The time between changes in business processes and their IT implementation has an impact on a company’s competitiveness. In addition, the costs of such changes should be minimized. The article presents a method for implementing changes to business processes based on a process platform. By means of simulation it is shown that this method offers several advantages compared to traditional componen...

BACKGROUND Fluoridation of public water supplies remains the key potential strategy for prevention of dental caries. The water supplies of many remote Indigenous communities do not contain adequate levels of natural fluoride. The small and dispersed nature of communities presents challenges for the provision of fluoridation infrastructure and until recently smaller settlements were considered u...

This paper considers control structure selection for a biological wastewater treatment process, with emphasis on identifying controlled variables that contribute to minimize economic costs. This is achieved according to the selfoptimizing procedure proposed by Skogestad (2000). The aim is to demonstrate how, with simple considerations on the control structure design, the efficiency of a wastewa...

This paper develops a model for calculating comparable combined internal and external costs of intermodal and road freight transport networks. Internal costs consist of the operational-private costs borne by the transport and intermodal terminal operators, and the time costs of goods tied in transit. The external costs include the costs of the impacts of both networks on society and the environ...

We propose a structural operational semantics for mobile and distributed agents. From it we derive a sto-chastic transition system labelled by actions and their costs. These costs reeect the (net) architecture on which agents run. We then map stochastic transition systems to Markov chains, and performance evaluation is carried out using standard tools. The results given by our approach are show...

The present paper deals less with Grid computing than with other aspects of this conference, namely numerical software. The goal of our work is to use mathematical modeling and computer simulation to avoid building nonproduction prototypes in manufacturing processes. Of particular interest is to eliminate prototypes associated with painting processes used in the automotive industry. Since paint...

Cloud computing is one of the rapidly improving technologies. It provides scalable resources needed for the applications hosted on it. As cloud-based services become more dynamic, resource provisioning becomes more challenging. The QoS constrained resource allocation problem is considered in this paper, in which customers are willing to host their applications on the provider’s cloud with a giv...

This work concerns the way that statistical models are used to make decisions. In particular, we aim to merge the way estimation algorithms are designed with how they are used for a subsequent task. Our methodology considers the operational cost of carrying out a policy, based on a predictive model. The operational cost becomes a regularization term in the learning algorithm’s objective functio...

With an increasing use of distributed energy resources and intelligence in the electricity infrastructure, the possibilities for minimizing costs of household energy consumption increase. Technology is moving toward a situation in which households manage their own energy generation and consumption, possibly in cooperation with each other. As a first step, in this paper a decentralized controlle...