Whenever an agent learns to control an unknown environment, two opposing principles have to be combined, namely: exploration (long-term optimization) and exploitation (short-term optimization). Many real-valued connectionist approaches to learning control realize exploration by randomness in action selection. This might be disadvantageous when costs are assigned to \negative experiences". The b...

Abstract. Typical applications of evolutionary optimization involve the off-line approximation of extrema of static multi-modal functions. Methods which use a variety of techniques to self-adapt mutation parameters have been shown to be more successful than methods which do not use self-adaptation. For dynamic functions, the interest is not to obtain the extrema but to follow it as closely as p...

The motion planning problem for mobile robots is typically formulated as follows: given a robot and a description of an environment, plan a path of the robot between two specified locations, which is collision-free and satisfies certain optimization criteria. Traditionally there are two approaches to the problem: Off-line planning, which assumes perfectly known and stable environment, and on-li...

The data cube, also known in the OLAP community as the multidimensional database, is designed to provide aggregate information that can be used to analyze the contents of databases and data warehouses. Previous research mainly focussed on strategies for supporting queries, assuming that updates do not play an important role and can be propagated to the data cube in batches. While this might be ...

In this paper, a novel quadratic assignment-based mathematical model is developed for concurrent design of robust inter and intra-cell layouts in dynamic stochastic environments of manufacturing systems. In the proposed model, in addition to considering time value of money, the product demands are presumed to be dependent normally distributed random variables with known expectation, variance, a...

This paper presents a new approach for adapting a multimedia presentation into heterogeneous and dynamically changing environments. A novel media adaptation taxonomy is proposed that includes synchronized media optimization and scaling. The taxonomy incorporates multi-dimensional interaction between media, service requirements and presentation. Network properties, terminal types and integration...

This paper extends the hierarchical radiosity method to environments in which geometry and surface attributes can be changed dynamically. New algorithms are presented for maintaining an appropriately-sized mesh and speeding the construction of the corresponding linear system. Mesh folding, the unrefinement of a mesh, is used to optimize mesh size while maintaining a specified error tolerance. T...

This paper deals with plan execution on agents/robots in highly dynamic environments. Besides a formal semantics of plan execution and a representation of plans as programs, we introduce the concept of plan invariants. Plan invariants are similar to loop invariants in imperative programs in that they have to be true during the whole plan execution cycle. Once a plan invariant fails the plan exe...