in today's competitiveenvironment, customers are the most important asset to any company. therefore,in order to retain customers, it is essential to understandtheirbehaviour for developing effective strategies. one of the most commonmethods for customer analysis is market segmentation that helps companies todevelop marketing technique by dividing market into several smaller homogeneousgrou...

this study investigates the prediction model of compressive strength of self–compacting concrete (scc) by utilizing soft computing techniques. the techniques consist of adaptive neuro–based fuzzy inference system (anfis), artificial neural network (ann) and the hybrid of particle swarm optimization with passive congregation (psopc) and anfis called psopc–anfis. their performances are comparativ...

This paper addresses the need for automated facilitation to buttress facilitation efforts in managing behavior in the virtual environment. We assert that it is within this environment that we need to concentrate our efforts as the nature of virtual work brings added challenges to successful facilitation. We propose the concept of embedded facilitation in which we implant intelligent agent based...

data envelopment analysis (dea) is a technique used to compare efficiency in various sectors such as hospitals, chain stores, and dealerships. it represents a set of linear programming techniques and uses deter-ministic data (inputs and outputs), in stable conditions. the dea technique cannot be used when there is data with indeterministic nature, or when there is an environment with dynamic co...

New practical applications of the Line of Balance technique are presented, introducing simple and transparent tools for initial planning, short term scheduling and production control on multi-storey building construction sites. These developments were being conducted along an investigation on some construction sites on Brazil. The planning methodology is discussed including preplanning details ...

In this paper, we propose to use the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to enhance consensus in bilateral multi-issue negotiation where one agent has no knowledge about the preferences of the other agents. This work focuses on mediated negotiation, where two agents try to reach an agreement over a range of qualitative and quantitative issues. We assume that the mediator agent adopts the AHP metho...

This paper discusses the development of a model of the household migration behavior of a nation’s population. From information synthesized from across available microdata sources which are each temporally, spatially, or topically inconsistent in coverage, we learned decision trees and instantiated agents in an agent-based model. The generative results of the whole-country simulation of this ABM...

I describe a planning methodology for domains with uncertainty in the form of external events that are not completely predictable. Under certain conditions, these events can be modelled as continuous-time Markov chains whose states are characterised by the planner’s domain predicates. Planning is goal-directed, but the subgoals are suggested by analysing the utility of the partial plan rather t...