93 Production budget planning in the building products industry is the process of committing and allocating resources to manufacture building products for 12 months ahead in order to satisfy certain criteria set by top management. It is a highly complicated and time consuming process and demands experienced production managers to handle it. This paper discusses the development of an intelligent...

The purpose of a building design process is to create a description that satisfies building functional specifications, requirements on performance and resource usage, as well as restrictions such as building regulations. The need to develop intelligent computer programs to check compliance of a design with building codes was specified by Niwa (1987), Sharpe and Oakes (1995). A previously propos...

What is ‘intelligence’ and, for that matter, what problems might arise in building an intelligent machine? Are human brains, with their greatly expanded neocortex, the only currently-existing intelligent devices? Apart from some unconvincing computer programs, the only known intelligent devices seem to be animals: particularly birds, and especially mammals. There is, however, at least one other...

1 Dpto. de Electrónica e Computación. Edificio Monte da Condesa, Campus Sur. Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. 15782 Santiago de Compostela. Spain. Email: [email protected], http://aiff.usc.es/~elchus/chus.html 2 Servicio de Oftalmología. Hospital Comarcal de Monforte. Monforte. Spain 3 Dpto. de Inteligencia Artificial. UNED. Madrid. Spain 4 Dpto. de Física Aplicada. Universidade de Santiag...

The article addresses the problem of intelligent analysis and evaluation of facility management data gathered from heterogeneous sources, including environmental data collected from building automation sensors, temporal weather characteristics and scheduling. We suggest the framework of analytical model, based on deriving descriptors which could sentinel the level of thermal comfort of working ...

Today computers are part of the standard equipment of modern surgery rooms. They assist surgeons in performing complex procedures that would not be possible otherwise. However, despite the availability of more powerful and complex computer systems, their user interfaces have not been adapted to fully leverage their potential. A new type of software, behaving as an independent intelligent assist...

Computer systems keep growing in complexity, processing power and inter-connectivity. To leverage this rich environment and better assist users, a new type of intelligent assistant software is required. Building intelligent assistants is a difficult task that requires expertise in many AI related fields including natural language interpretation, dialog management, multimodal fusion and brokerin...

The primary method for protecting networks today is to use a rewall: a boundary separating the protected network from the untrusted Internet. However, these rewalls o er no protection from internal attacks, scale poorly due to limited rewall processing capacity, and do not support mobile computing. Distributing a rewall to each network host avoids many of these problems, but weakens the securit...

Currently, most of distance learning courses can only deliver standard material to students. Students receive course content passively which leads to the neglect of the goal of education – “to suit the teaching to the ability of students”. Providing appropriate course content according to students’ ability is the main goal of this paper. Except offering a series of conventional learning service...

Structural vibration control is one of the most important features in structural engineering. Real-time information about seismic resultant forces is required for deciding module of intelligent control systems. Evaluation of lateral forces during an earthquake is a complicated problem considering uncertainties of gravity loads amount and distribution and earthquake characteristics. An artificia...