supplier selection is one of the most important activities of purchasing departments. this importance is increased even more by new strategies in a supply chain, because of the key role suppliers perform in terms of quality, costs and services which affect the outcome in the buyer’s company. supplier selection is a multiple criteria decision making problem in which the objectives are not equall...

In many real-life situations, there are “package deals”, when customers who buy two or more different items get a special discount. For example, when planning a trip, a deal including airfare and hotel costs less than the airfare and hotel on their own; there are often also special deals when we combine airfare with car rental, and deals that cover all three items plus tickets to local tourist ...

Bottom LinE Total disc replacement compared with conventional fusion surgery for degenerative disc disease appeared to result in a small but clinically irrelevant improvement with respect to pain relief, disability, and quality of life in a selected population, in the short term (2 years, with only one study extended to 5 years). As harm and complications may occur after years, the spine surger...

An agent augmented community is a new framework that uses agent technologies for the augmentation of our community activities by integrating cyberspace, the real world, and personal contexts. We have been developing a mobile agent system that can recognize real world situations, move to remote computers, and process information through communication among agents. The detection of real world sit...

In this paper, we give a systematic review of the theory Gibbs measures Potts model on Cayley trees (developed since 2013) and discuss many applications to real world situations: mainly biology, physics, some examples alloy behavior, cell sorting, financial engineering, flocking birds, flowing foams, image segmentation, medicine, sociology, etc.