In today’s globally-leveled playing field, forces such as consumer activism, demographic change and technological evolution are forcing industry leaders to continuously evaluate their strategies to achieve or retain competitive advantage. These forces are even stronger in the manufacturing industry, and they are exacerbated by the unintended consequences of accelerating globalization. For insta...

Recent neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that human brain networks have economic small-world topology and modular organization, enabling efficient information transfer among brain regions. However, it remains largely unknown how the small-world topology and modular organization of human brain networks emerge and develop. Using longitudinal MRI data of 28 healthy pediatric subjects, collect...

The United States Postal Service (USPS) delivers more than 200 billion items per year. Transporting these items in a timely and cost-efficient way is a key issue if USPS is to meet its service and financial goals. The Highway Corridor Analytic Program (HCAP) is a tool that aids transportation analysts in identifying cost saving opportunities in the USPS surface transportation network. Use of th...

When adapting services in a SOA environment, not only the validity of the adapter may be of importance, but also non-functional properties like the costs of the adapter. We introduce an approach for finding cost-efficient adapters based on the operating guideline, which characterizes all valid adapters for the given services.

Merge-and-shrink (M&S) is a framework to generate abstraction heuristics for cost-optimal planning. A recent approach computes simulation relations on a set of M&S abstractions in order to identify states that are better than others. This relation is then used for pruning states in the search when a “better” state is already known. We propose the usage of simulation relations inside the M&S fra...

Health care delivery in the developed world is in constant transformation. Structures and values are changing. New and more effective tools and technology are being used to identify and overcome diseases. Yet even if these new technologies are increasingly available to the public, not all of them have market potential. Cost efficiency is at the core of our health care system. Cost consideration...

This study aims to inspect and evaluate the integration of database queries and their use in e-commerce product searches. It has been observed that e-commerce is one of the most prominent trends, which have been emerged in the business world, for the past decade. E-commerce has gained tremendous popularity, as it offers higher flexibility, cost efficiency, effectiveness, and convenience, to bot...

For variable annuities, the cost of hedging must be taken into consideration when firms use the dynamic hedging strategy. In this paper, we study hedging strategies by assuming the hedge position follows a random walk with boundary conditions. We find that re-balancing delta to the initial position is always more cost-efficient than re-balancing it to the edge for a fixed transaction cost. Howe...

Cloud computing is very common today due to its various characteristics and benefits. It is cost efficient and thus very popular, but has great impact on environment such as increase in pollution, climatic changes and shortage of energy resources. Green cloud computing is important issue at present time. In this paper, the author have made critical observations of energy efficiency in all field...

Understanding the phenomenon of propagation of disruptions regarding security is a critical factor for designing of robust export supply chains. From a system dynamics approach, this research analyses the effects of the materialization and simultaneous propagation of disruptions of security at various points in export supply chains (ESC). The model allows understanding why the production sites ...