We analyze the effort and pricing decisions in a two facility supply chain in which one of the parties can exert costly effort to increase demand. We consider an outsourcing model in which the supplier makes the effort decision and an in-house production model in which the manufacturer decides on the effort level and we compare these two models with each other. We analyze and compare several co...

Convergence rate results are derived for a stochastic optimization problem where a performance measure is minimized with respect to a vector parameter θ. Assuming that a gradient estimator is available and that both the bias and the variance of the estimator are (known) functions of the budget devoted to its computation, the gradient estimator is employed in conjunction with a stochastic approx...

The global search stage of crystal structure prediction (CSP) methods requires a fine balance between accuracy and computational cost, particularly for the study of large flexible molecules. A major improvement in the accuracy and cost of the intramolecular energy function used in the CrystalPredictor II [Habgood et al. (2015). J. Chem. Theory Comput. 11, 1957-1969] program is presented, where ...

Providing Best-Effort Services in Dataspace Systems

eGovernment initiatives all over the world endeavor to integrate Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to transform delivery of government services to their stakeholders by improving quality of services, accountability and efficiency. In this study we explore adoption of ICT to enhance government-to-employee interactions in a government organization in a developing country. We examin...

This paper deals with the impact of traffic handling mechanisms on capacity for different network architectures. Three traffic handling models are considered: per-flow, class-based and best-effort (BE). These models can be used to meet service guarantees, the major differences being in their complexity of implementations and in the quantity of network resources that must be provided. In this st...

Cellular networks, e.g. UMTS, provide voice and data services to mobile users. In hot spots where users need high speed data services operators can deploy low-cost high-speed WLANs, e.g. 802.11, to cover hot-spots. This paper proposes a possible architecture of integrating UMTS and 802.11 WLAN. The architecture allows a mobile node to maintain data (PS) connection through WLAN and voice (CS) co...

In the area of software engineering a critical task is to accurately estimate the overall project costs for the completion of a new software project and efficiently allocate the resources throughout the project schedule. The numerous software cost estimation approaches proposed are closely related to cost modeling and recognize the increasing need for successful project management, planning and...

Spatial structures determine the ways we perceive our environment and the ways we act in it in important ways. Spatial structures also determine the ways we think about our environment and how we solve spatial problems abstractly. When we use graphics to visualize certain aspects of spatial and non-spatial entities, we exploit the power of spatial structures to better understand important relat...

In the context of multi-domain and multimodal online asynchronous discussion analysis, we propose an innovative strategy for manual annotation of dialog act (DA) segments. The process aims at supporting the analysis of messages in terms of DA. Our objective is to train a sequence labelling system to detect the segment boundaries. The originality of the proposed approach is to avoid manually ann...