In an increasingly competitive business environment characterized by more globalization, deregulation and technological advances, companies have been looking for ways of differentiating their products and services and also rethinking their business model through leaner operations and reduced costs. In this context, a new practice that has recently gained a lot of attention is the offshore outso...

Through their communications mix, firms make decisions that have implications for the ease with which consumers can search for product information. A common intuition is that firms would like to make information easily available to consumers, but choose not to because facilitating consumer search is costly to them. The main result of this paper counters this intuition – firms may not want to ma...

We consider two non-interacting systems embedded in a heat bath. If they remain dynamically independent, physical inconsistencies are avoided only if the single-system reduced dynamics is completely positive also beyond the weak-coupling limit.

Rolling element bearing failure is one of the foremost causes of breakdown in rotating machinery. It is not uncommon to replace a defected/used bearing with a new one that has shorter remaining useful life than the defected one. Thus, prognostics of bearing plays critical role for increased availability and reduced cost. Effective prognostics highly depend on the quality of the extracted featur...

Solar sailing is a proposed means of space propulsion in which a reflective surface collects momentum from solar photons to accelerate a vehicle. The current trend within the solar sailing community is to increase sail size as solar sailing technologies advance, allowing for larger payloads and higher accelerations. However, with the miniaturization of modern payloads, sail sizes can be dramati...

This paper investigates a class of Lagrangian control systems with n degrees-offreedom (DOF) and n − 1 actuators, assuming that n − 1 virtual holonomic constraints have been enforced via feedback, and a basic regularity condition holds. The reduced dynamics of such systems are described by a second-order unforced differential equation. We present necessary and sufficient conditions under which ...

There are methods to increase fertilizer nitrogen use efficiency through optical sensor-based nitrogen application; however, the sensors are expensive and cost prohibitive to farmers in the developing world. This study evaluated a novel, reduced cost, prototype, and optical sensor to determine if it could be used with the same level of accuracy as a commercial sensor. The stability of the proto...

Global connectivity cannot be guaranteed by terrestrial networks due to the lack of infrastructure in rural areas. Neither can satellite networks assure this due to lack of signal penetration and capacity coverage issues in densely populated areas. To bridge this gap, we propose an Orthogonal Frequency Domain (OFDM) based hybrid architecture where users are provided service by existing mobile n...

In this paper, we propose an effective search procedure that interleaves two steps: subproblem generation and subproblem solution. We mainly focus on the first part. It consists of a variable domain value ranking based on reduced costs. Exploiting the ranking, we generate, in a Limited Discrepancy Search tree, the most promising subproblems first. An interesting result is that reduced costs pro...