Production and non-productive equipment and personnel delays are a critical element of any production system. The frequency and length of delays impact heavily on the production and economic efficiency of these systems. Machining processes in wood industry are particularly vulnerable to productive and non-productive delays. Whereas, traditional manufacturing industries usually operate on homoge...

Most research in economic manufacturing/order quantity management assumes that all products are of perfect quality and are produced at a constant production rate. One result of this assumption is that the number of units produced in a given period is constant, which is not the case in real life. Most production systems produce items which are of perfect quality along with some that are of imper...

Let c(F) be the number of perfect pairs of F and c(G) be the maximum of c(F) over all (near-) one-factorizations F of G. Wagner showed that for odd n, c(Kn) ≥ n∗φ(n) 2 and for m and n which are odd and co-prime to each other, c(Kmn) ≥ 2 ∗ c(Km) ∗ c(Kn). In this note, we establish that both these results are equivalent in the sense that they both give rise to the same lower bound.

V. Chv atal proved that no minimal imperfect graph has a small transversal, that is, a set of vertices of cardinality at most + ! 1 which meets every !-clique and every -stable set. In this paper we prove that a slight generalization of this notion of small transversal leads to a conjecture which is as strong as Berge's Strong Perfect Graph Conjecture for a very large class of graphs, although ...

This paper examines how the fertility of enslaved women was affected by the promise of freedom. Exploiting geographic variation in the effect of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, I demonstrate a negative correlation between fertility and the distance to freedom. This negative correlation is stronger on larger plantations but weaker when the slaveholder is a woman. A similar correlation is not pre...

In order to prove the Strong Perfect Graph Conjecture, the existence of a ”simple” property P holding for any minimal non-quasi-parity Berge graph G would really reduce the difficulty of the problem. We prove here that this property cannot be of type ”G is F-free”, where F is any fixed family of Berge graphs.