We study a hybrid strategy that uses both process flexibility and inventory to mitigate risks of plant disruption. In this setting, a firm allocates inventory before disruption while facing demand uncertainties; demand is realized after disruption, and the firm schedules its production using process flexibility to minimize lost sales. This interplay between process flexibility and inventory is ...

Very large data centers are very expensive (servers, power/cooling, networking, physical plant.) Newer, geo-diverse, distributed or containerized designs offer a more economical alternative. We argue that a significant portion of cloud services are embarrassingly distributed – meaning there are high performance realizations that do not require massive internal communication among large server p...

Abstrsrct-A direct adaptive control scheme is proposed, termed an Adaptive-Q scheme, which has the property that it can, if considered desirable, limit its searches to the space of all stabilizing linear proper controllers for a nominal linear plant. The adaptive controller feeds back disturbance estimates via a filter with operator Q. It augments any fixed linear stabilizing controller, viewed...

The Fusion Test Facility (FTF) is a high repetition rate ignition facility that would bridge the gap between single shot facilities (such as NIF and LMJ) and a fully functioning laser fusion power plant. It would allow development of science and technologies so that follow-on power plants could have predictable performance. The FTF would need to have enough fusion power, about 100 MW, to rigoro...

A background briefing on the use of evolutionary computation to optimise industrial designs Executive Summary Nature has a process that optimises the design of living organisms. This process is called evolution. Evolution is based on a set of key principles including the use of a genetic code and Darwinian natural selection. Todayy s scientists and engineers can use the same principles to solve...