The paper presents a multi-factor decision-making approach for prioritizing failure modes as an alternative to traditional approach of failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA). The approach is based on the ‘technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution’ (TOPSIS). The priority ranking is formulated on the basis of six parameters (failure occurrence, non-detection, maintainability...

The application of principles of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics to economic systems is considered in a broad historical perspective, extending from prehistoric times to the present day. The hypothesis of maximum entropy production (MEP), which has been used to model complex physical systems such as fluid turbulence and the climate of the Earth and other planets, may be applied to huma...

The Rényi entropy is a generalization of Shannon entropy to a one-parameter family of entropies. Tsallis entropy too is a generalization of Shannon entropy. The measure for Tsallis entropy is non-logarithmic. After the introduction of Shannon entropy , the conditional Shannon entropy was derived and its properties became known. Also, for Tsallis entropy, the conditional entropy was introduced a...

Although the lot size problem (i.e., the economic order quantity model) has been widely accepted and used by researchers and practitioners, it has also been criticized by others on the grounds that not accounting for some of the hidden costs in inventory systems often lead to poor results. This paper postulates that estimating these hidden costs may be attained by applying the first and second ...

Consider a financial market in which an agent trades with utility-induced restrictions on wealth. For a utility function which satisfies the condition of reasonable asymptotic elasticity at −∞ we prove that the utility-based super-replication price of an unbounded (but sufficiently integrable) contingent claim is equal to the supremum of its discounted expectations under pricing measures with f...

The thermodynamic formulation of economics is based on the laws of calculus. Differential forms in two dimensions are generally not exact forms (δQ), the integral from (A) to (B) is not always the same as the integral from (B) to (A). It is possible to invest little in one way and gain a lot on the way back, and to do this periodically. This is the mechanism of energy production in heat pumps, ...

Neoclassical economics has only recently considered the problem of sustainability—how to provide for the well-being of future generations given ecological constraints. In general, the neoclassical economist perceives physical and ecological constraints on economy-environment interactions as inconveniences that will inevitably be overcome by substitution—the discovery of new economic resources o...

In this paper, we introduce a new entropy-like invariant, named Hausdorff metric entropy, for finitely generated semigroups acting on compact metric spaces from a set-valued view and study its properties. We establish the relation between Hausdorff metric entropy and topological entropy of a semigroup defined by Bis. Some examples with positive or zero Hausdorff metric entropy are given. Moreov...