Because of their inherent low ductility, TiAl-based materials are difficult to fabricate, especially thin gage titanium gamma aluminide (TiAl) sheet and foil. In this paper, an innovative powder metallurgy approach for producing cost-effective thin gage TiAl sheets (with 356 mm long and 235 mm wide, and a thickness of 0.74, 1.09, 1.55, and 2.34 mm, respectively) is presented. The microstructure...

bstract. This paper presents an efficient technique for linking dge points in order to generate a closed-contour representation. It s based on the consecutive use of global and local schemes. In oth cases it is assumed that the original intensity image, as well as ts corresponding edge map, are given as inputs to the algorithm. he global scheme computes an initial representation by connecting d...

The long-term goal of our research is to develop a top-down transformation-based and cost-based optimizer for object queries. Relational optimization techniques have been widely and successfully adopted. Thus, the primary task of object query optimization is to adapt relational techniques, and meanwhile to invent new techniques, to address the new features in object query languages such as meth...

Planning research has returned to the issue of optimizing costs (rather than sizes) of plans. A prevalent perception, at least among non-experts in search, is that graph search for optimizing the size of paths generalizes more or less trivially to optimizing the cost of paths. While this kind of generalization is usually straightforward for graph theorems, graph algorithms are a different story...

Cost-based unbalanced R-trees (CUR-trees) are a costfunction based data structure for spatial data. CUR-trees are constructed specifically to improve the evaluation of intersection queries, the most basic selection query in an Rtree. A CUR-tree is built taking into account a given query distribution for the queries and a cost model for their execution. Depending on the expected frequency of acc...

One important problem with software development projects is to get an early and nevertheless accurate estimation of the software development costs. In the literature various methods have been developed for this purpose. The most popular examples are Boehm's COCOMO , Albrecht's function-point method or Sneed's object-point method . The two last-named methods are based on early results of the ana...

Conventional wisdom holds that reducing disk latency leads to higher disk utilization, maximizing disk utilization leads to higher throughput, and employing a faster disk leads to better performance. All of this is true when building a conventional le or database system. In this paper we show that these principles can be misleading when applied to a media server. To design such a server, we pro...

Cost-based filtering is a promising technique able to improve search performance in combinatorial optimization problems. Such a technique has already been successfully applied to stochastic inventory control problems. We focus on the class of production/inventory control problems that considers a single product and a single stocking location, given a stochastic demand with a known non-stationar...