The efficient and economic allocation of resources is one main goal in the field of production planning and control. Nowadays, a new variable gains in importance throughout the planning process: Energy. Energy-efficiency has already been widely discussed in literature, but with a strong focus on reducing the overall amount of energy used in production. This paper provides a brief systematic app...

Analyzing Cost Efficient Production Behavior Under Economies of Scope: A Nonparametric Methodology In designing a production model for firms that generate multiple outputs, we take as a starting point that such multi-output production refers to economies of scope, which in turn originate from joint input use and input externalities. We provide a nonparametric characterization of cost efficient ...

Disasters are large intractable problems that test the ability of communities and nations to effectively protect their populations and infrastructure, to reduce both human and property loss, and to rapidly recover. The seeming randomness of impacts and problems and uniqueness of incidents demand dynamic, real-time, effective and cost efficient solutions, thus making the topic very suitable for ...

Considering heuristic search for satisficing and cost-optimal planning, we introduce the notion of global safeness of a heuristic, a property weaker than the standard safeness, which we claim is better for heuristic search. We describe one concrete approach for creating globally safe and optimality preserving heuristics by exploiting information in the history of the search via a new form of in...

We compare the welfare effects of different regulation schemes of electricity distribution utilities. The compared regulation schemes are fixed price regulation, cost of service regulation, menu of cost-contingent contracts and simple menus of contracts. In our calculations we utilize the information of firm specific potential to improve cost efficiency. The firm specific cost information of Fi...

New information and computing technologies offer cost efficient and effective learning opportunities for health care professionals. The Assisted Electronic Communication project is prototyping, administering and evaluating a digital discourse system for health care professionals within an acute Hospital. Health care staff participating in the study are able to access and contribute to threaded,...

This study examines the relation between life events and the adoption of wills among older adults using the 1996 and 2000 surveys of the Heath and Retirement Study. The results suggest that the adoption of wills and trusts is associated with four life events (i.e., becoming a widow, being diagnosed with cancer, retiring, and having a positive change in assets). Older adults experiencing these e...

Courseware abstraction is an approach to CAL whereby the lesson author creates a general parametetized CAL lesson that is then applied to many concrete examples. This approach has the following advantages over alternative approaches to lesson development: it is cost efficient; it facilitates lesson verification; it encourages the provision of as many examples as are desirable; it simplifies the...

Suppose that infinitesimal firms have identical variable costs but there is heterogeneity in their fixed costs. Regardless of the ordering of entry and exit, fixed costs will be minimized for a given industry size. Journal of Economic Literature Classifications: L11 & L13

The present context of the electric industry, characterized by competitive markets, privatization, and regulatory of technical requirements forces the power utilities to optimize their asset management practices and develop the requisite decision plans techno-economically. Practically approaching, this paper devises a new support tool based on a multiattribute decision making (MADM) framework i...