Everyday Planning Research Articles

Between innovative ambitions and erratic everyday practices: urban planners’ ambivalences towards digital transformation

Great expectations are being projected onto digital transformation as a solution to planning under uncertainty and complexity, while demanding new skills from and posing challenges to professionals. We address the ambivalent inclusion of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in everyday planning practices. How do ambivalences towards digitalisation as either a transformative process or as an intrusion upon everyday routines play out in urban planning as a situated knowledge practice? We focus on the erratic embedding of digital technologies and data into planning practices. We gather insights from interviews with planners in small and medium-sized cities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The analytical focus on knowing in practice and situated knowledge allows for insights on how digital transformations shape planning from professionals’ perspectives. Our research shows that digital transformation requires infrastructure and routines to bring forward innovative ambitions, which in many contexts are disrupted by limited resources and hierarchical decision-making procedures.

Making the Invisible, Visible: An Exploration of Track-and-Field Coaches' Perspectives of Their Planning Processes.

The traditional understanding of how coaches plan for sporting performance is rooted in the assumption that coaches create periodized plans underpinned by physiological principles, thereby providing scientific credibility to their work. In contrast, there remains a paucity of literature exploring how coaches understand or think about their planning practices. The purpose of this study was to generate new knowledge regarding what information coaches actually consider within their planning processes and how they actually approach the task of planning. Using rigorous, in-depth interviews, this study examined athletics coaches' understandings of their everyday planning practices, in an attempt to contribute to narrowing the gap between academic research and real-world application. Twenty-eight highly experienced, high-performance track-and-field coaches based in England (female, n = 1; male, n = 27) were recruited. The coaches were from the throwing disciplines (n = 10) and endurance running (n = 18). Coaches were interviewed about their planning process, using a maximum of 3 semistructured interviews per coach, spaced across a full athletics season. In total, this generated 68hours of data. The analysis demonstrated that, while the participant coaches utilized the principles of periodization, their planning activities were not limited to this issue. The findings highlighted how the coaches conceptualized successful athletic performance in a holistic way; that is, planning is multifaceted in nature. This study presents a holistic picture of the complexity of coaches' planning, detailing the considerable time and attention given to planning for athletes' psychological, personal, and social development, to enhance athlete performance and development.

Abwägung, Alternativen und Varianten in kommunalen Planungsprozessen. Grundsätzliche Überlegungen und Ergebnisse einer empirischen Untersuchung

Balancing in general and balancing alternatives and variants can be seen as a core component of the work of planners. Against the backdrop of current social challenges, the complexity of these balancing processes is increasing. From a planning science perspective, however, the question of the balancing process has only begun to be analysed. To date, there are only a few empirical studies that have explicitly focussed on balancing processes in Germany. This is where this paper starts by focusing on urban planning, investigating what planners understand by balancing alternatives and variants and how the balancing process is presented in everyday planning. To this end, 19 qualitative interviews were conducted with public and private sector planners. A qualitative content analysis was used to analyse the data. The results confirm the central role of balancing processes in everyday planning and emphasise the need for further research to understand these processes’ complexity and significance.

54 The Relationship between Error-Monitoring and Measures of Real-World Awareness and Everyday Function

Objective:Aging older adults and individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) experience changes in ability to self-monitor errors. Difficulties with accurate self-monitoring of errors can negatively impact everyday functioning. Without proper error recognition, individuals will continue to make mistakes and not implement compensatory strategies to prevent future errors. A modified Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART; Robertson et al., 1997) has previously been used to assess self-monitoring by the number of errors individuals were able to recognize. The current study sought to examine the relationship of this laboratory-based error-awareness task with everyday functional abilities as assessed by informants and with real-world error-monitoring. We hypothesized that self-monitoring would be significantly related to real-world error-monitoring and everyday functional abilities.Participants and Methods:135 community-dwelling participants (110 healthy older adults (HOA) and 25 individuals with MCI) were included from a larger parent study (mean age = 67.73, SD = 8.89). A modified SART was used to measure error-monitoring and create a self-monitoring variable by dividing accurately recognized errors by the total number of errors. Participants also completed simple and complex everyday tasks of daily living (e.g., making lemonade, cooking oatmeal, cleaning, filling medication pillbox) in a university campus apartment. Examiners coded both number of errors committed and self-corrections that were made during task completion. To examine real world error awareness, total self-correct errors were divided by the total number of errors. Knowledgeable informants (KI) completed the Everyday Cognition (ECog) scale, where they rated the participant on domains of memory, language, spatial abilities, planning, organization, and divided attention, to capture changes in everyday function. Pearson correlations were used to examine the relationship between SART self-monitoring and real-world error-monitoring, and changes in everyday functions as rated by their informants.Results:As self-monitoring scores on the SART increased, so too did real-world error awareness scores, r(133) = .18, p = .04. Higher self-monitoring scores on the SART were also significantly positively associated with functional performance abilities on the Ecog total (r(96) = -.24, p = .02). Further, higher self-monitoring on the SART was related to better functional performance within the Ecog domains of everyday memory (r(96) = -.23, p = .02), everyday language (r(96) = -.24, p = .02), everyday spatial abilities (r(96) = -.23, p = .02), and everyday planning (r(96) = -.21, p = .04). SART self-monitoring was not significantly related to everyday organization or divided attention domains.Conclusions:The findings revealed that better error-monitoring performance on a laboratory-based task was related to better error-monitoring when completing real-world activities, and less overall impairment in everyday function as reported by informants. Results support the ecological validity of the SART error-monitoring score and suggest that error-monitoring performance on the modified SART may have important clinical implications in predicting real-world error-monitoring and everyday function. Future research should consider how SART error-monitoring may predict everyday functioning, over and above other clinical measures.

Adaptability of everyday planning in urban design practices: self-organization and spontaneous action analysis of Galataport, Istanbul

Cities are information systems by its social and physical components. The data of these components create a wider picture in urban texture than it was designed by planners and designer in urban practices. The idea of collecting the data and composing models of spontaneous actions in urban simulations can add different dimensions to planning ideas in social terms and spatial texture. The issue is to find out how these components can be better related with each other to let citizens be urban planners as well up to some level, and what level that would be. The aim of the project is to bring back the social impact of the whole city as linking the hubs of Karaköy and Kabataş through the waterfront, also reawakening the collective memory of the port, by preserving the texture of warehouses form Ottoman Empire. The final outcome would be understanding how effectively project would be able to create the dynamics that have been proposed, and whether there have been other spontaneous actions thought the designed area.

Acquisition of Information and Communication Technology Skills among Basic Science Teachers in Kogi Central District of Kogi State

The need for acquisition of skills in information and communications technology among science teachers cannot be over-emphasized. Any science teacher who does not have sufficient skills in ICT may therefore not be able to cope with the 21st century demands of the teaching profession as the use of these technologies take central stage in everyday planning and delivery of teaching and learning in science classes. This study assessed the extent of acquisition of ICT skills among Basic science teachers in Kogi Central District of Kogi State, Nigeria. It adopted a descriptive survey research design. Three hundred and fifty teachers drawn through multi-stage sampling technique were used for the study. Information and communication technology skills acquisition questionnaire (ICTSAQ) was used to collect relevant data for this study. Five research questions were posed and four hypotheses were tested in the study. The research questions were answered using mean and standard deviation while the hypotheses were tested using t-test at .05 level of significance. The findings of this study revealed among others that the basic science teachers do not have sufficient skills in applying arithmetic operations in Microsoft excel. They do not also have sufficient skills in creating and editing power point slides as well as inserting pictures or objects in slides. It further revealed that teaching experience has no statistically significant influence on the acquisition of ICT skills among the teachers. The educational implications of the findings were discussed and adequate recommendations were also made

Knowledge Actors Engaging in “Everyday Planning” in Rapidly Urbanizing Peripheries of the Global South

This article presents original research based on the premise that inclusive urban planning is about different types of knowledges coming together, a process that enables the participation of diverse knowledge actors. In India, the urgency of peri‐urbanization is reflected in the massive transformation and roaring real estate speculation that is being unleashed through the conversion of agricultural land into profit‐making urban zones. It is the praxeology of an everyday planning modality by actors that interpret the possibility of real estate speculation at different scales that drive the rapid emergence of the peri‐urban built environment around the metropolis of Bangalore in Southern India. At the outset, I present a conceptual framework that articulates territorial‐financial mechanisms at the macro‐level with the praxiology of planning actors and their networks at the meso‐level through spatial knowledges. Then I describe the methods used. In the empirical part, this article first describes a particular site at the periphery of the city of Bangalore. Then, I delineate the prescriptive knowledge given by the local planning law. I present the praxiology of the different knowledge actors that explain the modality of peri‐urbanization, followed by a discussion of the rationales of the actors that shape everyday practices of planning. Finally, I discuss how social workers could get more involved in the urban planning process and contribute to shaping more inclusive cities because of the profession’s grounding in principles and ethics that supports human well‐being and development in cities for people and not for profit.

A Clinic-Based Measure of Everyday Planning Ability: The Overnight Trip Task.

Traditional measures of cognitive abilities most used by neuropsychologists are generally low in ecological validity and only capture a small proportion of the variance of a person's true functional capacity. This study evaluates the association between clinic-based performance and parallel real-world completion of an everyday planning test, the Overnight Trip Task (OTT). A cross-sectional cohort of 65 community-dwelling older adults completed a battery of cognitive assessments and two formats of the OTT: the paper-and-pencil clinic OTT, which was completed remotely through video conferencing (Zoom), and the parallel real-world OTT (RW-OTT), which was completed at home between sessions. Both formats required participants to plan for what they would pack and prepare for a hypothetical overnight trip based on a provided story that included rules and embedded contingencies. The clinic OTT demonstrated a small-to-moderate relationship with the RW-OTT (r = 0.35) and no relationship with measures of learning, long delay recall, an executive function composite, and a measure of everyday planning. Hierarchical regressions indicated that the clinic OTT demonstrated incremental validity above an executive function composite measure and global cognition when predicting self-reported everyday functioning and RW-OTT performance. The clinic OTT showed only modest association with the RW-OTT and discriminate but not convergent validity was demonstrated. The clinic OTT showed incremental validity when predicting self-reported everyday functioning and RW-OTT performance above more traditional measures. Before the clinic OTT could be considered a reliable and valid clinic-based measure for predicting real-world behavior, additional research would be needed.

What hinders climate adaptation? Approaching barriers in municipal land use planning through participant observation

Climate change poses many risks and affects humans’ daily life in particular at local and regional level. Thus, spatial planning is a key instrument for adapting man’s environment to projected changes. It relies consequently on the competence of local governments to plan urban landscapes in a climate-adapted manner. However, despite the efforts undertaken, there are still significant barriers to appropriate implementation of climate adaptation measures in practice. This research documents barriers that occurred during a real planning process. The researchers worked within a German planning department over 1.5 years as climate adaptation managers to incorporate climate adaptation concerns into the planning of a new urban district and adjacent green area. Applying a participant observation approach, we focused on the reasons why planners would not or could not implement certain measures and what systemic conditions weaken climate adaptation in the planning process relative to other concerns. The study identifies three system-immanent reasons underlying the individual barriers: Organizational-structural, procedural and legal reasons. Within each of the three groups, we describe how individual barriers are interrelated or build on each other. The findings provide a deeper insight into the problem’s planners face in everyday planning. The weak position of climate adaptation in the weighting of planning objectives and the integration in optimized planning processes appeared as the main constraints. We expect these problems to be encountered in other cities with similar planning regulation and administrative structures.

People with aphasia and their family members proposing joint future activities in everyday conversations: A conversation analytic study.

In everyday conversations, a person with aphasia (PWA) compensates for their language impairment by relying on multimodal and material resources, as well as on their conversation partners. However, some social actions people perform in authentic interaction, proposing a joint future activity, for example, ordinarily rely on a speaker producing a multi-word utterance. Thus, the language impairment connected to aphasia may impede the production of such proposals, consequently hindering the participation of PWAs in the planning of future activities. To investigate (1) how people with post-stroke chronic aphasia construct proposals of joint future activities in everyday conversations compared with their familiar conversation partners (FCPs); and (2) how aphasia severity impacts on such proposals and their uptake. Ten hours of video-recorded everyday conversations from seven persons with mild and severe aphasia of varying subtypes and their FCPs were explored using conversation analysis. We identified 59 instances where either party proposed a joint future activity and grouped such proposals according to their linguistic format and sequential position. Data are in Finnish. People with mild aphasia made about the same number of proposals as their FCPs and used similar linguistic formats to their FCPs when proposing joint future activities. This included comparable patterns associated with producing a time reference, which was routinely used when a proposal initiated a planning activity. Mild aphasia manifested itself as within-turn word searches that were typically self-repaired. In contrast, people with severe aphasia made considerably fewer proposals compared with their FCPs, the proposal formats being linguistically unidentifiable. This resulted in delayed acknowledgement of the PWAs' talk as a proposal. Mild aphasia appears not to impede PWAs' ability to participate in the planning of joint future activities, whereas severe aphasia is a potential limitation. To address this possible participatory barrier, we discuss clinical implications for both therapist-led aphasia treatment and conversation partner training. What is already known on the subject PWAs use multimodal resources to compensate for their language impairment in everyday conversations. However, certain social actions, such as proposing a joint future activity, cannot ordinarily be accomplished without language. What this paper adds to existing knowledge The study demonstrates that proposing joint future activities is a common social action in everyday conversations between PWAs and their family members. People with mild aphasia used typical linguistic proposal formats, and aphasic word-finding problems did not prevent FCPs from understanding the talk as a proposal. People with severe aphasia constructed proposals infrequently using their remaining linguistic resources, a newspaper connecting the talk to the future and the support from FCPs. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? We suggest designing aphasia treatment with reference to the social action of proposing a joint future activity. Therapist-led treatment could model typical linguistic proposal formats, whereas communication partner training could incorporate FCP strategies that scaffold PWAs' opportunities to construct proposals of joint future activities. This would enhance aphasia treatment's ecological validity, promote its generalization and ultimately enable PWAs to participate in everyday planning activities.

Severity of Subjective Cognitive Complaints and Worries in Older Adults Are Associated With Cerebral Amyloid-β Load.

Subjective cognitive decline (SCD) is considered an early risk stage for dementia due to Alzheimer's disease (AD) and the development of pathological brain changes, such as the aggregation of amyloid-beta (amyloid-β) plaques. This study evaluates the association between specific features of SCD and cerebral amyloid-β load measured by positron emission tomography (PET) with 18F-florbetaben in 40 cognitively normal older individuals. Global amyloid-β, as well as regional amyloid-β load for the frontal, temporal, parietal, and cingulate cortex, was quantified. Specific features of SCD, such as subjective cognitive complaints and worry, were assessed using the 39-item Everyday Cognition Scales and the 16-item Penn State Worry Questionnaire. Spearman's rank partial correlation analyses, adjusted for age and apolipoprotein E ε4 status, were conducted to test the associations between specific features of SCD and cerebral amyloid-β load. The severity of subjective cognitive complaints in everyday memory and organization was positively correlated with amyloid-β load in the frontal cortex. In addition, the severity of subjective cognitive complaints in everyday planning was positively correlated with amyloid-β load in the parietal cortex. Higher levels of worry were associated with higher amyloid-β load in the frontal cortex. After correction of the PET data for partial volume effects, these associations were reduced to trend level. In conclusion, the severity of subjective cognitive complaints and the level of trait worry were positively associated with cortical amyloid-β burden, particularly in the frontal and parietal cortex. Further studies are required to elucidate the direction of these associations in order to develop strategies to prevent amyloid deposition and cognitive decline.

Navigating visions, knowledge and practical challenges in coastal zone planning

This paper explores what happens when the ideal of sustainable development meets the real and pressing problems in coastal zone planning. Insights into how coastal zone planners understand environmental problems and navigate political visions, knowledge requirements, stakeholder involvement and local conditions, are key to understanding how to develop a holistic approach in line with sustainable development. The paper applies Q-methodology to identify the dominant discourses and explore planners’ perceptions and practices for sustainable coastal zone management. The Q sorts were realized in 2018–2019 in Northern Norway with planners in 10 small municipalities and 8 county level representatives. It is argued that it provides new insights into the challenges that planners face in striking a balance between the overarching values and the practical tasks that planners face in everyday planning; and that the interpretation of factors using Q-methodology should focus on all statements to ensure holism and avoid overlooking important information.

DeepAMD: Detection and identification of Android malware using high-efficient Deep Artificial Neural Network

Android smartphones are being utilized by a vast majority of users for everyday planning, data exchanges, correspondences, social interaction, business execution, bank transactions, and almost in each walk of everyday lives. With the expansion of human reliance on smartphone technology, cyberattacks against these devices have surged exponentially. Smartphone applications use permissions to utilize various functionalities of the smartphone that can be maneuvered to launch an attack or inject malware by hackers. Existing studies present various approaches to detect Android malware but lack early detection and identification. Accordingly, there is a dire need to craft an efficient mechanism for malicious applications’ detection before they exploit the data. In this paper, a novel approach DeepAMD to defend against real-world Android malware using deep Artificial Neural Network (ANN) has been adopted including an efficiency comparison of DeepAMD with conventional machine learning classifiers and state-of-the-art studies based on performance measures such as accuracy, recall, f-score, and precision. As per the experimental analysis, DeepAMD outperforms other approaches in detecting and identifying malware attacks on both Static as well as Dynamic layers. On the Static layer, DeepAMD achieves the highest accuracy of 93.4% for malware classification, 92.5% for malware category classification, and 90% for malware family classification. On the Dynamic layer, DeepAMD achieves the highest accuracy of 80.3% for malware category classification and 59% for malware family classification in comparison with the state-of-the-art techniques.

Feasibility of a Tablet-Based Program for Training Everyday Planning in Adolescents With Intellectual Disabilities

BackgroundIndividuals with intellectual disabilities (ID) show difficulties with everyday planning. A tablet-based training program for everyday planning may be a suitable intervention, but its feasibility must be evaluated. This study evaluated how behavior changes during training and if individuals with ID can use technology by themselves.MethodThirty-three adolescents with ID and 30 younger children with a typical development were recruited. The participants were instructed to train in school for a total of 300 minutes. After the intervention, the participants were matched on mental age (MA).ResultsOnly 16% of the participants trained for all 300 minutes. Participants in the MA group trained for a longer time than the ID group. Both groups made fewer errors per task at the end compared to the beginning. Individuals with ID started off making less attempts per task and increased their activity during the training. This pattern was not seen in the comparison group.ConclusionsBoth groups used the program independently, without adult supervision. However, a large group of participants in the ID group had a low usage time. Thus, the program might not have been feasible for that subgroup. The ID group increased their activity during the training which might mirror a strategy development of how to use the program. The change in behavior in activity on task attempts can be interpreted such that individuals with ID need a longer time to get familiarized with the technology. Tablet-based training programs are feasible for individuals with ID, but it is necessary to follow up on usage time.

A Model of Practice for Building Teacher Capacity in Educating Young School-age Children on the Autism Spectrum: User Perspectives

ABSTRACT The increasing number of children on the autism spectrum entering mainstream schools requires classroom teachers with the knowledge and skills to create supportive and inclusive environments in which these students can thrive. This paper reports the perspectives offered by 33 teachers who volunteered to trial an Early Years Model of Practice (EY-MoP) designed to provide information and guidance on foundational practices supportive of students on the spectrum. All teachers worked in Australian primary schools and had at least one student on the spectrum in their early years classrooms. In pre-and post-trial interviews, teachers shared their impressions of, and experiences with, the EY-MoP. In general, they endorsed the model as a resource outlining foundational practices for working with students on the spectrum. Insights shared pointed to the positive impact that this kind of comprehensive, foundational resource can have on teaching practice both in everyday planning and as a reflective tool. Responses also indicated that the model enhanced teachers’ knowledge and confidence in supporting students on the spectrum. Taken together, these teacher data provide preliminary evidence for the viability of the EY-MoP as a resource to support both beginning and experienced teachers in their work with young children on the spectrum.

Deciphering posthumanism: Why and how it matters to urban planning in the Anthropocene

This article responds to the call for planning theorists to develop a posthumanist approach to planning, especially in the context of the Anthropocene or planetary environmental degradation. In the wake of often unexpected and brutal feedback from nature – frequent flooding, heat waves, tornadoes or cyclones – the positioning or conceptualisation of ‘the environment’ in planning has changed; rather than being discounted as an inanimate background that merely hosts human affairs, it is now considered an active agent that influences how we design and plan for a city. The posthumanist framing of the planning agenda is closely related to the previous ‘material turn’ in planning, which initially introduced ‘distributive agency’, where human agency or our willingness to act is activated only via our relation with non-human surroundings. ‘More-than-human’ approaches to planning, inspired by the new ecology movement that debunks the idea of human exceptionalism, attempt to extend that logic even further by proclaiming how we can critically reframe planning to develop more inclusive and ethical relationships with non-human species. As a continuation of this dialogue, I provide the philosophical background behind the recent rise of posthumanist or ‘new materialist’ ecopolitics and argue why and how they can offer important insights for planning theory and practice. I lay out specifically how planners would execute this ‘posthumanist normativity’ in their everyday planning practices, focusing on three lessons that could be directly applicable: (1) understanding environment politics as a mundane politics of representation – which eventually allows us to consider non-human species as social minorities, (2) learning to ‘stay with the trouble’ – recognising the webs of our material dependency on non-human critters that encourage us to cultivate ‘response-ability’ and (3) activating political mobilisation based on empirical experiences – thinking of immediate physical experiences and sensory values as major sources of environmental activism.

Cognitive abilities and life experience in everyday planning in adolescents with intellectual disabilities: Support for the difference model.

The literature on planning ability in individuals with intellectual disability (ID) provides no clarity on whether their ability matches their mental age (MA) or not. Perhaps can planning experience explain the mixed results. The current study investigated to what extent cognitive abilities and life experience can explain everyday planning ability in individuals with ID and to what extent results from everyday planning tasks support the developmental or the difference model of ID. Planning tests, cognitive ability tasks and a self-rated life experience form were administered to 71 adolescents with ID and 62 children with a typical development matched on MA. Adolescents with ID exhibited planning ability according to their MA. Regression analyses showed that the predictors of planning differed between the groups. The cognitive measures could predict planning in both groups, but life experience only contributed positively to planning in the MA group, whereas chronological age was negatively correlated with successful planning in the ID group. The results support the difference model of ID. When matched on MA, the individuals with ID will solve the planning task in a qualitatively different manner. Additionally, the participants with ID could not utilise their life experience when solving the planning task, contrary to the MA group. Practitioners should be aware that individuals with ID might need more everyday planning training throughout adolescence. To support adolescents with ID, practitioners may focus on supporting the individual's cognitive abilities rather than relying on their prior knowledge.

Green Resilient City - A framework to integrate the Green and Open Space Factor and climate simulations into everyday planning to support a green and climate-sensitive landscape and urban development

Continued urban growth, densification and the constantly increasing number of days with excessive heat provide challenging conditions for urban green infrastructure (UGI) and intensify the Urban Heat Island effect (UHI). Therefore, new approaches are required to improve the urban ecological function of buildings and to provide high-quality (urban) open spaces that affect the meso- and microclimate in a positive way. Based on the research project “Green Resilient City”, this paper shows how climate simulations can support landscape and urban planning and development. A proof of concept for a multiscale tool set for the evaluation, regulation, and optimization of green and climate-sensitive urban planning projects is the overall aim. The tool-set combines a Green and Open Space Factor, as an urban planning index and controlling instrument, as well as three climate simulation models on different scales in order to harmonize them: the GREENPASS® as an optimization instrument on parcel and neighborhood level, MUKLIMO_3 on neighborhood and city level and Cosmo-CLM as evaluation tools on mesoclimatic and regional level. Several advantages arise from the unprecedented combination of these four instruments: It transfers the use of climate models to the planning process, enables the testing and optimization of different UGIs with a focus on how they can influence the climatic performance of the proposed design of an urban development or retrofit project and serves as a scientific basis for urban planning decisions on a political level.

Throughput optimisation in a coal export system with multiple terminals and shared resources

This work describes a genetic algorithm based approach for the optimization of the Hunter Valley coal export system in Newcastle, Australia. The Port of Newcastle features three coal export terminals, operating primarily in cargo assembly mode. They share a rail network on their inbound operations and a channel on their outbound operations. Maximizing throughput at a single coal terminal, taking into account its layout, equipment and operating policies, is already a challenging problem. However, maximizing throughput of the Hunter Valley coal export system as a whole requires that terminals and inbound/outbound shared resources be considered simultaneously. Existing approaches to solve this and similar problems either lack realism or are computationally too demanding to be useful as an everyday planning tool. We present a parallel genetic algorithm to optimize the integrated system. The algorithm models activities in continuous time and can handle practical planning horizons efficiently. The solutions are on average 17% better than those obtained with the current state-of-the-art method – a constraint programming-based approach – requiring less than 3% of the CPU time. Tests were conducted on 10 instances generated using real world data, with 200 vessels and approximately 270 stockpiles each.

Family Functioning and Psychological Health of Children with Mentally Ill Parents.

Parental mental illness can be linked to reduced family functioning, which is associated with more conflicts, less adaptability and cohesion as well as a disorganized pattern of everyday planning. Concurrently, family functioning is an important moderator for the influence of parental mental disorders on the development of the children. Consequently, the current study addresses the correlation of family functioning in families with mentally ill parents and the psychological health of the children. The sample consists of 67 mentally ill parents. Both parents and therapists completed questionnaires related to family functioning and the psychological health of the children. Family functioning was rated as dysfunctional in 38% of the families. The psychological health of the children was classified as clinical or subclinical in 43% of the cases. 52% of the children were rated to have no psychological problems. In families with good family functioning, children were assessed to have less psychological problems than in families with poor functioning. Children outside the clinical range lived in families with good family functioning and vice versa. Significant positive correlations were found between the FB-A scales, the CBCL/4-18 syndrome scales and the CBCL/4–18 total score. Results indicate that family functioning and psychological health of children in families with mentally ill parents correlate closely and represent potential targets for future family interventions.