The theories of supermodular optimization and games provide a framework for the analysis of systems marked by complementarity. We summarize the principal results of these theories and indicate their usefulness by applying them to study the shift to 'modern manufacturing'. We also use them to analyze the characteristic features of the Lincoln Electric Company's strategy and structure.

Data abstraction is a valuable method for organizing programs to make them easier to modify and maintain. Inheritance allows one implementation of a data abstraction to be related to another hierarchically. This paper investigates the usefulness of hierarchy in program development, and concludes that although data abstraction is the more important idea, hierarchy does extend its usefulness in s...

The development of interface design as an engineering discipline has been hampered by the absence of general, robust, and quantitative measures for the usefulness of interfaces. In the absence of such measures, it di cult to optimize an interface for a particular task, and to make precise statements about the relative advantages of di erent types of designs. This article brie y surveys the lite...

Hash lters are very useful for the optimization of query processing espe cially in the case of join queries In this paper we investigate the possibilities how hash lters can be utilized in the eld of temporal queries We introduce a exible kind of such hash lters and discuss di erent variations Addition ally we analyze the usefulness of this concept for some well known types of temporal queries

A computer program in a conventional (imperative) language provides an explicit sequence of instructions by which to compute the desired answer. A program in a declarative language, by contrast, expresses conditions that the answer should satisfy; it is up to an implementation of the language to compute an appropriate answer. The usefulness of declarative programming has been recognized for dec...

The main purpose of this paper is to assess if Multi-agent Systems (MAS) technology can be used to model, study and manage Supply Chains (SC). A second objective is to present new tools and results that we have not presented before. In this paper we present multi-agent technology as a sound alternative to classical optimization techniques that can contribute to solve hard problems. To validate ...

We argue for the usefulness of convenient optimization criteria, when building scalable and efficient instance retrieval inference services for ontology-based applications. We discuss several optimization criteria, especially a dedicated load balancing strategy, evaluate the approach with practical experiments on a particular implementation and present results.

We consider a stochastic portfolio optimization model in which the returns of risky asset depend on its past performance. The price of the risky asset is described by a stochastic delay differential equation. The investor’s goal is to maximize the expected discounted utility by choosing optimal investment and consumption as controls. We use the functional Ito’s formula to derive the associated ...

At least three factors in the existing migrating systems make them less suitable in Grid systems especially when the goal is to improve the response times for individual applications separate policies for suspension and migration of executing applications employed by these migration systems, the use of pre-defined conditions for suspension and migration and the lack of knowledge of the remainin...

For video broadcasting applications in a wireless environment, layered transmission is an effective approach to support heterogeneous receivers with varying bandwidth requirements. There are several important issues that need to be addressed for such layered video broadcasting systems. At the session level, it is not clear how to allocate bandwidth resources among competing video sessions. For ...