To examine the effects of cultivation and grazing on evapotranspiration (ET), continuous measurements of ET were conducted over almost two years, from December 2005 to September 2007, using the eddycovariance technique in two paired ecosystems: a steppe and a cropland in Duolun and a fenced and a degraded steppe in Xilinhot, Inner Mongolia, China. The ET of the four ecosystems approached or exc...

In this study, a stochastic model is developed to analyze performance measures of a manufacturing cell, which is allowed to operate under degraded mode. The model is used to determine reliability and productivity of the cell, as well as the utilization of its components, under various operational conditions, including equipment failures and fault-tolerant states. The model and the results can b...

Abstract: The present investigation deals with the multi component machine repair problem by including the concepts of reneging and interdependent controlled rates. We consider a machining system consisting of M operating units, S1 and S2 warm spares of two kinds and a repair facility having R permanent repairmen and r additional removable repairmen. When all the spares are used and the operati...

Conventional dependability measures, such as reliability or availability, assume that the equipment characterized by the measure is either operational or has failed. This dichotomy does not hold for decentralized or distributed systems because these can operate in modes in which partial or degraded service is furnished. Whether a specific degraded mode should be counted as "operational" or "fai...

As the cost of executing and maintaining a large test suite is always expensive, many heuristic techniques have been brought out for test suite reduction in spite of no guarantee of minimum size. The integer linear programming (ILP) approach can generate minimum test suites but it may cost exponential time. This paper proposes a degraded ILP (DILP) approach to bridge the gap between the ILP met...

We address the problem of how to integrate fault-tolerant external and internal clock synchronization. In this paper we propose a new external/internal clock synchronization algorithm which provides both external and internal clock synchronization for as long as a majority of the reference time servers (servers with access to reference time) stay correct. When half or more of the reference time...

Shearer, Jeffry D., Cynthia F. Coulter, William C. Engeland, Richard A. Roth, and Michael D. Caldwell. Insulin is degraded extracellularly in wounds by insulindegrading enzyme (EC 3.4.24.56). Am. J. Physiol. 273 (Endocrinol. Metab. 36): E657–E664, 1997.—The exact mechanism by which insulin reverses impaired wound healing is unknown. Previous investigators have shown that insulin is degraded in ...