Over the past few years it has become clear that the Internet will play an ever greater role in the distribution of digital contents. Businesses have to start now understanding the dynamics of this new market and gaining insight into how to exploit the impending paradigm shift in contents, marketing, and distribution. Our main aim is to provide businesses in the digital contents sector with a t...

In this paper, we model an operating system consisting of a firm and its customers, where the mean demand rate is a function of the guaranteed delivery time offered to the customers and of market price, where price itself is determined by the length of the delivery time. Economies of scale are present. The firm s objective is to maximize profits by selecting an optimal guaranteed delivery time ...

Strategy annotations provide a simple mechanism for introducing some laziness in the evaluation of expressions. As an eager programming language, Maude can take advantage of them and, in fact, they are part of the language. Maude strategy annotations are lists of non-negative integers associated to function symbols which specify the ordering in which the arguments are (eventually) evaluated in ...

Closed-loop supply chain systems are increasingly attracting attention because of cost competition, resource constraints and environmental issues. Electronic products are of particular concern due to short lifecycles and hazardous material used in production. We formulate the closed-loop product lifecycle system with stochastic dynamic programming methodology. By applying the reverse logistics ...

This paper presents models for three variants of the secretary problem based on a strategic form of zero-sum finite games for two players. Based on the minimax theorem for finite games, the problem of maximizing the minimum average payoff of a player, in spite of the strategies of the other player, is represented by a linear programming model, which solution using the simplex method presents no...