We study the joint inventory and sales effort management problems of a retailer in a broad context and investigate the optimal policies for a single item, periodic-review system. In each period, the demand is uncertain depending on the sales effort level exerted by the retailer, which incurs an associated cost. The retailer’s objective is to find a joint optimal inventory replenishment and sale...

Stage IIIA non-small cell lung cancer represents a relatively heterogeneous group of patients with metastatic disease to the ipsilateral mediastinal (N2) lymph nodes and also includes T3N1 patients. Presentations of disease range from apparently resectable tumors with occult microscopic nodal metastases to unresectable, bulky multistation nodal disease. Controversy abounds as to the optimal tre...

Abstract. We present a new modified nodal cubic spline collocation scheme for solving the Dirichlet problem for Poisson’s equation on the unit square. We prove existence and uniqueness of a solution of the scheme and show how the solution can be computed on an (N + 1) × (N + 1) uniform partition of the square with cost O(NlogN) using a direct fast Fourier transform method. Using two comparison ...

This study evaluated the predictive value of the preoperative albumin/globulin ratio (AGR) in laryngeal squamous cell carcinoma (LSCC) retrospectively, which has not been reported before. The current study enrolled 241 newly diagnosed LSCC patients in the Second Affiliated Hospital of Nanchang University between January 2005 and December 2010. The optimal AGR cut-off value for overall survival ...

In many applications like verification or combinatorial optimization, OBDDs (ordered binary decision diagrams) are used as a representation or data structure for Boolean functions. Efficient algorithms exist for the important operations on OBDDs, and many functions can be represented in reasonable size if a good variable ordering is chosen. In general, it is NP-hard to compute optimal or near-o...