The effect of workers’ learning curve on production rate in manual assembly lines is significant when producing relatively small batches of different products. This research analyzes this effect and suggests applying work-sharing among the workers in such an environment to improve the time to complete the batch, namely, the makespan. Work-sharing refers to a situation where adjacent workers hel...

The Secret Sharing scheme assumes long-lived shares. However the protection provided for such long lived and sensitive shares may be insufficient. The security in a system that is exposed to attacks and break-ins might become exhausted. The goal of the pro-active security scheme is to prevent the adversary from learning the secret or from destroying it. The Shamir’s Secret Sharing is pioneer me...

We propose efficient secret sharing schemes realizing general access structures. Our proposed schemes are perfect secret sharing schemes and include Shamir’s (k, n)-threshold schemes as a special case. Furthermore, we show that a verifiable secret sharing scheme for general access structures is realized by one of the proposed schemes. key words: (k, n)-threshold scheme, general access structure...

Advances in networking and distributed computing allowed the establishment of production Grid infrastructures during the past few years. Today, large-scale production Grid infrastructures such as EGEE in Europe, OSG in the US, and NAREGI in Japan are offering their services to many scientific and industrial applications, from domains as diverse as Astronomy, Biomedicine, Computational Chemistry...

We assess the benefits of sharing demand forecast information in a manufacturer–retailer supply chain, consisting of a traditional retail channel and a direct channel. The demand is a linear function of price with a Gaussian primary demand (i.e., zero-price market potential). Both the manufacturer and the retailer set their price based on their forecast of the primary demand. In this setting, w...

Experts estimate that only 5 percent of the world’s publishing output is made accessible in alternate formats for people who cannot use print. While some popular commercial digital audio and textual products are available to people with print disabilities, many people do not have equal access to reading materials and other resources. People who cannot use print due to a visual, physical, neurol...

The hallmarks of today’s business environment are volatile demand, shorter product life cycles, and increasing global competition. Advances in information technology allow more and more information to be shared across entities so that the activities can be better coordinated throughout the entire supply chain. For different products and under different demand patterns, sharing information may h...

Organizations are pursuing the outsourcing of business processes (BPO) to offshore locations. However, current research has shown that a knowledge-sharing gap between the client and vendor organizations leads to less than expected benefits. This research applies social capital theory to study the antecedents necessary for the creation of social and intellectual capital in the BPO relationship a...

A revenue sharing contract is one of the mechanisms that coordinate decision makers in a decentralized supply chain toward the consensual goal. The transfer prices between different echelons in the supply chain influence the total supply chain profits. The study aims to explore various transfer pricing heuristics on the supply chain coordination in terms of the supply chain profits and their in...

Unauthorized copying of movies is a major concern for the motion picture industry. While unauthorized copies of movies have been distributed via portable physical media for some time, low-cost, high-bandwidth Internet connections and peer-to-peer file sharing networks provide highly efficient distribution media. Many movies are showing up on file sharing networks shortly after, and in some case...