XNiSn (X = Ti, Zr and Hf) half-Heusler alloys have promising thermoelectric properties and are attracting enormous interest for use in waste heat recovery. In particular, multiphase behaviour has been linked to reduced lattice thermal conductivities, which enables improved energy conversion efficiencies. This manuscript describes the impact of spark plasma sintering (SPS) on the phase distribut...

A stable test for checking if a matrix is a nonsingular M -matrix is presented. Its computational cost is, in the worst case, O(n2) elementary operations higher than the computational cost of Gaussian elimination. The test can be applied to check if a nonnegative matrix has spectral radius less than 1.

Without any doubt, Design For Manufacturability has been the hottest buzzword for the last couple of years. This is quite justifiable by the enormous challenges in nanometer technology nodes and ever increasing design-process interactions. As a result, virtually all EDA companies have focused on providing the “DFM Solutions”. Since the concept of DFM covers an extremely broad spectrum of tasks ...

Although at the moment electronic payment via the Internet has no major impact on e-commerce sites, it will be a prerequisite for new business models, such as pay-per-view, and necessary for the success and cost efficiency of future e-commerce applications. Many payment protocols and frameworks for various business domains exist. However, they are incompatible which makes it hard for service de...

Reliable Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) aid drivers in a variety of traffic and environment/weather conditions. Growing traffic volumes require sensors and systems that handle difficult urban and non-urban scenarios. For such systems, the EU FP7 project ADOSE is developing and evaluating new cost-efficient sensor technology that will provide vehicles with a ‘virtual safety belt’ by a...

Motivated by the success of the translation-based approach for conformant planning, introduced by Palacios and Geffner, we present two variants of a new compilation scheme from conformant probabilistic planning problems (CPP) to variants of classical planning. In CPP, we are given a set of actions – which we assume to be deterministic in this paper, a distribution over initial states, a goal co...