........ ............................................................................................................... xiii Chapter 1: Introduction ............................................................................................. 1 1.1: Warm Mix Asphalt Technology ......................................................................... 2 1.2: Benefits of Warm Mix Asphalt ...........

Micro energy grids have many merits and promising applications under the smart grid vision. There are demanding procedures for their optimal planning and performance enhancement. One of the key features of a micro energy grid is its ability to separate and isolate itself from the main electrical network to continue feeding its own islanded portion. In this paper, an optimal sizing and operation...

The aim of this paper is to introduce a model for temporary staffing when temporary employment is managed by firm contracts and to propose a simulated annealing-based method to solve the model. Temporary employment is a policy frequently used to adjust the working hour capacity to fluctuating demand. Temporary workforce planning models have been unnecessarily simplified to account for only peri...

Abstract Expansion planning models are tools frequently employed to analyze the transition a carbon-neutral power system. Such provide estimates for an optimal technology mix and operating decisions, but they also often used obtain prices subsequently calculate profits. This paper analyzes impact of modeling assumptions on convexity system outcomes and, in particular, investment cost recovery. ...

After undergoing many changes, the financing of health care in countries of the former Soviet Union is now showing signs of maturing. Soon after the political transition in these countries, the development of insurance systems and fee-for-service payment systems dominated the discussions on health reform. At present there is increasing emphasis on case mix adjusted payments in larger hospitals ...

Analogical planning provides a means of solving problems where other machine learning meth­ ods fail, because it does not require numer­ ous previous examples or a rich domain the­ ory. Given a problem in an unfamiliar domain (the target case), an analogical planning sys­ tem locates a successful plan in a similar do­ main (the bast case), and uses the similarities to generate the target plan. ...

Present paper is an application study of intuitionistic fuzzy optimization technique in agricultural production planning problem particularly a case of smallholder farmer in north Bihar, India. Generally, the crop planning problem is formulated as linear programming problems. but in realistic situation there are many uncertain factors in agricultural production planning problems and hence futur...

Navigational p th planning isa classical problem in robotics. Traditional approaches u e goal-directed heuristic search of problem spaces defined by spatial models of the navigation world. Case-based reasoning offers an alternative approach. In the Router project, we have combined the case-based method with the model-based method. Since Router is a multistrategy system, it provides anexperiment...

The design of manufacturing planning and control systems is a strategic decision for manufacturing firms. In this paper we analyze the interrelationships among the choices of planning and control approaches at different hierarchical levels, including sales and operations planning (chase; level), master scheduling (make-to-order; assemble-to-order; make-to-stock), material planning (time-phased;...