The allocation of inventory ownership affects the inventory availability in a supply chain, which in turn determines the supply chain performance. In this paper, we consider a supplier-retailer supply chain in which the supplier starts production well in advance of the selling season, and the retailer is offered two ordering opportunities at different points in time. An early order is allowed b...

Dual weight restrictions are commonly suggested as a remedy to the problem of low discriminatory power and absurd marginal prices in conventional Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) models. However, weight restriction models also suffer from potential problems of infeasibility, lack of exogenous determination and ambiguous interpretations. The Symmetric Weight Assignment Technique (SWAT) addresses ...

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) models have been used in formulating the Malmquist index to measure productivity change over time periods. In this article, we question the validity of this index in the presence of input/output slacks that appear in DEA models used. We demonstrate with an application to banking that Malmquist index loses its meaning whenever slacks are present. As a corrective m...

A parametric analysis is an analysis whose input and output are parametrized with a number of parameters which can be instantiated to abstract properties after analysis is completed. This paper proposes to use Cousot and Cousot’s Cardinal power domain to capture dependencies of analysis output on its input and obtain a parametric analysis by parametrizing a base analysis. We illustrate the meth...

We develop comparative results for ratio-based efficiency analysis (REA), based on the decision making units’ (DMUs’) relative efficiencies over sets of feasible weights that characterize preferences for input and output variables. Specifically, we determine (i) ranking intervals which indicate the best and worst efficiency rankings that a DMU can attain relative to other DMUs, (ii) dominance r...

Managing music audio databases for practicing musicians presents new and interesting challenges. We describe a systematic investigation to provide useful capabilities to musicians both in rehearsal and when practicing alone. Our goal is to allow musicians to automatically record, organize, and retrieve rehearsal (and other) audio to facilitate review and practice (for example, playing along wit...

An experience based iterative learning controller is proposed for a general class of robotic systems. Experience of the iterative learning controller is stored in the memory in terms of input output data and later used for the prediction of the initial control input for a new desired trajectory. It is proved in this paper that using this approach we can reduce the number of iterations to achiev...

The infeasibility problem in traditional super efficiency models has been well established. A generalization of traditional inputor output-oriented super efficiency models, the directional distance function also suffers from infeasibility and related problems. The hyperbolic-oriented efficiency measure provides an alternative to the input-oriented, output-oriented, and directional efficiency me...

Abstract Electricity generation currently is the main industrial source of air emissions in the United States. Both researchers and practitioners are interested in conducting studies to evaluate the ecological performance of this industry, in order to propose solutions to curb emissions of air pollutants and to improve the efficiency of converting fossil resources into electric energy. In this ...

BACKGROUND Analysis of clinical studies often necessitates multiple graphical representations of the results. Many professional software packages are available for this purpose. Most packages are either only commercially available or hard to use especially if one aims to generate or customize a huge number of similar graphical outputs. We developed a new, freely available software tool called K...