Esta dissertação tem por objetivo mostrar que se podem melhorar as capacidades de gerar, divulgar, documentar e processar informações que orientem os dirigentes de empresas de ônibus nas decisões sobre escalas de veículos. O processo usado para identificar e descrever relações entre escalas e operação de empresas de ônibus conteve entrevistas a executivos, administradores e funcionários. O processamento de dados se deu com o condicionamento de banco de dados e desenvolvimento de programa para computador. Para estudo de caso, adotaram-se dados coletados em uma empresa de transporte de passageiros por ônibus que opera em serviços urbanos, interurbanos, interestaduais, fretamento e turismo. / This dissertation has the objective to show that one can improve the capacities to generate, to publish, to document and to process information useful to guide the bus company\'s bosses on the decisions concerning the scales of vehicles. The process used to identify and to describe relationships between scales and operation of bus companies contained interviews to executives, administrators and employees. The data processing was done with the database conditioning and computer program development. For a case study, it was conducted a surveying in a passengers\' bus company that operates in services like urban, intercity, interstate, charter and tourism.

A multi-agent system consists of a number of agents, which may include software agents, robots, or even humans, in some application environment. Multi-robot systems are increasingly being employed to complete jobs and missions in various fields including search and rescue, space and underwater exploration, support in healthcare facilities, surveillance and target tracking, product manufacturing, pick-up and delivery, and logistics. Multi-agent task allocation is a complex problem compounded by various constraints such as deadlines, agent capabilities, and communication delays. In high-stake real-time environments, such as rescue missions, it is difficult to predict in advance what the requirements of the mission will be, what resources will be available, and how to optimally employ such resources. Yet, a fast response and speedy execution are critical to the outcome. This thesis proposes distributed optimisation techniques to tackle the following questions: how to maximise the number of assigned tasks in time restricted environments with limited resources; how to reach consensus on an execution plan across many agents, within a reasonable time-frame; and how to maintain robustness and optimality when factors change, e.g. the number of agents changes. Three novel approaches are proposed to address each of these questions. A novel algorithm is proposed to reassign tasks and free resources that allow the completion of more tasks. The introduction of a rank-based system for conflict resolution is shown to reduce the time for the agents to reach consensus while maintaining equal number of allocations. Finally, this thesis proposes an adaptive data-driven algorithm to learn optimal strategies from experience in different scenarios, and to enable individual agents to adapt their strategy during execution. A simulated rescue scenario is used to demonstrate the performance of the proposed methods compared with existing baseline methods.

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Several industries use what is called rotating workforce scheduling. This often means that employees are needed around the clock seven days a week, and that they have a schedule which repeats itself after some weeks. This thesis gives an introduction to this kind of scheduling and presents a review of previous work done in the field. Two different optimization models for rotating workforce scheduling are formulated and compared, and some examples are created to demonstrate how the addition of soft constraints to the models affects the scheduling outcome. Two large realistic cases, with constraints commonly used in many industries, are then presented. The schedules are in these cases analyzed in depth and evaluated. One of the models excelled as it provides good results within a short time limit and it appears to be a worthy candidate for rotating workforce scheduling.

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Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

L'augmentation de l'utilisation de l'Internet et des services de données motive l'évolution des réseaux cellulaires de troisième. Dans ce contexte, HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) a été développé dans les releases 5 et 6 au sein de 3GPP pour poursuivre l'évolution du mode "paquet" de l'UMTS. Ce système utilise de nouvelles technologies telles que le Hybrid-ARQ (Automatic Repeat Request), la modulation adaptative et l'ordonnancement rapide (fast Scheduling) pour permettre de véhiculer des débits plus élevés sur l'interface radio et d'augmenter la capacité. Cette thèse se focalise sur l'analyse et la modélisation des interactions entre la couche MAC-hs de HSDPA et les autres couches (physique, transport). L'objectif est de trouver la configuration optimale de cette entité MAC-hs afin de réduire les interactions "négatives" entre-couches et optimiser les performances de HSDPA. Par conséquent, cette thèse fournit des études et des modélisations analytiques couvrant les aspects suivants: -Analyse et modélisation de l'impact du canal radio (shadowing, fast fading) sur les performances du système HSDPA dans le cas où plusieurs "schedulers" sont utilisés -Analyse et modélisation de l'effect des services "Circuit" de l'UMTS R99 sur les performances de HSDPA. -Modélisation de l'interaction entre le protocole TCP et l'entité MAC-hs. Une nouvelle stratégie d'ordonnancement est proposée afin d'améliorer les performances du système -Charactérisation de l'interaction entre MAc-hs et les services streaming. Une nouveau "scheduler" est proposé afin de garantir les contraintes sévères de QoS des services streaming sans trop perdre de capacité cellulaire.