoted to accomplish both simultaneously. In this paper, we tackle this issue with a generic paradigm that can be implemented in most existing solvers. We show that our technique can be specialized to produce diverse solutions of ...

In knowledge generating production processes such as intelligence gathering and news reporting, the quality of the result produced by a given activity depends on its duration, and, due to resource limitations and process deadlines, tradeoffs must invariably be made regarding how much time to devote to various activities to achieve maximum overall effect. In essense, some activities must be exec...

Streaming multimedia quality is impacted by two main factors: capacity constraint and packet loss. To match the capacity constraint while preserving real-time playout, media scaling can be used to discard the encoded multimedia content that has the least impact on perceived video quality. To limit the impact of lost packets, repair techniques, e.g. forward error correction (FEC), can be used to...

OBJECTIVE To systematically examine the research literature on the effectiveness of constraint-induced movement therapy on improving arm function in children with cerebral palsy, and to assess the association between the study effect size and the characteristics of the patients and intervention protocol. DATA SOURCES A systematic literature search was conducted in PubMed, PsycINFO, Cochrane, ...

Knowledge about the quality characteristics (QoS) of service compositions is crucial for determining their usability and economic value. Service quality is usually regulated using Service Level Agreements (SLA). While end-to-end SLAs are well suited for request-reply interactions, more complex, decentralized, multi-participant compositions (service choreographies) typically involve multiple mes...

Multi-constraint quality-of-service routing will become increasingly important as the Internet evolves to support real-time services. It is well known however, that optimum multi-constraint QoS routing is computationally complex, and for this reason various heuristics have been proposed for routing in practical situations. Among these methods, those that use a single mixed metric are the most p...

In multimedia networks, certain applications (e.g., voice and video sessions) can tolerate some delay violations and packet losses. For these applications, in [2] we proposed a novel, more flexible traffic characterization approach-Lp-sense constraint functions-as a generalization of deterministic constraint function. Intuitively, feeding more packets than provided resources will degrade the Qu...

The support of QoS properties in component-based software requires the run-time selection of appropriate concrete QoS contracts at the ports of the interacting components. Such a selection process is called QoS contract negotiation. This paper discusses the architecture of a QoS contract negotiation framework and how it is implemented in our prototype. The framework can be integrated in a compo...

This study considers a multi-class network resource in a competitive market where each user endowed with an initial budget will purchase bandwidth from each class of the network resource to maximise its utility function. The authors use revenue as the utility function for the service provider, and enhance Kelly’s utility function by including delay as the quality of service (QoS) parameter for ...