It is difficult to determine whether specific weather events like the storms in Washington can be definitively attributed to climate change or if they are severe storm occurrences within otherwise natural weather patterns. However, consensus in the scientific community indicates that major storms and other events including inundation of coastal roads from a rising sea level, erosion of roadways...

Post-optimization through local search is known to be a powerful approach for complex optimization problems. In this paper we tackle the problem of optimizing individual activity plans, i.e., plans that concern activities that one person has to accomplish independently of others, taking into account complex constraints and preferences. Recently, this problem has been addressed adequately using ...

Planning from second principles by reusing and modifying plans is one way of improving the eeciency of planning systems. In this paper, we study it in the general framework of deductive planning and develop a logical formalization of planning from second principles, which relies on a systematic decomposition of the planning process. Deductive inference processes with clearly deened semantics fo...

Past research on assessing and improving plans in domains that contain uncertainty has focused on analytic techniques that are exponential in the length of the plan. Little work has been done on choosing from among the many ways in which a plan can be improved. We present the IMPROVE algorithm which simulates the execution of large, probabilistic plans. IMPROVE runs a data mining algorithm on t...

Generating optimal plans in highly dynamic environments is challenging. Plans are predicated on an assumed initial state, but this state can change unexpectedly during plan generation, potentially invalidating the planning effort. In this paper we make three contributions: (1) We propose a novel algorithm for generating optimal plans in settings where frequent, unexpected events interfere with ...

Climate change and its impacts continue to affect urban areas globally. Apparently, despite the existence of international, regional, national climate development policies, city authorities in low middle-income countries are daunting about consideration their undertakings. This paper explores mainstreaming adaptation planning city's master plans middle incomes developing Sub-Saharan Africa. Spe...

Climate change is transforming the decision-making landscape for many conservation organizations. Conservation planning and implementation under climate are challenging due to uncertainties about impacts effectiveness of adaptation options. Strategically building flexibility into plans so they can be adjusted over time in response unforeseen events, or new information, one solution this challen...

BACKGROUND Proton beam therapy is promising for the treatment of head and neck cancer (HNC), but it is sensitive to uncertainties in patient positioning and particle range. Studies have shown that the planning target volume (PTV) concept may not be sufficient to ensure robustness of the target coverage. A few planning studies have considered irradiation of unilateral HNC targets with protons, b...

We address the challenge of adaptation in open systems. Open systems are characterized by interactions among autonomous and heterogeneous participants. In such systems, each participant is a locus of adaptation; nonetheless, a participant would typically have to interact with others in order to effect an adaptation. Existing approaches for software adaptation do not readily apply to such settin...