Research on social laws in computational environments has proved the usefulness of the law-based approach for the coordination of multi-agent systems. Though researchers have noted that the imposition of a specification could be attained by a variety of different laws, there has been no attempt to identify a criterion for selection among alternative useful social laws. We propose such a criteri...

Classic direct mechanisms suffer from the drawback of requiring full type (or utility function) revelation from participating agents. In complex settings with multi-attribute utility, assessing utility functions can be very difficult, a problem addressed by recent work on preference elicitation. In this work we propose a framework for incremental, partial revelation mechanisms and study the use...

Since the emergence of power market, the target of power generating utilities has mainly switched from cost minimization to revenue maximization. They dispatch their power energy generation units in the uncertain environment of power market. As a result, multi-stage stochastic programming has been applied widely by many power generating agents as a suitable tool for dealing with self-scheduling...

Almost all of electric utility companies are planning to improve their management automation system, in order to meet the changing requirements of new liberalized energy market and to benefit from the innovations in information and communication technology (ICT or IT). Architectural design of the utility management automation (UMA) systems for their IT-enabling requires proper selection of ...

An e-learning architecture selection has been analyzed. This is a typical problem when dealing with e-learning system selection. For each alternative of an e-learning architecture there is an evaluation of both cost and quality of service. The latter may include probabilistic delivery time and confidence in quality commitment. The decision-maker takes into account multi-criteria evaluation thro...

The regulatory schemes currently used for reliability improvement have weaknesses in the provision of quality services based on the customers’ perspective. These schemes consider the average of the service as a criterion to incentivize or penalize the distribution system operators (DSOs). On the other hand, most DSOs do not differentiate electricity services at the customer level, due to the st...

In this paper the turnpike property is established for convex optimal control problems, involving undiscounted utility function and differential inclusions defined by multi-valued mapping having convex graph. Utility function is concave but not necessarily strictly concave. The turnpike theorem is proved under the main assumption that over any given line segment, either multi-valued mapping is ...