The Bertrand paradox holds that price competition among at least two firms eliminates all profits in equilibrium, when firms have identical constant marginal costs. This assumes that the number of competitors is common knowledge among firms. If firms are uncertain about the number of their competitors, there is no pure strategy equilibrium. But in mixed strategies an equilibrium exists. In this...

Supply chain network design (SCND) problem has recently been gaining attention because an integrated management of the supply chain (SC) can reduce the unexpected/undesirable events and can affect definitely the efficiency of all the chain. A critical component of the planning activities of a manufacturing firm is the efficient design of its SC. Hence, SCND affords a sensitive platform for effi...

Nowadays, the design of a strategic supply chain network under the incidence of disruption is regarded as one of the important priorities of governments. Supplying sustainable petrochemical products is considered as a strategic goal by managers who require reliable infrastructure design. Crisis conditions such as natural disasters and sanctions have a destructive effect on the raw materials and...

Agent-oriented conceptual modeling(AoCM) approaches in Requirements Engineering (RE) have received considerable attention recently. Semi-formal modeling frameworks such as i* assist analysts in requirements elicitation and reasoning of early-phase RE. AgentSpeak(L) is a widely accepted agent programming language. The Strategic Rationale (SR) model of the i* framework naturally lends itself to A...

We establish a systematic approach that incorporates neural networks in conjunction with portfolio matrices to assist managers in evaluating and forming strategic plans. Based on the principle of dispersing risks, we also provide a linear integer programming model, which helps in allocating the annual budget optimally among proposed strategies. The approach has been successfully implemented for...

An example of a sender-receiver game, due to Farrell, is studied to illustrate the role of incentive constraints in the design of optimal communication systems between rational individuals whose interests are not the same. Some noise in the communication system is essential for substantive communication. Informational and strategic incentive constraints are linear, so finding an optimal incenti...

Models of programming and debugging suggest many causes of errors, and many classifications of error types exist. Yet, there has been no attempt to link causes of errors to these classifications, nor is there a common vocabulary for reasoning about such causal links. This makes it difficult to compare the abilities of programming styles, languages, and environments to prevent errors. To address...

This paper proposes a new location problem of competitive facilities, e.g. shops and stores, with uncertainty and vagueness including demands for the facilities in a plain. By representing the demands for facilities as fuzzy random variables, the location problem can be formulated as a fuzzy random programming problem. For solving the fuzzy random programming problem, first the α-level sets for...

Mobile communication is nowadays taken for granted. Having started primarily as a service for speech communication, data service and mobile Internet access are now driving the evolution of network infrastructure. Operators are facing the challenge to match the demand by continuously expanding and upgrading the network infrastructure. However, the evolution of the customer’s demand is uncertain....

Attribute grammars are a powerful specification formalism for treebased computation, particularly for software language processing. Various extensions have been proposed to abstract over common patterns in attribute grammar specifications. These include various forms of copy rules to support non-local dependencies, collection attributes, and expressing dependencies that are evaluated to a fixed...