Product design involves choosing from a vast array of components and subcomponents. By developing modular platforms and communicating with multiple suppliers each product becomes a bundle of attributes. The multitude of potential product configurations poses a challenge in identifying optimal configurations to offer customers. For most companies, the greatest challenge is measuring consumers’ m...

The Single Frontier Bi-Directional Search (SBS) framework was recently introduced. A node in SBS corresponds to a pair of states, one from each of the frontiers and it uses front-tofront heuristics. In this paper we present an enhanced version of SBS, called eSBS, where pruning and caching techniques are applied, which significantly reduce both time and memory needs of SBS. We then present a hy...

Exploring an unknown environment with multiple robots requires an efficient coordination method to minimize the total duration. A standard method to discover new areas is to assign frontiers (boundaries between unexplored and explored accessible areas) to robots. In this context, the frontier allocation method is paramount. This paper introduces a decentralized and computationally efficient fro...

  Selecting an effective project plan is a significant area in the project management. The present paper introduces a technique to identify the project plan efficient frontier for assessing the alternative project plans and selecting the best plan. The efficient frontier includes two criteria: the project cost and the project time. Besides, the paper presents a scheme to incorporate Directed Ac...

We evaluate the probability that an estimated Sharpe ratio exceeds a given threshold in presence of non-Normal returns. We show that this new uncertainty-adjusted investment skill metric (called Probabilistic Sharpe ratio, or PSR) has a number of important applications: First, it allows us to establish the track record length needed for rejecting the hypothesis that a measured Sharpe ratio is b...

A numerical method based on the Adomian decomposition method which has been developed by Adomian [Adomian, G. (1994). Solving Frontier Problems of Physics: The Decomposition Method. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, MA] is introduced in this paper for the approximate solution of delay differential equation (DDE). The algorithm is illustrated by studying an initial value problem. The results o...

BACKGROUND The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is among the world's largest investors in biomedical research, with a mandate to: "…lengthen life, and reduce the burdens of illness and disability." Its funding decisions have been criticized as insufficiently focused on disease burden. We hypothesize that modern portfolio theory can create a closer link between basic research and outcome, and...