In recent years, the U.S. health care system has been plagued by shortages of generic sterile injectable drugs. The shortage problem arose suddenly within a short period of time, and remained persistent afterwards. To gain insights into what may have led to this situation, we develop a model that incorporates key characteristics of the generic drug manufacturing industry, including random suppl...

In today’s business environment, harsher and more frequent natural and man-made disasters make supply chains more vulnerable. Supply chain disruptions now seem to occur more frequently and with more serious consequences. During and after supply chain disruptions, companies may lose revenue and incur high recovery costs. If supply chain managers were more capable of measuring and managing supply...

Good resource scheduling plays a pivotal role in successful software development projects. However, effective resource scheduling is complicated by such disruptions as requirements changes, urgent bug fixing, incorrect or unexpected process execution, and staff turnover. Such disruptions demand immediate attention, but can also impact the stability of other ongoing projects. Dynamic resource re...

Invasive alien species affect the composition and functioning of invaded ecosystems in many ways, altering ecological interactions that have arisen over evolutionary timescales. Specifically, disruptions to pollination and seed-dispersal mutualistic interactions are often documented, although the profound implications of such impacts are not widely recognized. Such disruptions can occur via the...

We investigate the performance and robustness of distributed averaging integral controllers used in the optimal frequency regulation of power networks. We construct a strict Lyapunov function that allows us to quantify the exponential convergence rate of the closed-loop system. As an application, we study the stability of the system in the presence of disruptions to the controllers’ communicati...

Marco Zoli School of Science and Technology CNISM University of Camerino, I-62032 Camerino, Italy [email protected] Abstract The thermodynamical stability of DNA minicircles is investigated by means of path integral techniques. Hydrogen bonds between base pairs on complementary strands can be broken by thermal fluctuations and temporary fluctuational openings along the double helix are essen...