We focus on minimum cost spanning tree problems (mcstps) where agents need to be connected with a source directly or indirectly through other agents with the minimum cost. Mcstps have been studied as cooperative games, where all of agents cooperate to construct a minimum cost spanning tree (mcst), and share the cost of the mcst. There actually exist situations where some coalitions of agents ar...

SYNLETT 2007, No. 10, pp 1477–148918.06.2007 Advanced online publication: 07.06.2007 DOI: 10.1055/s-2007-980382; Art ID: A46207ST © Georg Thieme Verlag Stuttgart · New York Abstract: Millions of years of evolution have allowed Nature to develop ingenious synthetic strategies and reaction pathways for the construction of architectural complexity. In contrast, the field of chemical synthesis is y...

The complexity of ICT products and services has brought them to the level of disposable ‘species’. The combination of the race to optimal performance and disposability has resulted in considerable footprint and impact. Although approaches such as increasing efficiency, reducing the total cost of ownership, life cycle assessment and management, and circular economy have been put forward to manag...

T he U.S. government reports on minority business ownership as part of the regular economic census performed every 5 years in years ending in 2 or 7. For the purposes of this census, minority-owned businesses are all those not owned by nonminority (Caucasian) business owners. By this definition, minority-owned businesses make up approximately 15% of all U.S. firms. Between 1992 and 1997, minori...

“Cloud” computing – a relatively recent term, builds on decades of research in virtualization, distributed computing, utility computing, and more recently networking, web and software services. It implies a service oriented architecture, reduced information technology overhead for the end user, great flexibility, reduced total cost of ownership, on demand services and many other things. This pa...

The goal of the present study was quality evaluation of the natural waters in Stara Zagora Region according to two parameters: total iron and zinc. With regard to the investigations conducted during October-December, 2009: the surface waters of Stara Zagora Region, towards the measured zinc and iron concentrations, could be classified as I category; the groundwaters of Stara Zagora Region, towa...

As more institutions of higher education confront budget cuts and financial crisis, open source Learning Management Systems become increasingly attractive, providing cost effective and efficient alternatives to commercial Learning Management Systems. This interpretive case study investigates the implementation and adoption of an open source based LMS at an university located in California. The ...

Induction cooking is often considered one of the most efficient cooking technologies. With this technology, up to 90% of the energy consumed is transferred to the food, compared to about 74% for traditional electric systems and 40% for gas. This technology has become popular in Europe, but its adoption in the US has been less enthusiastic. Several market barriers exist for this technology, incl...

For digraphs D and H, a mapping f : V (D)→V (H) is a homomorphism of D to H if uv ∈ A(D) implies f(u)f(v) ∈ A(H). If, moreover, each vertex u ∈ V (D) is associated with costs ci(u), i ∈ V (H), then the cost of the homomorphism f is ∑ u∈V (D) cf(u)(u). For each fixed digraph H, we have the minimum cost homomorphism problem for H. The problem is to decide, for an input graph D with costs ci(u), u...

Data centers form a key part of the infrastructure upon which a variety of information technology services are built. They provide the capabilities of centralized repository for storage, management, networking and dissemination of data. With the rapid increase in the capacity and size of data centers, there is a continuous increase in the demand for energy consumption. These data centers not on...