OLAP queries (i.e. group-by or cube-by queries with aggregation) have proven to be valuable for data analysis and exploration. Many decision support applications need very complex OLAP queries, requiring a fine degree of control over both the group definition and the aggregates that are computed. For example, suppose that the user has access to a data cube whose measure attribute is Sum(Sales)....

(ABSTRACT) This study presents a multi-attribute decision making (MADM) framework in support of strategic resource planning of electric utilities. Study efforts have focused on four technical issues identified to be essentially important to the process of strategic resource development, i.e., decision data expansion, MADM analysis with imprecise information, MADM analysis under uncertainty and ...

Customer requirements play an important role in securing the competitive advantages of a company’s new product development endeavors. Based on the concept of quality function deployment (QFD), this article presents a novel procedure to effectively link customer requirements with design characteristics for product design. The proposed procedure comprises an analytic hierarchy process (AHP), whic...

Online analytical processing (OLAP) systems have been introduced to facilitate decision support applications. While most previous studies deal with the situation where the aggregate functions are applied to all cells in a given range, this paper considers a class of queries, called the Partial-MAX/MIN query, that are applied only to specified cells in a given range. We propose the Rank Index an...

With the increase in disruptions and vulnerabilities, demand for more resilient supply chain is echoed vibrantly in business world. It is important to develop resilient capability in right time because supply chain disruptions may be the cause of serious financial loss to the organizations as well as their supply chains. Supply chain managers need to identify supply chain disruptions and vulner...

Data Warehouses (DWs), Multidimensional (MD) Databases, and On-Line Analytical Processing Applications are used as a very powerful mechanism for discovering crucial business information. Considering the extreme importance of the information managed by these kinds of applications, it is essential to specify security measures from the early stages of the DW design in the MD modeling process, and ...

We investigate the Church–Kalmár–Kreisel–Turing Theses concerning theoretical (necessary) limitations of future computers and of deductive sciences, in view of recent results of classical general relativity theory. We argue that (i) there are several distinguished Church–Turing-type Theses (not only one) and (ii) validity of some of these theses depend on the background physical theory we choos...

We report on the design of a novel architecture for data warehousing based on the introduction of an explicit “logical” layer to the traditional data warehousing framework. This layer serves to guarantee a complete independence of OLAP applications from the physical storage structure of the data warehouse and thus allows users and applications to manipulate multidimensional data ignoring implem...

Microfluidics, a field that has been well-established for several decades, has seen extensive applications in the areas of biology, chemistry, and medicine. However, it might be very hard to imagine how such soft microfluidic devices would be used in other areas, such as electronics, in which stiff, solid metals, insulators, and semiconductors have previously dominated. Very recently, things ha...

The design of strategies to generate efficient mixing is crucial for a variety of applications, particularly digital microfluidic devices that use small “discrete” fluid volumes (droplets) as fluid carriers and microreactors. In recent work, we have presented an approach for the generation and control of mixing inside a translating spherical droplet. This was accomplished by considering Stokes’...