Vaccinations are amongst the most cost-effective and successful public health interventions. During the H1N1 influenza pandemic public health organizations around the world mobilized to procure and deliver vaccinations to the at-risk populations in order to reduce spread of, and decrease morbidity and mortality from, the swine flu. With the focus on delivering vaccines at a population-level, st...

5 Simplification procedures 72 5.1 Simplification under Landau symbols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 5.2 Simproc setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 5.3 Tests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 5.3.1 Product simplification tests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 5.3.2 Real product decision procure tests . . . . . . . . . . . 74 5.3.3 Su...

Web2.0 has contributed tremendously towards the rapid growth of web contents which ensures that customers utilize existing blogs, discussion forums, e-commerce and many other sites to express their opinions and read reviews of other people on different products and services which they plan to procure. Such an online wealth of information over the web has helped customers, firms, manufacturers, ...

Emerging service-oriented technologies allow software agents to automatically procure distributed services to complete complex tasks. However, in many application scenarios, service providers demand financial remuneration, execution times are uncertain and consumers have deadlines for their tasks. In this paper, we address these issues by developing a novel approach that dynamically procures mu...

A three year ESPRIT project ProCure – is ultimately aiming to take a significant but achievable step forward in the application of available ICT to the Large Scale Engineering (LSE) construction industry. The ProCure consortium consists of 5 industrial partners supported by 4 associated research and expert partners. The project combines leading expertise from 3 member states to support ICT depl...

This paper describes how multitasking and merge bias may impact the procurement time of complex equipment, such as power distribution equipment used in capital projects. The time required to procure this type of product is often based on past experience and ad hoc assumptions, without explicit consideration for the contributing factors. Capital projects are becoming increasingly complex, requir...

This special issue, State-of-the Art Investigations on Biomolecular Crystals, is focused strategies to procure suitable crystals for high-resolution X-ray crystallographic investigations [...]

Industrial buyers who seek to procure inputs have the option of contracting the process out to procurement intermediaries. Many of these intermediaries now operate using Internet-based software to enhance the efficiency of their services. We develop a theoretical model of a buyer who wishes to procure an input from one of many differentiated suppliers. The buyer chooses between conducting the p...

To be successful in multi-attribute auction, agents must be capable of adapting to continuous changing bidding price. This paper presents a novel fuzzy attitude based bidding strategy (FA-Bid), which employs dual assessment technique i.e. assessment of multiple attributes of the goods as well as assessment of agents attitude (eagerness) to procure an item in automated auction. The assessment of...

This paper proposes a stochastic framework for demand response (DR) aggregator to procure DR from customers and sell it to purchasers in the wholesale electricity market. The aggregator assigns fixed DR contracts with customers based on three different load reduction strategies. In the presented problem the uncertainty of market price is considered and the risk of aggregator participation is ma...