the company level has been dominated by what goes on inside companies. Thinking about the competitiveness of nations and states has focused on the economy as a whole, with national economic policy seen as the dominant influence. In both competition and competitiveness the role of location is all but absent. If anything, the tendency has been to see location as diminishing in importance. Globali...

This paper proposes a new location problem of competitive facilities, e.g. shops and stores, with uncertain demands in the plain. By representing the demands for facilities as random variables, the location problem is formulated to a stochastic programming problem, and it is reformulated to three deterministic programming problems: expectation maximizing problem, probability maximizing problem,...

The location routing problem (LRP) is a relatively new research direction within location analysis that takes into account vehicle routing aspect. The goal of LRP is to solve a facility location problem and a vehicle routing problem simultaneously. We propose a simulated annealing (SA) based heuristic for solving the LRP. The proposed heuristic is tested on some well-known benchmark instances a...

To be competitive, an industrial robot picking fruits must be able to perform this task in an amount of time which compares to that needed by humans. Because the location of a fruit changes due to the picking of others, the determination of their location has to be performed on-line and also the associated path planning for the robot. This poses two major problems in the development of fruit-pi...

The Arrow-Debreu model of a perfectly competitive economy is based on the crucial assumption of complete markets, that is, the assumption that there exists a market (i.e. a price) for each good, for each location, for each future date and for each possible state of nature. The presence of a complete set of forward markets for future contingent delivery eliminates uncertainty since it allows com...

Location awareness is the key capability of mobile computing applications. Despite high demand, indoor location technologies have not become truly ubiquitous mainly due to their requirements of costly infrastructure and dedicated hardware components. Received signal strength (RSS) based location systems are poised to realize economical ubiquity as well as sufficient accuracy for variety of appl...