BACKGROUND Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator (ICD) therapy has been proven to be beneficial and efficacious for the treatment of serious ventricular tachyarrhythmias in primary prevention patients. However, primary prevention patients appear to have a lower incidence of ventricular arrhythmias in comparison to secondary prevention patients and consequently likely experience a higher propor...

With the addition of IBM System ze application assist processors (zAAPs) and integrated information processors (zIIPs) to the portfolio of special-purpose IBM System z processors, the reinvention of the IBM mainframe continues. Jointly, zAAPs and zIIPs provide significant IBM System z9e integrated and cost-effective processing cycles for today’s strategic Javae and DB2t for z/OSt programming pl...

We study a cement transportation problem with asset-management (equipment selection) for strategic planning scenarios involving multiple forms of transportation and network expansion. A deterministic mixed integer programming approach is difficult due to the underlying capacitated multi-commodity network flow model and the need to consider a time-space network to ensure operational feasibility....

PρLog is an experimental extension of logic programming with strategic conditional transformation rules, combining Prolog with ρLog calculus. The rules perform nondeterministic transformations on hedges. Queries may have several results that can be explored on backtracking. Strategies provide a control on rule applications in a declarative way. With strategy combinators, the user can construct ...

Learning to program is difficult for many first year undergraduate students. Instructional strategies of traditional programming courses tend to focus on syntactic issues and assigning practice exercises using the presentation-examples-practice formula and by showing the verbal and visual explanation of a teacher during the “step by step” process of writing a computer program. Cognitive literat...

Amixed integer stochastic programming model is established to support strategic planning of bioenergy supply chain systems and optimal feedstock resource allocation in an uncertain decision environment. The two-stage stochastic programming model, together with a Lagrange relaxation based decomposition solution algorithm, was implemented in a realworld case study in California to explore the pot...

In this paper we consider the location of a tree-shaped facility S on a tree network, using the ordered median function of the weighted distances to represent the total transportation cost objective. This function unifies and generalizes the most common criteria used in location modeling, e.g., median and center. If there are n demand points at the nodes of the tree T = (V ,E), this function is...

Purpose – The study sets out to explore the use of an iterative approach for designing distribution chain in an agile virtual environment; in an agile virtual environment, quick adaptation to changing market situation and automation of supply chain management processes are essential. Design/methodology/approach – The iterative approach consists of two parts: the strategic model and the tactical...

This paper presents a method to support the identification of the cause-effect relationships of strategic objectives of a strategy map of a balanced scorecard. A strategy map contains the strategic objectives of an organization, grouped into four perspectives (a) finances, (b) clients, (c) internal processes and (d) growth and learning, all of them linked through cause-effect relationships. The...

Uncertain demand is one of the most important uncertainties in supply chain management. Different from the traditional methods, such as dynamic inventory control, estimation of demand, we propose to apply postponement strategy to treat uncertain demand in the process of distribution in supply chain. Postponement has been appreciated in recent decades, mainly in manufacturing period of realizing...