The stochastic cash balance problem is a periodic review inventory problem faced by a firm in which the customer demands might be positive or negative. At the beginning of each time period, the firm may decide to replenish the inventory or return excess stock. Both the ordering cost and the return cost include a fixed component and a variable component. A holding or penalty cost is charged depe...

This paper explores the features of political economy in the dynamics of representative politics in India. Politics is seen as enhancing economic benefits through acquiring and maintenance of power in the realm of democratic set up. The system of representation is riddled with competitive populism. Emerging leaders and parties are forced to accommodate their ideologies in coping with competitiv...

We have built a comprehensive solution to address the management aspects of deployment and analysis of applications in Internet Data Centers. Our work was motivated by the high total cost of ownership of operating such centers, largely due to the variety of applications and their distinctive management requirements. We have chosen an approach that encapsulates application specific knowledge (is...

Reverse logistics involving closed-loop supply chains in various industry sectors has received growing attention throughout this decade. Reverse logistics considers several channels of reverse material flows from customers to suppliers. The value of product returns now exceeds $100 billion annually in the United States. However, only a small fraction of the returned product value is recaptured ...

Fixed automated spray technology (FAST) systems are designed as a fi xed-asset technology for anti-icing at specifi c target areas, such as bridges, tunnels, ramps and other elevated roadways. They remotely sense the potential for frost or ice formation on pavement in light of atmospheric and pavement data from a road weather information system (RWIS) or an environmental sensor system (ESS) and...

From a customer perspective, three main dimensions are relevant when evaluating and procuring database systems: functionality, performance, and total cost of ownership. Traditionally, database research has focused a lot on performance improvements of database systems, but less on new functionality and reducing the total cost of ownership. In this paper, we give our perspective on these three di...

Under conventional models, subsidizing energy efficiency requires electricity to be priced below marginal cost. Its benefits increase when electricity prices increase to finance the subsidy. With high prices, subsidies are counterproductive unless consumers fail to make efficiency investments when private benefits exceed costs. If the gain from adopting efficiency is only reduced electricity sp...

PRT, Personal Rapid Transit, is a transportation concept with small vehicles on a low weight structure, that combines many of the best aspects of today’s urban public transport, and packages them together with unparalleled service and lower total cost of ownership. Vectus, with operations in Korea and Sweden, is at the forefront of PRT technology. Vectus has built a PRT test track in Sweden for...

In this paper, we present a novel twist on the Beowulf cluster — the Bladed Beowulf. Designed by RLX Technologies and integrated and configured at Los Alamos National Laboratory, our Bladed Beowulf consists of compute nodes made from commodity off-the-shelf parts mounted on motherboard blades measuring 14.7 00 4.7 0.58. Each motherboard blade (node) contains a 633-MHz Transmeta TM5600TMCPU, 256...

Traffic congestion in mega cities is a common phenomenon for developing countries. Numerous studies on congestion cost estimation, that aim to quantify their monetary losses, have been conducted. Value of Time (VOT) assessment through utility maximizing theory and choice models are abundantly applied in transport literature. However, estimating VOT on congested network is not widely applied yet...