As the density of electronic devices increases, traditional design techniques fail to fully utilise the expanding resource. How can the design community utilise the design capacity that technology is offering and at the same time ensure its correctness? A further problem facing the design community is that yield rates are falling due to the increasing complexity of modern chips. How can we impr...

Motivated by applications in the health insurance industry, we consider a seller who designs and sells a set of vertically differentiated products to a population of quality-sensitive customers. The seller’s business environment entails an uncertainty about production costs. We characterize the seller’s optimal price-quality schedule in the cases of: (a) static cost uncertainty, and (b) dynamic...

The emergence of the worldwide SARS epidemic in 2003 led to a revived interest in the study of infectious diseases. Mathematical models have become important tools in analyzing transmission dynamics and measuring the effectiveness of controlling strategies. Research on infectious diseases in the actuarial literature only goes so far as to set up epidemiological models which better reflect the t...

With enterprises facing tremendous time-to-market pressures, manufacturing systems must be implemented quickly and modified easily. The ability of the open architecture approach to reconfigure or extend existing machine controllers to meet new needs is one of its advantages in meeting these challenges. Another open architecture advantage is the ability to reuse existing designs or components. H...

Manufacturing companies have to meet a lot of challenges in continuing training for employees. Especially on the way towards industry 4.0 the workforce needs to be able to handle fast changing environments and ever-changing working contexts. Furthermore, they have to be familiar with constantly new technologies (e.g. complex user interfaces, mobile devices) that are introduced during the proces...

In order to summarize the status of rescue robotics, this chapter will cover the basic characteristics of disasters and their impact on robotic design, describe the robots actually used in disasters to date, promising robot designs (e.g., snakes, legged locomotion) and concepts (e.g., robot teams or swarms, sensor networks), methods of evaluation in benchmarks for rescue robotics, and conclude ...

Locational marginal prices (LMP)-based electricity markets are implemented in different countries around the world and are dominant in the United States. Even after ten years of the operation, some of the properties of the LMP are not well understood. There are many misconceptions about this clearing mechanism that led to some inefficient market designs. This study is an attempt to consistently...

Dentists and patients are facing a perplexity between saving a compromised tooth through endodontic treatment and restoration or by extraction and replacement with an implant. The purpose of this paper was to compare the success rates of these two treatments. Success was measured as the longevity of the tooth or implant. Studies which met strict inclusion criteria to ensure best evidence were i...

Software design is a cognitively challenging task. Most software design tools provide support for editing, viewing, storing, and transforming designs, but lack support for the essential and difficult cognitive tasks facing designers. These cognitive tasks include decision-making, decision ordering, and task-specific design understanding. This paper describes Argo/UML, an object-oriented design ...

The bamboo industry is facing good opportunities for development in China, but it faces enormous challenges, too. From the level of bamboo industrial development, mainly in the following aspects: the level of bamboo resources management is low, cultivate direction is not clear, operating methods are backward, production is not high, processing or utilization of bamboo products is small-scale an...