Several recent studies have found that managers engage in redundant communication; that is, they send the same message to the same recipient sequentially through two or more unique media. Given how busy most managers are, and how much information their subordinates receive on a daily basis, this practice seems, initially, quite puzzling. We conducted an ethnographic investigation to examine the...

Planning optimal paths for large numbers of robots is computationally expensive. In this thesis, we present a new framework for multirobot path planning called subdimensional expansion, which initially plans for each robot individually, and then coordinates motion among the robots as needed. More specifically, subdimensional expansion initially creates a one-dimensional search space embedded in...

This paper looks at a generic natural disaster scenario where a number of survivors are scattered over a geographical area requiring a coordinated helicopter search and rescue effort. It aims to show that an Empirical Modelling approach to coordinating this is appropriate due to the scenario being dynamic (i.e. reports of new survivors) and changes can be unexpected (e.g. a building collapse re...

Agents situated in dynamic and unpredictable environments require several capabilities, including synthesizing and executing plans while continuing to be responsive to the world. The Cypress system is a domain-independent framework for defining persistent agents with this full range of behavior. Cypress has been used for several applications, including military operations and fault diagnosis on...

We analyzed the responses of several T cell fractions reactive with superantigenic toxins (SAGTs), staphylococcal enterotoxin A (SEA), or Yersinia pseudotuberculosis-derived mitogen (YPM) in mice implanted with mini-osmotic pumps filled with SEA or YPM. In mice implanted with the SEA pump, SEA-reactive Vbeta3(+)CD4(+) T cells exhibited a high-level protracted expansion for 30 days, and SEA-reac...

We describe a model-based representation for real-time planning in technical processes. This means a complete model of causal and temporal dependencies is developed for an application. The main difference to other planners is that scripts, an event-oriented representation formalism is used and that goals and actions are part of the knowledge base in order to reason about old goals and already s...

The RAP reactive plan execution system is specifically designed to accept plans and goals at a high level of abstraction and expand them into detailed actions at run time. One of the key features of the RAP system is the use of hierarchical expansion methods that allow different paths of execution for the same goals in different situations. Another central reason for the hierarchy is to create ...

In this paper a knowledge-based event-oriented planner is presented that reasons explicitly about time and a safe reaction in time. By means of a distributed architecture a behaviour is achieved that is capable on one side to use knowledgebased techniques to find good and effective solutions and on the other side it uses procedural knowledge to react immediately on asynchronous events in a tech...

This work proposes a method to generate robot plans by evolutionary computation. The main focus of the work is the representation of the plan. The reactive plan can be represented with a fixed length string that is suitable to be evolved by Genetic Algorithms. Two experiments are performed comparing the reactive plan with the ordinary plan: controlling a manipulator and the artificial ant probl...