The Swedish Transport Administration is introducing a new regime, called maintenance windows, for allocating train free slots reserved for maintenance tasks on the railway infrastructure. In this paper, a model for the assessment and the dimensioning of such maintenance windows is presented, which considers marginal effects on both the maintenance cost and the expected train traffic demand. The...

Voice over IP (VoIP) technology is being extensively and rapidly deployed. The flexibility and cost efficiency are the key factors luring enterprises to transition to VoIP. Some security problems may surface with the widespread deployment of VoIP. This article presents an overview of VoIP systems and its security issues. First, we briefly describe basic VoIP architecture and its fundamental dif...

In multi-division organizations, goal congruence between different divisions and top management is critical to the success of management. In this paper, drawing upon a nonparametric framework to model production technology, we derive a necessary and sufficient condition for a firm with multiple divisions to be goal-congruent, and then extend it to a goal congruence testing measure, which coinci...

We introduce average cost optimal adaptive policies in a class of discrete-time Markov control processes with Borel state and action spaces, allowing unbounded costs. The processes evolve according to the system equations xt+1 = F (xt, at, ξt), t = 1, 2, . . . , with i.i.d. R -valued random vectors ξt, which are observable but whose density ̺ is unknown.

During recent decades large changes in vegetation biomass have been observed in arctic and alpine areas. While these temporal trends have been clearly linked to changing climatic conditions, the drivers of local spatial variation in biomass are still relatively poorly understood. Thus, we examine the effects of abiotic conditions (as measured by ten variables representing topography, soil prope...

This paper examines changes in the industry-adjusted financial performance of 48 sample firms that laid off five percent or more employees between 1985 and 1990. Our findings indicate that the firms show significant improvements in operating cash flows and cost efficiency despite poor sales performance following layoffs. There is also evidence that the firms’ asset size increases after the layo...

High price of chippers and small scale of forestry management area seemed to create a standstill situation of chip utilization system in Japan. By combining the benefits of small scale forestry and low price chippers, a simple and low-cost chip supply model could be established, creating new employments opportunities. The object of this study is to propose the benefits of a chip supply system i...

The nuclear phase-out and the increased share of renewable distributed generation implicate new challenges for transforming the electric power system into an environmentally sustainable, reliable and cost-efficient system. An important component in transforming the electric power system is the reliable substitution of large controllable power plants by small generation units (photovoltaic syste...

To understand the transformation of banking in the post-communist transition, this paper examines the cost efficiency of 289 banks in 15 east European countries. The findings showed that banking systems in which foreign-owned banks have a larger share of total assets record lower costs and that the association between a country’s progress in banking reform and cost efficiency is non-linear. Ear...

This paper describes the process of developing an approach to evaluating the cost-efficiency of Finnish electricity distribution companies for regulation purposes. The process consisted of three main stages 1) describing of the problem and exploring the key factors, 2) finding measurable quantities for the most essential factors, and 3) selecting the final model to be used in the regulation. Th...