Suggested readers: • PNOs studying potential upgrade possibilities for their transport networks • PNOs upgrading and developing planning tools for optical networks • PNO strategists and network planners • PNO researchers in the field of network optimisation methods

To date, no one planner has demonstrated clearly superior performance. Although researchers have hypothesized that this should be the case, no one has performed a large study to test its limits. In this research, we tested performance of a set of planners to determine which is best on what types of problems. The study included six planners and over 200 problems. We found that performance, as me...

For some time, planning researchers have advocated the use of simulators of "complex" environments, domains or problems [Erman, 1990, Drummond et al., 1990]. Yet, a casual survey of planning papers in the last few AAAI and IJCAI proceedings shows that Blocksworld continues to dominate as the domain of choice. Blocksworld is well-known and simple enough that many properties of planners can be de...

Previous academic research found that two broad approaches characterize non-profit foundations when setting objectives. In the first approach, business-like model, nonprofit are inspired by for-profit organizations, and they adopt methodologies, tools, practices typical of business management to better respond social issues connected their local dimensions. The second charity-like conversely ar...

We outline in this paper a suite of methods, and illustrate their use, to empirically determine food self-sufficiency at a relatively small (Local Health Areas) level of geography. Further we have, after identifying regions of lowest food self-sufficiency in British Columbia (BC) superimposed these on regions whose populations have relatively poor dietary ill health. Approximately one third of ...