Olfaction is generally assumed to be critical for survival because this sense allows animals to detect food and pheromonal cues. Although the ability to sense sex pheromones [1, 2, 3] is likely to be important for insects, the contribution of general odor detection to survival is unknown. We investigated the extent to which the olfactory system confers a survival advantage on Drosophila larvae ...

We o€er a formulation that locates hubs on a network in a competitive environment; that is, customer capture is sought, which happens whenever the location of a new hub results in a reduction of the current cost (time, distance) needed by the trac that goes from the speci®ed origin to the speci®ed destination. The formulation presented here reduces the number of variables and constraints as co...

Differential evolution (DE) is a powerful yet simple evolutionary algorithm for optimizing real valued optimization problems. Traditional investigations with DE have used a single mutation operator. Using a variety of mutation operators that can be integrated during evolution could hold the potential to generate a better solution with less computational effort. In view of this, in the present s...

This study addresses the problem of constructing an adequate strategy for multiagent scheduling in situations with high uncertainty and inconsistent goals. An automatic scheduling agent with adjustable autonomy builds the preliminary schedule and assists the human agents in modifying the schedule towards their specific goals. The degree of autonomy of an automatic agent is controlled via the sy...

The role of information in facilitating choice in a competitive health care marketplace is clearly pivotal, but it is also complex and occasionally problematic. Although it is clear that information is critical to the competitive approach, less clear is the relationship between the availability of appropriate information and the exercise of informed choice, a relationship that is obscured in th...

Current management approaches to resource-based strategy and core competence thinking require extensive intelligence gathering to ensure that correct assumptions are being made about the environment and competitors' capabilities. Without such intelligence any attempts to develop, maintain and in many cases even identify the key assets and competences are #awed. Often the very people who are bes...

Since the 1990s the European Union’s biofuels policy has espoused several aims: energy security, greenhouse gas (GHG) savings, technology export and rural development. On these various grounds, by 2007 the EU was moving towards statutory targets, i.e. to mandate larger markets for ‘renewable energy’ including biofuels. However, controversy erupted over harmful environmental and social effects, ...

We o er a formulation that locates hubs on a network in a competitive environment; that is, customer capture is sought, which happens whenever the location of a new hub results in a reduction of the current cost (time, distance) needed by the tra c that goes from the speci ed origin to the speci ed destination. The formulation presented here reduces the number of variables and constraints as co...

We describe the development of a collection of survival strategies for populations of ant-like agents in a virtual world implemented in the XRaptor multi-agent simulation environment. The diierent strategies have been developed by diierent teams and competed with each other in a sequence of tournaments, thus providing not only a set of paradigms useful for survival under competition, but also a...

Spirited debate in the field of strategic management wages as to whether competitive advantage is sustainable or merely temporary in today's highly dynamic environments. The objectivity of the debate, however, suffers from a lack of specificity regarding the terms " sustainable " and " temporary. " That is, the amount of time or duration of a sustained or temporary competitive advantage is neve...