This paper sets up a rational inattention model for the choice of departure time for a traveler facing random travel time. The traveler chooses how much information to acquire about the travel time outcome before choosing departure time. This reduces the cost of travel time variability compared to models in which the information is exogenously fixed .

This paper presents a tool for dynamic loading of components into run-time environments. This tool was implemented in the context of the Odyssey environment. Using this tool, it is possible to select, at runtime, the desired set of functionality for the Odyssey environment. Depending on the selected configuration, new components are downloaded and dynamically plugged into the environment. Moreo...

The relations between English spellings and pronunciations have been described as a fractal pattern. Manipulations of word properties are constructed to coincide with the fractal pattern of ambiguity in these relations (sampled as random variables). New word naming and lexical decision experiments replicate previously established effects of relations between word spellings and pronunciations. T...

The Response Time Variability Problem (RTVP) is a combinatorial optimisation problem that occurs whenever products, clients or jobs need to be sequenced so as to minimise variability in the time between the instants at which they receive the necessary resources. These situations can be generalized under the following framework. A sequence is built using n symbols (that represent products, clien...

Software must be regularly updated to keep up with changing requirements. Unfortunately, to install an update, the system must usually be restarted, which is inconvenient and costly. In this dissertation, we aim at overcoming the need for restart by enabling run-time changes at the programming language level. We argue that the best way to achieve this goal is to improve the support for encapsul...

The objective of the study was to determine maximum phonation time reliability as a function of the number of trials, days, and raters in dysphonic and control subjects. Two groups of adult subjects participated in this reliability study: a group of outpatients with functional or organic dysphonia versus a group of healthy control subjects matched by age and gender. Over a period of maximally 6...

More and more approaches propose to use Software Product Lines (SPLs) modelling techniques to implement dynamic adaptive systems. The resulting Dynamic Software Product Lines (DSPLs) present new challenges since the variability transformations used to derive alternative configurations have to be intensively used at runtime. This paper proposes to use the Common Variability Language (CVL) for mo...

The recently introduced Response Time Variability Problem (RTVP) is a scheduling problem that has a broad range of real-life applications, for example, to sequence the models to be produced on a mixed-model assembly line. Previous studies include heuristic algorithms and mathematical programming models, whose practical limit for obtaining optimal solutions is around 40 units to be scheduled. In...

Fairness is an inherent and fundamental factor of queue service disciplines in a large variety of queueing applications. Service time variability across jobs is an important factor affecting both system performance and scheduling rules (for example, computer systems that prioritize short jobs over long jobs). Service time variability and its effects on mean response times have been studied exte...