Just‐In‐Time (JIT) production has received a great deal of attention, worldwide, since its introduction in Japan a few decades ago. It has been well documented that some of the main benefits of JIT implementation are reduction of inventories, lead‐time reduction, and cost savings. Most of the previous research on the impact of JIT on firm performance has either been anecdotal (one‐firm studies)...

Cognitive scientists have shown increased interest in diagrams in recent years, but most of the focus has been on spatial representation, not conventions for representing time. We explore a variety of ways in which time is represented in diagrams by one research community: scientists investigating circadian rhythms at the behavioral and molecular levels. Diagrams that relate other variables to ...

Experience-based continuous learning is essential for improving products, processes, and technologies in emerging as well as established areas of business and engineering science. It can be facilitated by casebased organizational learning, meaning that relevant experience is captured in the form of cases for reuse in a corporate experience repository. For obvious reasons, learning from experien...

Because of the dynamic nature of the interstellar medium, the Sun should have encountered a variety of different interstellar environments in its lifetime. As the solar wind interacts with the surrounding interstellar medium to form a heliosphere, different helio-sphere shapes, sizes, and particle contents result from the different environments. Some of the large possible interstellar parameter...

Consider the Product Rate Variation problem. Given n products 1, ..., i, ..., n, and n positive integer demands d1, ..., di, ..., dn. Find a sequence α = α1, ..., αT , T = ∑n i=1 di, of the products, where product i occurs exactly di times that always keeps the actual production level, equal the number of product i occurrences in the prefix α1, ..., αt, t = 1, ..., T , and the desired productio...

ii DEDICATION To M. and D., for making me who I am today. iii If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done. There's no ulterior practical purpose here. I'm just playing. That's what math is – wondering, playing, amusing yourself with your imagination.

Healthcare is an increasingly collaborative enterprise involving a broad range of healthcare services provided by many individuals and organizations. Grid technology has been widely recognized as a means for integrating disparate computing resources in the healthcare field. Moreover, Grid portal applications can be developed on a wireless and mobile infrastructure to execute healthcare processe...

the decline in avoidable mortality (am) and increase in life expectancy in shanghai is impressive. gusmano and colleagues suggested that shanghai’s improved health system has contributed significantly to this decline in am. however, when compared to other global cities, shanghai’s life expectancy at birth is improving as london and new york city, but has yet to surpass that of hong kong, tokyo,...

The industrial economies of ‘scale’ and ‘scope’ are being transformed into digital economies of ‘depth’ and ‘coordination’. This is being facilitated by dramatic improvements in the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). The main strength for the efficiency of networked operations is derived from the ability to integrate disparate computer systems, creating seamlessly integrated net...