The Multimodal User Supervised Interface and Intelligent Control (MUSIIC) project is working towards the development of an assistive robotic system which integrates human-computer interaction with reactive planning techniques borrowed from artificial intelligence. The MUSIIC system is intended to operate in an unstructured environment, rather than in a struc-tured workcell, allowing users with ...

In this document we define a contract in the context of the GrADS project and describe the current software infrastructure for creating and monitoring contracts. The mechanisms presented are quite flexible and support a wide range of contract specification and verification implementations. This flexibility allows for experimentation to identify the types of contracts that are most effective for...

Global economy is undergoing a recession phase that had made competition tougher and imposed new business framework. Businesses have to shift from the classical management approaches to an Intelligent Project Based Organization Model (IPBOM) that provides flexibility and agility. IPBOM is intended to reinforce the proven advantages of Project Based Organization (PBO) by the use of suitable Ente...

Does syntactic information affect the production of bare nouns? Research into this issue has explored word-specific features (e.g., gender). However, word-independent syntactic distributions may also play a role. For example, studies of word recognition have uncovered strong effects of the diversity of a word's syntactic distribution – its syntactic flexibility – on response times in the lexica...

The average size of discovered petroleum reserves on the Norwegian continental shelf has declined steadily over the last years. As a consequence, the fields have become economically more marginal, and new and flexible development strategies are required. This paper describes a stochastic dynamic programming model for project evaluation under uncertainty, where emphasis is put on flexibility and...

The aim of the research project was to identify ways to maximise the flexibility of the plant by varying equipment utilization, while guaranteeing a certain level of profit. A case study was conducted at a company that makes various types of food additives, which are produced in a multi-product multipurpose batch plant. At the time of the research, market demand was exceeding the company's prod...

Process flexibility has evolved into a desired corporate capability as it promises to cope with demand uncertainty and variety. Particularly service processes have a high intrinsic need for flexibility. Many approaches have been proposed to determine the business value and an appropriate level of flexibility for service processes. Most of these approaches focus on a distinct flexibility type an...

This paper discusses some experiences from a project developing an objectoriented framework for a family of fire alarm system products. TeleLarm AB, a Swedish security company, initiated the project. One application has so far been generated from the framework with successful results. The released application has shown zero defects and has proved to be highly flexible. Fire alarm systems have a...

This paper presents a longitudinal case study at Smartner Information Systems, a small software product company operating in a dynamic and uncertain environment. Smartner successfully combines flexibility and control in their product development process. Flexibility is gained with monthly sprints, after which new decisions about project scope can be made in planning the following sprint. Contro...

FPGAs have an important role to play in System-on-a-Chip (SoC) designs by providing programmable hardware resources within complex ASIC designs. However, because the FPGA logic is custom-fabricated with the overall SoC, we have an opportunity to optimize that logic to the SoC’s specific needs. This gave rise to the Totem Project, which automates the creation of domain-specific reconfigurable lo...