In this paper, we develop a procedure for selecting a supplier. Suppliers are characterized by their lead time, price and quality (random yield). Each purchased item is acceptable with a given probability and independent of the others. We assume the demands are deterministic with no set-up cost and backordering is allowed. For each supplier, an optimal ordering policy is developed. We prove the...

This paper presents an analytic procedure for the value added to different production levels with different policy options. The approach is stochastic and thus provides a framework for informed decision-making on productivity growth under uncertainty conditions. The model was applied to data collected from a firm and re-sults recommend that the firm should redevelop if in diversification and sy...

In security games, the solution concept commonly used is that of a Stackelberg equilibrium where the defender gets to commit to a mixed strategy. The motivation for this is that the attacker can repeatedly observe the defender’s actions and learn her distribution over actions, before acting himself. If the actions were not observable, Nash (or perhaps correlated) equilibrium would arguably be a...

Research on heuristic functions is all about estimating the length (or cost) of solution paths. But what if there is no such path? Many known heuristics have the ability to detect (some) unsolvable states, but that ability has always been treated as a by-product. No attempt has been made to design heuristics specifically for that purpose, where there is no need to preserve distances. As a case ...

A natural way to benefit from distribution is via asynchronous invocations to methods or services. Upon invocation, a request is enqueued at the destination side and the caller can continue its execution. But a question remains: “what if one wants to manipulate the result of an asynchronous invocation?” First-class futures provide a transparent and easy-to-program answer: a future acts as the p...

In the Virtual Computing Laboratory (VCL) users request a computing resource (e.g., a blade) and customized software (an “image”). The software is loaded onto the blade from an image server. If loading is performed at the time of the request, the user experiences a delay before s/he can access the blade. This delay may be several minutes long, depending on the type of image requested. A “preloa...

Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. For more information on Open Research Online's data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policies page. The team extends thanks to all of the children and teachers participating in the Possibility Thinking study. In addition, we wish to acknowledge the contri...

Abstract In this paper, Markov chain and dynamic programming were used to represent a suitable pattern for tax relief and tax evasion decrease based on tax earnings in Iran from 2005 to 2009. Results, by applying this model, showed that tax evasion were 6714 billion Rials**. With 4% relief to tax payers and by calculating present value of the received tax, it was reduced to 3108 billion Rials. ...