In manufacturing enterprises, maintenance is a significant contributor to the total company’s cost. Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) relies on prognostic models and uses them to support maintenance decisions based on the current and predicted health state of equipment. Although decision support for CBM is not an extensively explored area, there exist methods which have been developed in order ...

The World Bank USA Lead Highway Engineer Henry Godfrey Rupiny Kerali This paper describes the development of a stochastic model for the strategic assessment of road maintenance funding and policy decisions. The algorithms used for simulating pavement deterioration utilise Markov processes, resulting in a transition probability matrix that defines defect progression as opposed to the more famili...

In the last decade managing railway infrastructure in Europe has changed compared to the century preceding it. Due to the restructuring of railways, which has resulted in separate Infrastructure Management and increasing performance demands from governments and Transport Operating Companies, infrastructure performance has become an important issue. Reliability requirements, budget limits, and o...

When the Air Force first established DLR prices, the prices were expected to influence the day-to-day decisions that wing maintenance personnel make about repairing unserviceable DLRs that they are equipped to repair versus purchasing serviceable ones through the working capital fund (hereafter referred to as the “fund”). However, DLR prices also provide powerful financial incentives for custom...

As the share of wind energy increases on the global energy market, the efficient operation of wind farms gains an ever growing significance. Among operational decisions, the planning and scheduling of maintenance operations are crucial for the availability of turbines, as well as for the operational costs. The paper introduces a system that performs the detailed scheduling of maintenance operat...

A data-driven model for scheduling pumps in a wastewater treatment process is proposed. The objective is to minimize the cost of pump operations and maintenance. A neural network algorithm is applied to model performance of the pumps using the data collected at a municipal wastewater treatment plant. The discrete-state Markov process is utilized to develop a model of maintenance decisions. The ...

In this paper, an assistant tool for the maintenance of rails in a metro context for normal steel wheeled trains is proposed. The theory of Dynamic Bayesian Networks offers an interesting frame to solve this specific problem. We present a modular modelling of the current rails’ diagnostic process. It simulates the rail degradation, the behavior of the various actors involved in the defect detec...

This Essay offers the first in-depth examination of the role of colorblind constitutionalism in the history of Brown v. Board of Education. In light of the recent Supreme Court ruling in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, such an examination is needed today more than ever. In this case, Chief Justice John Roberts drew on the history of Brown to support his c...

The landmark 1972 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Jackson v. Indiana prohibited the indefinite commitment of criminal defendants on grounds of incompetence to stand trial if there was no substantial probability of restoration to competency in the foreseeable future. Such defendants are still subject to ordinary civil commitment; however, not all will meet civil commitment criteria, given that th...

In 1837, Dirichlet proved that there are infinitely many primes in any arithmetic progression in which the terms do not all share a common factor. Modern presentations of the proof are explicitly higher-order, in that they involve quantifying over and summing over Dirichlet characters, which are certain types of functions. The notion of a character is only implicit in Dirichlet’s original proof...