Enterprises facing pressure to reduce costs and to make better use of existing staff or equipment can, at least in part, meet this pressure by more efficient and intelligent planning; methods for this task lie at the heart of management science and operations research. Successful application of such methods depends on unambiguous model formulations; these in turn call for expressive modelling c...

The increasing awareness that there are limits to the availability of nonrenewable resources, as well as that there are limits to the biosphere’s ability to absorb wastes, are at the basis of the growing interest about Microbial Fuel Cells (MFCs) technology, with particular regards to their application to wastes treatment. MFCs, in fact, couple the direct electric power production to the degrad...

Episodic recharge as a result of infrequent, high intensity precipitation events comprises the bulk of groundwater recharge in arid environments. Climate change and shifts in precipitation intensity will affect groundwater continuity, thus altering groundwater recharge. This study aims to identify changes in the ratio of groundwater recharge and precipitation, the R:P ratio, in the arid southwe...

In this paper, we examine the research and results of dynamic pricing policies and their relation to revenue management. The survey is based on a generic revenue management problem in which a perishable and nonrenewable set of resources satisfy stochastic pricesensitive demand processes over a finite period of time. In this class of problems, the owner (or the seller) of these resources uses th...

In recent years bacteria have become increasingly resistant to antibiotics, leading to a decline in the effectiveness of antibiotics in treating infectious disease. This paper uses a framework based on an epidemiological model of infection in which antibiotic effectiveness is treated as a nonrenewable resource. In the model presented, bacterial resistance (the converse of effectiveness) develop...

This review outlines the current and emerging applications of biotechnology, particularly in the production and processing of chemicals, for sustainable development. Biotechnology is "the application of scientific and engineering principles to the processing of materials by biological agents". Some of the defining technologies of modern biotechnology include genetic engineering; culture of reco...

Modern agriculture is dependent on phosphate rock (PR), which is a nonrenewable resource. Improvement of phosphorus (P) availability for crops in agricultural soils represents a key strategy to slow down the depletion of PR. The aim of this study was to identify potential P biofertilisers among saprotrophic fungal species. We tested 30 fungal strains belonging to 28 taxa (4 Zygomycota and 24 As...

Approximately 2 X 10 ton biomass is produced on land and in water annually (l). Cellulose is the principal structural material in the cell wall of all plants (2). In addition, cellulose can be found in algae, bacteria, and animals (tunicates). Assuming that the average source contains 50% cellulose (Table 1) (35), then approximately 1 X 10 ton cellulose is formed each year. This makes cellulose...

This paper addresses a general class of nonpreemptive resource-constrained project scheduling problems in which activity durations are discrete functions of committed renewable and nonrenewable resources. We provide a well known 0±1 problem formulation and stress the importance of themodel by giving applications within production and operationsmanagement. Furthermore, we prove that the feasibil...

Recent technological advances have enabled the development of low-cost, low-power, and multifunctional sensor devices. Large collections of these devices organized in multihop sensor networks have the potential to revolutionize the way humans can “sense” the physical world. Owing to their theoretical challenges and myriads of practical applications, wireless sensor networks are emerging as one ...