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Historically, the condition we now refer to as intellectual disability has been conceptualized using models that were extension of the medical model. Recent advances, however, have emphasized person-environment fit models of disability that view disability, intellectual, and other cognitive disabilities, as the lack of fit between a person’s capacities and the demands of the context. This chapter examines these shifts in conceptualization and the ways in which this changes how interventions are designed to provide support to enable people with intellectual disability to live, learn, work, and play in their communities. Such interventions and supports include issues pertaining to Universal Design for Learning, multi-tiered systems of supports, and the primacy of promoting the self-determination of people with disabilities. The importance of efforts to promote social inclusion is also discussed, as well as strategies to promote transition to adulthood. Authors from several countries provide examples of how these new intervention paradigms are being implemented across the world.

Individuals with disabilities and vulnerabilities often experience a series of interventions that are of little benefit in terms of career development, resulting in uncertainty, career barriers, disinvestment in the future and school, a lack of knowledge regarding current reality, and a tendency to delay important life decisions, which can limit their ability to imagine and plan for the future. Based on the most recent and accredited approaches in the field of career guidance, this chapter explores a number of innovative programs and interventions designed to support children, adolescents, and adults with and without disabilities in planning their educational and professional futures in an inclusive perspective. Emphasis is given to actions and interventions to enable individuals with and without disabilities to develop critical consciousness, awareness, and reflection regarding the contextual variables and conditions that may represent career barriers to their future, to support them in aspiring to an inclusive and sustainable future, and to help them to acquire the strategies and skills needed to pursue what is close to their heart.

The paper presents a comparison of performance of a number of selected optimization procedures when applied to solving electromagnetic field problems. The optimization techniques assessed encompass simulated annealing and genetic algorithms, as well as deterministic methods, including the Levenberg‐Marquardt procedure. The comparison is performed using a number of test functions followed by a study of two simple configurations relevant to problems encountered in electromagnetics.

The paper reports on a development of an automated CAD optimization system which interfaces an external design routine with a general purpose finite element software. The magnetic analysis is performed using a parameterized model and the process is controlled from within procedures written in MATLAB programming environment. Results are shown for a permanent magnet brushless DC motor.

This paper aims to contribute to the literature on place marketing by focusing on the concept of strategic needs, i.e. the set of strategic priorities that a place could achieve in a medium- to long-term horizon to improve its development.

The research examines the strategic needs of four local territorial systems (LTSs), i.e. clusters of municipalities that share social, economic and spatial similarities, located in a southern Italian province, through an analysis of their competitive positioning over three temporal instants.

For each LTS, the analysis identified a number of development goals that local policymakers could pursue and the strategies most suitable to achieve the said goals.

This paper proposes a new methodological approach to set the development goals of local areas based on the simultaneous assessment of their attractiveness and competitive capacity.

The power transformer is one of the most important pieces of equipment in a power system. The necessity for the optimum design of a power transformer arises because the design chosen should satisfy all the limitations and restrictions placed on it. This paper presents an improved fast evolutionary programming (IFEP) technique for the optimal design of a three‐phase power transformer.

The optimization of the transformer design problem is formulated as an NLP problem, expressing the objective and constraint functions in terms of the selected independent variables. Here the cost of the transformer is considered as the objective function and is the sum of material cost of stampings and copper windings, cost of cooling tube arrangements, cost of cooling medium, insulation cost and labour cost. A computer program is written from which the optimal design parameters are obtained. For optimization, the classical evolutionary programming (CEP) technique and its variant the IFEP technique are used and the results are compared.

The application of CEP and IFEP for transformer design has been demonstrated on two test cases. It has been observed that this IFEP outperforms the CEP in obtaining the optimum design of transformers of smaller as well as larger ratings in terms of execution time, convergence rate, quality and success rate.

The proposed method results in the economical design of a three‐phase power transformer which can significantly reduce the cost of manufacturing transformers.

Introduces papers from this area of expertise from the ISEF 1999 Proceedings. States the goal herein is one of identifying devices or systems able to provide prescribed performance. Notes that 18 papers from the Symposium are grouped in the area of automated optimal design. Describes the main challenges that condition computational electromagnetism’s future development. Concludes by itemizing the range of applications from small activators to optimization of induction heating systems in this third chapter.

Employability skills training programmes are an effective means for reducing unemployment rates. Such programmes also have the potential to improve the general well-being (e.g. self-efficacy) of disadvantaged individuals, however, reliable longitudinal evaluations of the psychological benefits of such programmes are limited. The present study evaluated the impact of an employability programme offered to disadvantaged adults in North-West England on self-efficacy. Additionally, the study aimed to identify risk factors for programme disengagement to identify at-risk groups that require further support.

Secondary longitudinal data pertaining to the background characteristics, programme engagement and self-efficacy scores (repeatedly measured on a monthly basis) of 308 programme users were analysed.

Results demonstrated that employability programme engagement significantly increased self-efficacy scores. Additionally, the findings suggested that individuals with mental health and learning difficulties were more likely to disengage from the programme. The findings demonstrate that employability programmes can have a positive impact on the well-being of individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds, however, prolonged engagement is needed for which some individuals require further support with.

The present study analysed longitudinal data from a diverse sample of disadvantaged individuals to reliably evaluate psychological outcomes from employability training programmes.