Acknowledging that not all supplier relationships can nor should be close partnerships, this article explores the development of strategic supplier portfolios. The strategic portfolio perspective considers risks, trade-offs, and interdependencies between the firm’s array of supplier relationships. Based on over 50 interviews with managers and archival data from 12 multinational companies, a str...

An immersive multiscreen display (a UT-Cave) may be assembled from common home/office equipment which can be borrowed in most research settings. The simplest design requires two LCD projectors, three personal computers, the corner of a room, a network hub and cables. The required software is an inexpensive but graphically powerful computer game, Unreal Tournament (UT), and a freeware patch call...

M-commerce entails transactions conducted via mobile telecommunications networks using communication, information, and payment devices such as mobile phones or palmtop units. Geographic positioning and location capabilities are also being added to such networks and devices. Rather than using general-purpose browsers, customers accessing mobile commerce applications often rely on specific mobile...

We show how to design an optical device that can perform any linear function or coupling between inputs and outputs. This design method is progressive, requiring no global optimization. We also show how the device can configure itself progressively, avoiding design calculations and allowing the device to stabilize itself against drifts in component properties and to continually adjust itself to...

In this paper, we develop the optimal minimum-energy scheduler for the dynamic online joint allocation of the task sizes, computing rates, communication rates and communication powers in virtualized Networked Data Centers (NetDCs) that operates under hard per-job delay-constraints. The referred NetDC’s infrastructure is composed by multiple frequency-scalable Virtual Machines (VMs), that are in...

This paper describes the configuration of distributed multimedia applications using the CINEMA system. Components, interconnected by links via ports are used to handle multimedia data. Configuration management controls these interconnections, establishes components in threads on different systems and allows an interactive control of data handling functions. We present an object-oriented interfa...

Built-in self-test test registers must segment a circuit such that there exists a feasible test schedule. If a register transfer description is used for selecting the positions of test registers, the space for optimizations is small. In this paper, 1-bit test cells are inserted at gate level, and an initial test schedule is constructed. Based on the information of this schedule, test cells that...

With the advances in computational technologies over the last decade, large organizations have been investing in Information Technology to automate their internal processes to cut costs and efficiently support their business projects. However, this comes to a price. Business requirements always change. Likewise, IT systems constantly evolves as developers make new versions of them, which requir...