11200577
Plans as Structured Networks of Hierarchically and Temporally Related Case Pieces
This paper describes a representation of plan cases as a structured set of goals and actions. These goals and actions are the unit pieces that form a case. These case pieces are related each other by hierarchical and temporal links (explanations) forming a tree-like network. We give importance not just to explicit links, i.e., links between case pieces which are concretely known, but also to implicit ones, i.e., possibly unknown links between case pieces. Each case piece is explained by antecedent links and explains other case pieces by consequent links. The retrieval of a case piece is mainly guided by its links and by its surrounding case pieces. Our concept of case piece usefulness is briefly explained. We discuss the benefit of reusing and directly accessing small case pieces from multiple cases for improving the Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) systems' capability and efficiency to solve problems. We explain the importance of stepwise refinement in plan cases and also the role that temporal representation can take in the meaningful and coherent construction of planning problem solutions.
11166519
Case Retrieval of Software Designs using WordNet
Software design is one of the most important phases in system development, due to crucial decisions that are made during this phase. The need for software being developed in less time puts a lot of pressure in the design phase. One way to solve this problem is to reuse previous design solutions. In software design reuse the retrieval of relevant designs is a key issue. 
 
Case-Based Reasoning reuses past experiences to solve new problems, providing a reasoning framework for design reuse. But designing software involves reasoning at a more abstract level than coding software, thus a software design reuse tool must be able to work with a broad range of abstract concepts. A possible solution is the use of a common sense ontology, capable of providing this kind of knowledge, otherwise the system would have to demand a lot of knowledge from the designer. 
 
This paper presents an approach to software design retrieval based on Case-Based Reasoning combined with a common sense ontology - WordNet. We describe the case retrieval algorithm, the case similarity metrics and experimental results.
9759378
Noun Sense Disambiguation with WordNet for Software Design Retrieval
Natural language understanding can be used to improve the usability of intelligent Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools. For a software designer it can be helpful in two ways: a broad range of natural language terms in the naming of software objects, attributes and methods can be used; and the system is able to understand the meaning of these terms so that it could use them in reasoning mechanisms like information retrieval. But, the problem of word sense disambiguation is an obstacle to the development of computational systems that can fully understand natural language. In order to deal with this problem, this paper presents a word sense disambiguation method and how it is integrated with a CASE tool.
15250271
Evaluation of Case-Based Maintenance Strategies in Software Design
CBR applications running in real domains can easily reach thousands of cases, which are stored in the case library. Retrieval times can increase greatly if the retrieval algorithm can not cope with such an amount of cases. Redundancy can also be a problem, focusing retrieval alternatives in a very restricted search space. Basically, the system's performance starts to degrade with the increase of the case-base size. Case-base maintenance allows CBR systems to deal with this problem, mainly through the use of case selection criteria. In this paper we present an experimental study about several case-base maintenance policies developed till now. We adapted and implemented these policies to a CBR system for software reuse and design, testing the applicability of these policies to cases with a complex representation (combination of tree and graph representations).
11245975
Experiments with free concept generation in Divago
This paper presents a set of experiments we carried out with, Divago, a system that is an attempt to implement our ideas towards a computational model of creativity. It is expected to be able to generate novel concepts out of previous knowledge. Here we show its behaviour with a large dataset constructed independently by other researchers consisting of over 170 nouns (for a project named C^3). Each noun is represented with a syntax that is equivalent to the one adopted for Divago. We apply a two step experimentation procedure, which starts by ''training'' the system with ''preferred outcomes'' and then allowing it to do free generation, constrained by the pragmatic goal of a given query. We evaluate the results and make a short discussion regarding well-defined criteria of novelty and usefulness. We also present a comparison with a similar experiment done with C^3.
5517190
A Model for Creativity in Creature Generation
This paper brings a proposal and general specification of a new project that aims to apply Conceptual Blending (Fauconnier and Turner 1998) as a process of creature generation in games. The project we describe is based on Divago (Pereira and Cardoso, 2003 and should be able to bring novelty among creatures that populate a game. Moreover, it is expected to extend these capabilities to other objects in a game, towards a very dynamic environment. Since this is a work in progress, we provide the first preliminary results or experimental examples and try to provide the reader with a clear image of the framework to be followed.
10111787
Golomb Rulers: The Advantage of Evolution
In this paper we present a new evolutionary algorithm designed to efficiently search for optimal Golomb rulers. The proposed approach uses a redundant random keys representation to codify the information contained in a chromosome and relies on a simple interpretation algorithm to obtain feasible solutions. Experimental results show that this method is successful in quickly identifying good solutions and that can be considered as a realistic alternative to massive parallel approaches that need several months or years to discover high quality Golomb rulers.
8238424
GVR: A New Genetic Representation for the Vehicle Routing Problem
In this paper we analyse a new evolutionary approach to the vehicle routing problem. We present Genetic Vehicle Representation (GVR), a two-level representational scheme designed to deal in an effective way with all the information that candidate solutions must encode. Experimental results show that this method is both effective and robust, allowing the discovery of new best solutions for some well-known benchmarks.
12781827
On the influence of GVR in vehicle routing
A comparative study is made between a new evolutionary approach for the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) and a standard evolutionary model, based on Path Representation. Genetic Vehicle Representation (GVR) is the new two-level representational scheme designed to deal in an effective way with all the information needed by candidate solutions. Experimental results, obtained from a set of VRP instances, show performance improvements when GVR is used.
8187463
Vehicle Routing Problem: Doing It The Evolutionary Way
Some routes in the chromosome may cause the vehicle to exceed its capacity. When this happens, we perform the following modification: the route that exceeds the vehicle capacity is split in several ones. These changes only occur at the interpretation level and, therefore, the information codified in the chromosome is not altered. 3 COEVOLUTIONARY APPROACH We use two subpopulations: individuals from the 1 describe the size of each route; individuals from the 2 specify the order by which the nodes are visited. Routes that exceed vehicle capacity are split.
9947181
The Influence of Learning in the Evolution of Busy Beavers
The goal of this research is to study how individual learning interacts with an evolutionary algorithm in its search for good candidates for the Busy Beaver problem. Two learning models, designed to act as local search procedures, are proposed. Experimental results show that local search methods that are able to perform several modifications in the structure of an individual in each learning step provide an important advantage. Some insight about the role that evolution and learning play during search is also presented.