INTRODUCTION Disease conditions such as end-stage renal disease (ESRD), which have severe consequences of disability and mortality, can generate substantial costs for large employers providing life insurance and disability insurance benefits. This study is the first to examine such disease-related nonmedical costs for employers and models the following employer-paid costs for ESRD in patients w...

Many countries have adopted or are considering incentive approaches to environmental regulation, such as tradable permit schemes to control pollution. Regulators influence the success of tradable permit programs by their choice of market rules and permit allocation mechanisms. This paper uses laboratory experiments to study how the transaction costs incurred by participants interact with the in...

Optimal distribution substation placement is one of the major components of optimal distribution system planning projects. In this paper optimal substation placement problem is solved using Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) as a new developed heuristic optimization algorithm. This procedure gives the optimal size, site and installation time of medium voltage substation, using their relate...

Splashing of splat particles is one of the most important phenomena in industrial processes such as thermal spray coating. The data relative to the degree of splashing of splats sprayed with a normal angle are commonly characterized by the Weibull distribution function. In this present study, an effort has been made to show that the Burr distribution is better than the Weibull distribution for ...

This paper studies the cost distribution characteristics in multi-stage supply chain networks. Based on the graphical evaluation and review technique, we propose a novel stochastic network mathematical model for cost distribution analysis in multi-stage supply chain networks. Further, to investigate the effects of cost components, including the procurement costs, inventory costs, shortage costs...

In the present paper we develop recursive algorithms to evaluate the distribution of the net present value (abbreviated as ”NPV”) of a health care contract. The duration of the program is a random variable representing the lifetime of an individual. We suggest a discrete time phase-type approach to model individual health care costs. In this approach, annual health care costs depend naturally o...

Based on the observation that a single mutational event can delete or insert multiple residues, affine gap costs for sequence alignment charge a penalty for the existence of a gap, and a further length-dependent penalty. From structural or multiple alignments of distantly related proteins, it has been observed that conserved residues frequently fall into ungapped blocks separated by relatively ...

We analyze the cost of enforcing a system of firm specific emissions standards vis a vis a transferable emissions permit system in the context of complete and incomplete information. We also examine the optimality of a transferable emissions permit system when abatement costs and enforcement costs are considered. We show that under incomplete information, regulation based on each firm-specific ...

this paper presents the aerodynamic design and economical evaluation of a 200 kw site specific wind turbine for the province of semnan in iran. by designing site specific wind turbines, the cost of energy which is calculated out of the annual energy production and also the cost of manufacturing the rotor are minimized. the aerodynamic design is based on the well-known blade element momentum the...

A crucial question in the design of ecient logistics systems is the identi®cation of locations for distribution centers (DCs). However, the optimization of these location decisions requires careful attention to the inherent trade-o€s among facility costs, inventory costs, transportation costs, and customer responsiveness. This paper presents a modeling approach that provides such an integrated...