This paper presents a study conducted in collaboration with large Canadian engineering, procurement and construction management (EPCM) firm to identify areas of improvement in the current process of progress reporting and forecasting project status at different targeted future dates. The study focused mainly on trending and time/Cost control of engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) pr...

Amajor problem in forecasting is estimating the time of some future event. Traditionally, forecasts are designed to minimize an error cost function that is evaluated once, possibly when the event occurs and forecast accuracy can be determined. However, in many applications forecast error costs accumulate over time, and the forecasts themselves may be updated with information that is collected a...

Globalized companies seek growth while dealing with more complex and compelling challenges such as economic volatility, fluctuating commodity prices, supply-chain inefficiencies and increasing customer expectations. While companies cannot control all of these challenges, there is much they can do to remain competitive. Companies can gain competitive edge through improved demand forecasting and ...

Clouds moving at a high speed in front of the Sun can cause step changes in the output power of photovoltaic (PV) power plants, which can lead to voltage fluctuations and stability problems in the connected electricity networks. These effects can be reduced effectively by proper short-term cloud passing forecasting and suitable PV power plant output power control. This paper proposes a low-cost...

We solve a rich logistical problem inspired from practice, in which a heterogeneous xed eet of vehicles is used for collecting recyclable waste from large containers over a nite planning horizon. Each container is equipped with a sensor, which communicates its level at the start of the day. Given a history of observations, a forecasting model is used to estimate the point demand forecasts as we...

This paper introduces a new approach for efficiently indexing and querying constantly evolving data. Traditional data index structures suffer from frequent updating cost and result in unsatisfactory performance when data changes constantly. Existing approaches try to reduce index updating cost by using a simple linear or recursive function to define the data evolution, however, in many applicat...

Practitioner's Abstract The costs of corn-and soybean-based feeds compose a substantial proportion of the variable costs faced by both mainstream and emergent confined livestock producers. This research develops a method to provide a joint distribution of prices of corn and soybean meal at a future time. Black's 1976 option model and stochastic volatility jump diffusion (SVJD) model are compare...

a r t i c l e i n f o Due to healthcare costs rising faster than overall cost of living, decision makers (i.e., households, businesses, and governments) must cut back on healthcare utilization or spending elsewhere to be fiscally responsible. Accurate forecasts of future medical costs are critical for efficient planning, budgeting and operating decisions at all levels. This research compares th...

The need effectively to integrate decision making tasks together with knowledge representation and inference procedures has caused recent research efforts towards the integration of decision support systems with knowledge-based techniques. Explores the potential benefits of such integration in the area of business forecasting. Describes the forecasting process and identifies its main functional...