For the past several years, competing resource demands within BPA have forced the Agency to stretch Operations, Maintenance and Replacement (OM R) resources. There is a large accumulation of tasks that were not accomplished when scheduled. Maintenance and replacements and outages, due to...

Search and optimization in the context of blackbox objective function evaluation subject to blackbox constraints satisfaction is the thesis of this work. The SEARCH (Search Envisioned As Relation and Class Hierarchizing) framework introduced by Kargupta (1995) offered an alternate perspective of...

The SEARCH (Search Envisioned As Relation and Class Hierarchizing) framework developed elsewhere (Kargupta, 1995; Kargupta and Goldberg, 1995) offered an alternate perspective toward blackbox optimization -- optimization in presence of little domain knowledge. The SEARCH framework investigates the...

The development of an expert system for instrumentation and control operations is sometimes particularly difficult because (a) the expert system must implement the consensus opinion of a group of several human experts in all circumstances, (b) there may be 20 or more complex, dynamic,...