this study analyses the concept of cost functions for semi-automated straddle carrier (sc), rubber tyred gantry (rtg) and automated rail mounted gantry (rmg) container yard operating cranes. it develops a generic cost based model for a pair-wise comparison, analysis and evaluation of economic efficiency and effectiveness of container yard equipment to be used for decision-making by terminal pla...

In this paper, we present a technique to automatically synthesize dancing moves for arbitrary songs. Our current implementation is for virtual characters, but it is easy to use the same algorithms for entertainer robots, such as robotic dancers. Our technique is based on analyzing a musical tune (can be a song or melody) and synthesizing a motion for the virtual character where the character's ...

Research focused largely on developing new, highly automated tools for the process development laboratory is carried out in the authors' laboratory. The ability to evaluate, characterize and optimize synthetic routes, both quickly and comprehensively, is especially important in the pharmaceutical process development laboratory, where typically in a complex synthetic sequence many reaction param...

We have demonstrated the possibility of applying a modified genetic algorithm (GADO) to completely automate the design of a cell given only a behavioral description and optimization criteria such as power, area, speed or their combination. GADO maintains a population of potential standard cell designs. The designs are evaluated by (1) internal rules (2) MAGIC for design rule checks and (3) SPIC...

We introduce a framework for the automated synthesis of security-sensitive distributed applications. The central idea is to provide the programmer with a high-level declarative language for specifying the system and the intended security properties, abstracting away from any cryptographic details. A compiler takes as input such high-level specifications and automatically produces the correspond...

This paper describes the development of fully-automated synthesis systems for preparing and isolating various kinds of pharmaceutical compounds. The systems are versatile, and are able to perform most of the chemical reactions currently used in organic chemistry, with the exception of hydrogenation which requires high pressure. An additional benefit is the very user-friendly software.

In recent years there has been rising interest in the use of programming-by-example techniques to assist users in data manipulation tasks. Such techniques rely on an explicit inputoutput examples specification from the user to automatically synthesize programs. However, in a wide range of data extraction tasks it is easy for a human observer to predict the desired extraction by just observing t...

Most normative systems make use of explicit representations of norms (namely, obligations, prohibitions, and permissions) and associated mechanisms to support the self-regulation of open societies of selfinterested and autonomous agents. A key problem in research on normative systems is that of how to synthesise effective and efficient norms. Manually designing norms is time-consuming and error...

This paper focuses on automated synthesis of divide-andconquer parallelism, which is a common parallel programming skeleton supported by many cross-platform multithreaded libraries. The challenges of producing (manually or automatically) a correct divide-and-conquer parallel program from a given sequential code are two-fold: (1) assuming that individual worker threads execute a code identical t...