One of the best solutions provided to improve the availability of industrial and communication systems is to add redundant elements. Usually this task tries to achieve a performance level with minimal cost. The problem of total investment cost minimization, subject to availability constraints, is a pure redundancy optimization problem which is known to be intractable and for which no determinis...

We examined how positive and negative reinforcement influenced time allocation, occurrence of problem behavior, and completion of parent instructions during a concurrent choice assessment with 2 preschool-aged children who displayed severe problem behavior in their homes. The children were given a series of concurrent choice options that varied availability of parent attention, access to prefer...

1. The introduction of combined CsA and steroid treatment as the baseline immunosuppressive medication significantly enhanced the results of kidney transplantation in our series. But various other preexisting recipient or donor conditions may still have an important effect on kidney transplant survival and should not go unrecognized. 2. Living-related kidney transplants were almost totally aban...

The availability equivalence factors of a general repairable parallel-series system are discussed in this paper considering the availability function of the system. The system components are assumed to be repairable and independent but not identical. The life and repair times of the system components are exponentially distributed with different parameters. Two types of availability equivalent f...

Climate change could either directly or indirectly cause population declines via altered temperature, rainfall regimes, food availability or phenological responses. However few studies have focused on allocation trade-offs between growth and reproduction under marginal resources, such as food scarce that may be caused by climate warming. Such critical changes may have an unpredicted impact on a...

We examined the relationship between meristem allocation and plant size for four annual plant species: Arabidopsis thaliana, Arenaria serphyllifolia, Brassica rapa, and Chaenorrhinum minus. Gradients of light and nutrient availability were used to obtain a range of plant sizes for each of these species. Relative allocation to reproductive, inactive, and growth meristems were used to measure rep...

In the age of Internet, the performance of many Webbased applications critically depend on the quality of local repositories. Due to the dynamics of remote Web sources, applications have to crawl information periodically to ensure the high quality of repositories. In this paper, we use the general quality-aware principle to strike balances between the quality of repositories and the resources f...

In cooperative networks, a variety of resource allocation problems can be formulated as constrained optimization with system-wide objective e.g., maximizing the total system throughput, capacity or ergodic capacity, subject to constraints from individual users, e.g. minimum data rate, transmit power limit, and from the system, e.g. power budget, total number of subcarriers, availability of the ...

Production increases in intensively managed forests have been obtained by improving resource availability through water and nutrient amendments. Increased stem production has been attributed to shifts in growth from roots to shoot, and such shifts would have important implications for belowground carbon sequestration. We examined above and belowground growth and biomass accumulation and distrib...

We consider two capacity problems in P2P networks. In the first one, the nodes have an infinite amount of data to send and the goal is to optimally allocate their uplink bandwidths such that the demands of every peer in terms of receiving data rate are met. We solve this problem through a mapping from a node-weighted graph featuring two labels per node to a max flow problem on an edge-weighted ...