The article investigates a generic framework to estimate maintenance costs attributed to the No Fault Found (NFF) phenomenon. Such overhead costs are particularly difficult to quantify due to potentially serviceable equipment being returned for repair. Other factors, such as a reduction in the availability of the system, compromising reliability of high value assets, and logistical factors, can...

In recent years, privacy-preserving toll collection has been proposed as a way to resolve the tension between the desire for sophisticated road pricing schemes and drivers’ interest in maintaining the privacy of their driving patterns. Two recent systems in particular, VPriv (USENIX Security 2009) and PrETP (USENIX Security 2010), use modern cryptographic primitives to solve this problem. In or...

We consider a setting in which a company not only has a fleet of capacitated vehicles and drivers available to make deliveries, but may also use the services of occasional drivers who are willing to make a single delivery using their own vehicle in return for a small compensation if the delivery location is not too far from their own destination. The company seeks to make all the deliveries at ...

this paper deals with a multi-period fixed charge production-distribution problem associated with backorder and inventories. the objective is to determine the size of the shipments from each supplier and backorder and inventories at each period, so that the total cost incurred during the entire period towards production, transportation, backorder and inventories is minimised. a 0-1 mixed intege...

BACKGROUND Psoriasis is a chronic inflammatory disease of the skin that has a major effect on an individual's physical and mental function. The disease is associated with increased healthcare resource use and costs, therefore cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) can be used to assist decision makers with determining which treatments are optimal within a constrained healthcare system budget. OBJE...

A multi-agent system (MAS) for supporting the planning of transhipments of imported finished vehicles via a seaport is presented. The focus is on storage allocation, i.e. the allocation of parking areas for the temporary storage of vehicles, and on deployment scheduling, i.e. the allocation of drivers to the vehicles that have to be moved in the terminal area. These planning tasks, which in pra...