No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

In dynamic domains, the state of the world may change in unexpected ways during the generation or execution of plans. Regardless of the cause of such changes, they raise the question of whether they interfere with ongoing planning efforts. Unexpected changes during plan generation may invalidate the current planning effort, while discrepancies between expected and actual state of the world during execution may render the executing plan invalid or sub-optimal, with respect to previously identified planning objectives. In this thesis we develop a general monitoring technique that can be used during both plan generation and plan execution to determine the relevance of unexpected changes and which supports recovery. This way, time intensive replanning from scratch in the new and unexpected state can often be avoided. The technique can be applied to a variety of objectives, including monitoring the optimality of plans, rather then just their validity. Intuitively, the technique operates in two steps: during planning the plan is annotated with additional information that is relevant to the achievement of the objective; then, when an unexpected change occurs, this information is used to determine the relevance of the discrepancy with respect to the objective. We substantiate the claim of broad applicability of this relevance-based technique by developing four concrete applications: generating optimal plans despite frequent, unexpected changes to the initial state of the world, monitoring plan optimality during execution, monitoring the execution of near-optimal policies in stochastic domains, and monitoring the generation and execution of plans with procedural hard constraints. In all cases, we use the formal notion of regression to identify what is relevant for achieving the objective. We prove the soundness of these concrete approaches and present empirical results demonstrating that in some contexts orders of magnitude speed-ups can be gained by our technique compared to replanning from scratch.

The use of optical methods for performing non-invasive physiological and biochemical monitoring has been investigated, with particular emphasis on the application of near-infrared spectrophotocetry for following changes in the redox state of cytochrome oxidase. Initial studies of the gross optical properties of in vivo tissue were made using an image intensifier. These demonstrated that some light is transmitted through biological tissues and that such material is very highly scattering. In order to investigate the feasibiity of non-invasively monitoring changes in the redox state of cytochrome oxidase in vivo. spectrophotometric and oxygen measurements were made on solutions containing the pure enzyme and yeast cell suspensions. These demonstrated the high affinity that the enzyme has for oxygen in such preparations, in contrast to the much lower apparent affinities in vivo that have been reported. These results were then modelled mathematically, and a possible-explanation for this anomaly suggested. Potential problems with applying this method are also presented. The interest in cytochrome oxidase is due to its importance in oxidative metabolism. However in performing this role it also assists in the prevention of oxidative damage, whose contribution to various disease states in paediatrics is briefly considered. Two instruments were also constructed, and used, firstly to measure the spectral characteristics of transmitted and reflected light in vivo. ana secondly to study the cardiac synchronous pulsatile component of this light (commonly referred to as the photoplethysmogram).