The benefits of a recently proposed method to approximate hard optimization problems are demonstrated on the graph partitioning problem. The performance of this new method, called Extremal Optimization, is compared to Simulated Annealing in extensive numerical simulations. While generally a...

Negotiation is a process in which two or more parties with different criteria, constraints, and preferences, jointly reach an agreement on the terms of a transaction. Many current automated negotiation systems support one-to-one negotiation. One-to-many negotiation has been mostly automated...

The problem of performance evaluation of business processes supported by Workflow Management Systems is a recent research issue. In this paper we propose a measurement framework in which several aspects concerning the timing and working of a business process, either as a whole or in terms of its...

In this paper we studied two different classifiers fusion algorithms exploiting the combination weights expressed over the entire data space and the combination with data dependent weights. The following aggregation schemes are employed in the study: the majority vote, the averaging, the...

Phenomena of data, information, and knowledge are important for an organization to function. It is therefore important to agree on concepts for those terms. But the nature of such phenomena may not allow for a broad and lasting agreement, because they possess a historical dimension. In this...

Backpropagation based on minimization algorithms is replaced by heuristic search techniques for quantized weights. The resulting algorithm is fast, avoids local minima of the cost function, and may be used either as initialization method for standard backpropagation or as a logical rule...

Until recently, electronic markets were dominated by the combination of static offer plus fixed pricing policies. Static offer schemes assume that all users have the same criteria which may not meet the requirements of all potential buyers. A fixed price might not always reflect the current...

This paper presents and evaluates signaling schemes for distributing information about the state of the network in a constellation of non geostationary satellites. Because routing decisions are more accurate when the state of the network is taken into account, it is necessary to devise signaling...