Discrete-trials teaching (DTT) is one of the principal techniques used in Applied Behaviour Analysis programs for children with autism. Although the demand for training individuals to implement DTT is high, published studies on strategies to do so are few. I conducted two experiments to investigate a training package for teaching individuals to implement DTT. In Experiment 1, I used a modified multiple-baseline design to evaluate the training package for teaching five university students to implement DTT to teach three tasks to a confederate role-playing a child with autism. Also, in an AB within-subject design with each participant, I compared two components of the training package, a Self-Instructional Manual and Feedback plus Demonstration. Experiment 2 was a systematic replication of Experiment 1, with 2 teaching assistants, a resource teacher, and 3 parents of children with autism as participants. In both experiments I assessed the generalization (G1) of participants’ ability to implement DTT (while teaching the confederate) to teach tasks not targeted for Feedback plus Demonstration, as well as generalization (G2) of DTT while teaching a child with autism. After an average of approximately 3 hours to master the self-instructional manual, participants’ DTT accuracy in both experiments improved from an average of 34% in Baseline to an average of 61% following the Self-Instructional Manual. Results appeared to be due to the Self-Instructional Manual phase for 9 of the 11 participants. Following an average of 35 minutes of Feedback plus Demonstration of DTT of one task, participants’ DTT accuracy improved to an average of 91% while teaching a confederate. The improvement appeared to be due to the intervention with 10 of the 11 participants. The participants’ DTT accuracy averaged 90% during G1 and 86% during G2. These results demonstrate that this training package has considerable potential for teaching DTT to tutors, educational assistants, and parents of children with autism. / February 2008

Bergkvist insjön AB is a sawmill yard which is capable of producing 350,000 cubic meter of timber every year this requires lot of internal resources. Sawmill operations can be classified as unloading, sorting, storage and production of timber. In the company we have trucks arriving at random they have to be unloaded and sent back at the earliest to avoid queuing up of trucks creating a problem for truck owners. The sawmill yard has to operate with two log stackers that does several tasks including transporting the logs from trucks to measurement station where the logs will be sorted into classes and dropped into pockets from pockets to the sorted timber yard where they are stored and finally from there to sawmill for final processing. The main issue that needs to be answered here is the lining up trucks that are waiting to be unload, creating a problem for both sawmill as well as the truck owners and given huge production volume, it is certain that handling of resources is top priority. A key challenge in handling of resources would be unloading of trucks and finding a way to optimize internal resources.To address this problem i have experimented on different ways of using internal resources, i have designed different cases, in case 1 we have both the log stackers working on sawmill and measurement station. The main objective of having this case is to make sawmill and measurement station to work all the time. Then in case 2, i have divided the work between both the log stackers, one log stacker will be working on sawmill and pocket_control and second log stacker will be working on measurement station and truck. Then in case 3 we have only one log stacker working on all the agents, this case was designed to reduce cost of production, as the experiment cannot be done in real-time due to operational cost, for this purpose simulation is used, preliminary investigation into simulation results suggested that case 2 is the best option has it reduced waiting time of trucks considerably when compared with other cases and it showed 50% increase in optimizing internal resources.

I syftet att undersöka hur en skatte- och bidragsreform kan tänkas påverka utbudet av arbetskraft för ungdomar, modelleras en Discrete Choice nyttofunktion, där valet av antalet arbetstimmar begränsas till fem olika arbetstimmarsklasser. Modellen tar hänsyn till icke-linjära skatter och icke-konvexa budgetkurvor. I nyttomaximeringen tas även hänsyn till valet av socialbidrag. För att se effekten på ungdomarnas arbetstimmar används mikrosimuleringsmodellen FASIT som innehåller databaser över inkomster, skatte- och transfereringssystem. Finans- och Socialdepartementen använder modellen för att se reformers eventuella effekter på specifika grupper i samhället. Skattereformen innebär en höjning av grundavdraget och bidragsreformen en sänkning av socialbidraget. Syftet med reformerna är att öka inkomstdifferensen mellan att inte arbeta och att arbeta och därmed öka incitamenten till att vilja arbeta för ungdomar. För att kunna motivera en sådan reform, ska den inte försämra statens finanser, utan helst vara självfinansierad. Resultaten visar att en skatte- och bidragsreform av detta slag inte ökar ungdomarnas arbetstimmar signifikant. Däremot kommer användandet av socialbidrag minska med över 90 %, även om inte många ungdomar levde på socialbidrag innan reformen. För staten innebär en sådan här reform att både skatteinkomsterna minskar, p.g.a. grundavdragshöjningen och bidragsutgifterna minskar, till följd av mindre socialbidragsutbetalningar. Däremot, kommer inkomsterna att minska mer än utgifterna, så det blir svårt att berättiga reformen. / With the purpose of examining how a tax- and social assistance reform would affect the labor supply for Swedish youth, a Discrete Choice utility function is utilized, where the choice of working hours is restricted to five different sets of working hours. This model takes nonlinear taxes and nonconvex budget constraints into consideration and in the utility maximization the youth has to keep the choice of accepting the social assistance in mind. The effect on youth working hours is simulated in a micro simulation model, FASIT, which contains databases on Swedish incomes, taxes- and subsidies systems and is mostly used by the Swedish Ministry of Finance in order to investigate policy reforms’ affect on different groups in society. The tax reform implies an increase of the basic deduction and the subsidy reform implies a decrease of the amount of social assistance. The purpose of the reforms is to increase the income gap between not working and working and thereby increase the incentives of being willing to work. To be able to justify a reform like this, it must not be too expensive for the government, but preferably it should be self-financed. The results show that the reforms will not increase the working hours of the youth significantly. But at the same time the reform decreases the need of social assistance with over 90 %, although not a large part of the youth supported themselves through social assistance before the reform. For the government the reform will result in a decrease in tax revenues and a decrease in the subsidy cost. The problem is that the revenues will decrease much more than the costs; therefore the reform is difficult to justify.

This thesis aims to cover some aspects of synthesis and design of Proportional- Integral-Derivative (PID) controllers. The topics include computer aided design of discrete time controllers, data-based design of discrete PID controllers and data- robust design of PID controllers. These topics are of paramount in control systems literature where a lot of stress is laid upon identification of plant and robust design. The computer aided design of discrete time controllers introduces a Graphical User Interface (GUI) based software. The controllers are: Proportional (P), Proportional-Derivative (PD),Proportional-Integral (PI) and Proportional-Integral- Derivative (PID) controllers. Different performance based design methods with these controllers have been introduced. The user can either explore the performance by interactively choosing controllers one by one from the entire set and visualizing its performance or specify some performance constraints and obtaining the resulting set. In data-based design, the thesis presents a way of designing PID controllers based on input-output data. Thus, the intermediate step of identification of model from data is removed, saving considerable effort. Moreover, the data required is step response data which is easier to obtain in case of discrete time system than frequency response data. Further, a GUI developed for interactive design is also described. In data-robust design, the problem of uncertainty in data is explored. The design method developed finds the stabilizing set which can robustly stabilize the plant with uncertainty. It has been put forward as an application to interval linear programming. The main results of this research include a new way of designing discrete time PID controllers directly from the data. The simulations further confirm the results. Robust design of PID controllers with data uncertainty has also been established. Additionally, as a part of this research, a GUI based software has been developed which is expected to be very beneficial to the designers in manufacturing, aerospace and petrochemical industries. PID controllers are widely used in the industry. Any progress in this field is well acknowledged both in the industry and the academia alike. This thesis attempts a small step further in this direction.

controllers for discrete-time systems and time-delayed systems. By using bilinear transformation and orthogonal transformation, earlier research results obtained in the continuous-time case are extended to discrete-time situation. The complete set of stabilizing PID controllers for the discrete-time systems is thus obtained. Moreover, this set remains to be a union of convex sets when one particular parameter is fixed. Thus a method to design robust and non-fragile digital PID controllers is proposed by following a similar design procedure for the continuous-time systems. In order to find the stabilizing controller set for systems with time-delays, the relationship between the Nyquist Criterion and Pontryagin’s theory is investigated. The conditions under which one can correctly apply the Nyquist Criterion to time-delayed systems are derived. Then, the complete set of stabilizing PID controllers for arbitrary order LTI systems with time-delay up to a given value is obtained. Furthermore, the stability issue of a system with fixed-delay is also studied and a formula which provides complete knowledge of the distribution of the closed-loop poles is presented. Based on this formula, stabilizing P and PI controller sets for the system with fixed-delay can be computed.

Iterative solutions of the Boltzmann transport equation are computationally intensive. Spatial multigrid methods have led to efficient iterative algorithms for solving a variety of partial differential equations; thus, it is natural to explore their application to transport equations. Manteuffel et al. conducted such an exploration in one spatial dimension, using two-cell inversions as the relaxation or smoothing operation, and reported excellent results. In this dissertation we extensively test Manteuffel??s one-dimensional method and our modified versions thereof. We demonstrate that the performance of such spatial multigrid methods can degrade significantly given strong heterogeneities. We also extend Manteuffel??s basic approach to two-dimensional problems, employing four-cell inversions for the relaxation operation. We find that for uniform homogeneous problems the two-dimensional multigrid method is not as rapidly convergent as the one-dimensional method. For strongly heterogeneous problems the performance of the two-dimensional method is much like that of the one-dimensional method, which means it can be slow to converge. We conclude that this approach to spatial multigrid produces a method that converges rapidly for many problems but not for others. That is, this spatial multigrid method is not unconditionally rapidly convergent. However, our analysis of the distribution of eigenvalues of the iteration operators indicates that this spatial multigrid method may work very well as a preconditioner within a Krylov iteration algorithm, because its eigenvalues tend to be relatively well clustered. Further exploration of this promising result appears to be a fruitful area of further research.

This thesis aims to cover some aspects of synthesis and design of Proportional- Integral-Derivative (PID) controllers. The topics include computer aided design of discrete time controllers, data-based design of discrete PID controllers and data- robust design of PID controllers. These topics are of paramount in control systems literature where a lot of stress is laid upon identification of plant and robust design. The computer aided design of discrete time controllers introduces a Graphical User Interface (GUI) based software. The controllers are: Proportional (P), Proportional-Derivative (PD),Proportional-Integral (PI) and Proportional-Integral- Derivative (PID) controllers. Different performance based design methods with these controllers have been introduced. The user can either explore the performance by interactively choosing controllers one by one from the entire set and visualizing its performance or specify some performance constraints and obtaining the resulting set. In data-based design, the thesis presents a way of designing PID controllers based on input-output data. Thus, the intermediate step of identification of model from data is removed, saving considerable effort. Moreover, the data required is step response data which is easier to obtain in case of discrete time system than frequency response data. Further, a GUI developed for interactive design is also described. In data-robust design, the problem of uncertainty in data is explored. The design method developed finds the stabilizing set which can robustly stabilize the plant with uncertainty. It has been put forward as an application to interval linear programming. The main results of this research include a new way of designing discrete time PID controllers directly from the data. The simulations further confirm the results. Robust design of PID controllers with data uncertainty has also been established. Additionally, as a part of this research, a GUI based software has been developed which is expected to be very beneficial to the designers in manufacturing, aerospace and petrochemical industries. PID controllers are widely used in the industry. Any progress in this field is well acknowledged both in the industry and the academia alike. This thesis attempts a small step further in this direction.

<p>I syftet att undersöka hur en skatte- och bidragsreform kan tänkas påverka utbudet av arbetskraft för ungdomar, modelleras en Discrete Choice nyttofunktion, där valet av antalet arbetstimmar begränsas till fem olika arbetstimmarsklasser. Modellen tar hänsyn till icke-linjära skatter och icke-konvexa budgetkurvor. I nyttomaximeringen tas även hänsyn till valet av socialbidrag. För att se effekten på ungdomarnas arbetstimmar används mikrosimuleringsmodellen FASIT som innehåller databaser över inkomster, skatte- och transfereringssystem. Finans- och Socialdepartementen använder modellen för att se reformers eventuella effekter på specifika grupper i samhället.</p><p>Skattereformen innebär en höjning av grundavdraget och bidragsreformen en sänkning av socialbidraget. Syftet med reformerna är att öka inkomstdifferensen mellan att inte arbeta och att arbeta och därmed öka incitamenten till att vilja arbeta för ungdomar. För att kunna motivera en sådan reform, ska den inte försämra statens finanser, utan helst vara självfinansierad.</p><p>Resultaten visar att en skatte- och bidragsreform av detta slag inte ökar ungdomarnas arbetstimmar signifikant. Däremot kommer användandet av socialbidrag minska med över 90 %, även om inte många ungdomar levde på socialbidrag innan reformen. För staten innebär en sådan här reform att både skatteinkomsterna minskar, p.g.a. grundavdragshöjningen och bidragsutgifterna minskar, till följd av mindre socialbidragsutbetalningar. Däremot, kommer inkomsterna att minska mer än utgifterna, så det blir svårt att berättiga reformen.</p> / <p>With the purpose of examining how a tax- and social assistance reform would affect the labor supply for Swedish youth, a Discrete Choice utility function is utilized, where the choice of working hours is restricted to five different sets of working hours. This model takes nonlinear taxes and nonconvex budget constraints into consideration and in the utility maximization the youth has to keep the choice of accepting the social assistance in mind. The effect on youth working hours is simulated in a micro simulation model, FASIT, which contains databases on Swedish incomes, taxes- and subsidies systems and is mostly used by the Swedish Ministry of Finance in order to investigate policy reforms’ affect on different groups in society.</p><p>The tax reform implies an increase of the basic deduction and the subsidy reform implies a decrease of the amount of social assistance. The purpose of the reforms is to increase the income gap between not working and working and thereby increase the incentives of being willing to work. To be able to justify a reform like this, it must not be too expensive for the government, but preferably it should be self-financed.</p><p>The results show that the reforms will not increase the working hours of the youth significantly. But at the same time the reform decreases the need of social assistance with over 90 %, although not a large part of the youth supported themselves through social assistance before the reform. For the government the reform will result in a decrease in tax revenues and a decrease in the subsidy cost. The problem is that the revenues will decrease much more than the costs; therefore the reform is difficult to justify.</p>

Thesis (M.S.)--West Virginia University, 2008. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains ix, 51 p. : ill. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 46-51).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 122-132).