Dendrimers are polybranched and polyfunctionalized tree-like polymers. Unlike linear polymers, they have perfectly defined structure and molecular weight, due to their iterative step-by-step synthesis. Their multivalent structure and supramolecular properties have made them attractive nanotools for applications, particularly in biology and medicine. Among the different biological and medical pr...

Distributed optimization is a fundamental mathematical theory for parallel and distributed systems. Several applications are normally designed based on such a theory, where parties cooperatively exchange messages with little or no central coordination to achieve some goals. In many situations, the transactions among the parties must be private, such as among members of social networks, hospital...

Abstract—In most classical scheduling models, a job is assumed to deliver to a customer at the instant of a job processing completion. In numerous practical situations, however, multiple delivery dates exist, where the time interval between any two consecutive delivery dates is constant. This type of fixed delivery strategy results in substantial cost savings for transportation and handling. Th...

In many manufacturing systems, jobs that are completed early are held as finished-goods inventory until their due-dates, and hence we incur earliness costs. Similarly, jobs that are completed after their due-dates incur penalty. The objective in such situations would, therefore, be to meet the due-dates of the respective jobs as closely as possible, and consequently minimize the sum of earlines...

We use the Akers-Friedman geometric approach to solve the two jobs job-shop problem when there is an earliness cost on the first operation and a tardiness cost on the last operation of each job. We then generalize the problem by imposing earliness and tardiness costs on each operation and finally, we solve it using a dynamic programming algorithm. KeywordsEarliness-tardiness scheduling, Polyn...