The time–cost tradeoff problem is one of the most important and applicable problems in project scheduling area. There are many factors that force the mangers to crash the time. This factor could be early utilization, early commissioning and operation, improving the project cash flow, avoiding unfavorable weather conditions, compensating the delays, and so on. Since there is a need to allocate e...

1. Contracting agency may properly make an award to a lower-priced, lower-rated offeror athough the solicitation provides that cost will be less important than technical factors in the selection, where the contracting officer resonably determines that the technical advantage from the highest-rated proposal is less significant than the possible cost savings from a lower-rated proposal and the co...

Functional characteristic consistency in hard red spring (HRS) wheat is a major problem faced in the relationship between producers and end-users. Common procurement strategies designed to fix this problem include vertical integration, targeting of origins, and pre-shipment samples. End-users find these procurement strategies necessary as a means to ensure quality in their final product. The ma...

Exhaustive key search is the simplest attack against a cryptosystem, but it is sometimes the most realistic. This is specially true for carefully designed block ciphers for which advanced cryptanalysis (e.g. linear, differential) is not applicable. In this paper, we first update the cost of an exhaustive key search of the Data Encryption Standard (DES) using Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA...

In many applications, particularly power-constrained sensor networks, it is important to conserve the amount of data exchanged while maximizing the utility of that data for some inference task. Broadly, this tradeoff has two major cost components—the representation’s size (in distributed networks, the communications cost) and the error incurred by its use (the inference cost). We analyze this t...

The privacy-utility tradeoff problem is formulated as determining the privacy mechanism (random mapping) that minimizes the mutual information (a metric for privacy leakage) between the private features of the original dataset and a released version. The minimization is studied with two types of constraints on the distortion between the public features and the released version of the dataset: (...

We consider the problem of data dissemination in a satellite network. In contrast to previously studied models, broadcasting is among peers, rather than client server. We introduce a cost model for data dissemination in peer to peer satellite networks. The model quantifies the tradeoff between the inconsistency of the data, and its transmission cost; the transmission cost may be given in terms ...

In this paper, we focus on tradeoffs between storage cost and rekeying cost for secure multicast. Specifically, we present a family of algorithms that provide a tradeoff between the number of keys maintained by users and the time required for rekeying due to revocation of multiple users. We show that some well known algorithms in the literature are members of this family. We show that algorithm...

Inspired by facts from the private-sector construction industry, we develop a model that explains many stylized facts of procurement contracts. The buyer in our model incurs a cost of providing a comprehensive design and is faced with a tradeoff between providing incentives and reducing ex post transaction costs due to costly renegotiation. We show that cost-plus contracts are preferred to fixe...

Classical facility location models like the P -median problem (PMP) and the uncapacitated fixed-charge location problem (UFLP) implicitly assume that once constructed, the facilities chosen will always operate as planned. In reality, however, facilities “fail” from time to time due to poor weather, labor actions, changes of ownership, or other factors. Such failures may lead to excessive transp...