Collaborative management is a new framework to help implement programmes in protected areas. Within this context, the aim of this work is twofold. First, to propose a robust methodology to implement collaborative management focused on ecosystem services. Second, to develop indicators for the main functions of ecosystem services. Decision makers, technical staff and other stakeholders are includ...

Biomedical ontologies provide a commonly accepted scheme for the characterization of biological concepts that enable knowledge sharing and integration. Updating and maintaining an ontology requires highly specialized experts and is very time-consuming given the amount of literature that has to be analyzed and the difficulty in reaching consensus. This paper outlines a proposal for the developme...

Corresponding author Marta José Avena Napoleão de Barros street, 754, São Paulo, SP, Brazil. Zip Code: 04024-000 [email protected] Escola Paulista de Enfermagem, Universidade Federal de São Paulo, São Paulo, SP, Brazil. Conflicts of interest: no conflicts of interest to declare. Abstract Objective: To develop and validate conceptual and operational definitions for the defining characteristics of...

Group decision making problems aim to manage situations in which two or more experts need to achieve a common solution to a decision problem. Different rules and processes can be applied to solve such problems (e.g. majority rule, consensus reaching, and so on), and several models have been proposed to deal with them. Some difficulties may arise in group decisions, being most of them caused by ...

Feral cats are abundant in the Hawaiian Islands and pose a threat to native wildlife through predation and the spread of disease. A combination of factors including the submission of state bills and county resolutions has created the impression that a large segment of society supports the presence of feral cats in the islands and in-situ management techniques. The purpose of this research was t...

Formation control of multi-vehicle system has been studied as a combination of estimation problem and tracking problem. Virtual structure based formation control strategy is applied which solves the problem of formation maintenance and movement using a control architecture in hierarchical manner. The control architecture is distributed in nature and requires only local neighbor to neighbor comm...

In the exploration and implementation of formation control strategies, communication range and bandwidth limitations form a barrier to large scale formation control applications. The limitations of current formation control strategies involving a leader–follower approach and a consensus-based approach with fully available group trajectory information are explored. A unified, distributed formati...

In requirements analysis the task of elicitation of stakeholder need has been a continuing source of error and frustration in systems development. To aid in the acquisition of a set of proper needs that are critical to the design of an effective system, the systems analyst is provided with a new tool to assist in determining when group consensus has been met with respect to the identification o...

Complex behavior change interventions need evidence regarding the effectiveness of individual components to understand how these interventions work. The objective of this study was to identify the least and most promising behavior change techniques (BCTs) within the Dutch intervention 'A Matter of Balance' (AMB-NL) aimed at concerns about falls in old age as an example. After the identification...

in this paper, the optimal adaptive leader-follower consensus of linear continuous time multi-agent systems is considered. the error dynamics of each player depends on its neighbors’ information. detailed analysis of online optimal leader-follower consensus under known and unknown dynamics is presented. the introduced reinforcement learning-based algorithms learn online the approximate solution...