The NBA lockout of 1998-1999 resulted in the cancellation of a significant number of games. According to the claims made by proponents of sports-driven economic growth, cities with NBA franchises should experience significant negative economic losses from this work stoppage because of the lost spending in and around basketball arenas during this event. Although it will be several years before a...

An original maintenance decision making tool based on Bruss theorem has previously been investigated by the authors to select the optimal last production stoppage convenient to operate a maintenance action on a component according to its conditions of degradation. This stoppage is optimal with respect to the combination of antagonistic criteria such as maintainability and reliability. The appro...

In this paper we consider online scheduling problems for linear topology under various objective functions: minimizing the maximum completion time, minimizing the largest delay, and minimizing the sum of completion times. We show that for the two-directional versions of each problem, no online algorithm can deterministically achieve the optimal solution for any of the considered objective funct...