We focus on rating of non-life insurance contracts. We employ multiplicative models with basic premium levels and specific surcharge coefficients for various levels of selected risk/rating factors. We use generalized linear models (GLM) to describe the probability distribution of total losses for a contract during one year. We show that the traditional frequency–severity approaches based only o...

A large US retailer that procures transportation services from third-party carriers experienced an unexpected jump in fuel surcharges as the price of diesel fuel skyrocketed in the summer of 2008. As a result, it sought to limit its future exposure to diesel price risk. We collaborated with this retailer to create a lane assignment optimizer (LAO) that incorporates diesel price risk when select...

The design of a new laboratory facility for evaluating the structural response of small-diameter buried pipes (e.g., leachate collection pipes in landfills) is presented. The pipe is tested within a 2.0 m wide, 2.0 m long, and 1.6 m high prism of soil, subject to large vertical pressures (1000 kPa), with only minimal roughness and deflection of the lateral boundaries. Results from finite elemen...

Poor understanding of the flow behavior granular biomass material poses great challenges for bioenergy industry, as equipment functioning time is significantly reduced by handling issues like screw feeder clogging and hopper arching. In this work, loblolly pine chips, including mass rate critical outlet width, in a wedge-shaped investigated combining physical experiments numerical simulations. ...

Prefabricated vertical drain (PVD) combined with preloading is one way to deal soft soil conditions. The predicted settlement becomes the first information in designing surcharge, PVD configuration and depth, time required complete consolidation. Prediction of consolidation that using one-dimensional theory considerably underestimated field along construction surcharge placement stage. This pap...

finite affine groups are given by groups of translations and di-lations on finite cyclic groups. for cyclic groups of prime orderwe develop a time-scale (wavelet) analysis and show that for alarge class of non-zero window signals/vectors, the generatedfull cyclic wavelet system constitutes a frame whose canonicaldual is a cyclic wavelet frame.

A multi-agent system (MAS) for supporting the planning of transhipments of imported finished vehicles via a seaport is presented. The focus is on storage allocation, i.e. the allocation of parking areas for the temporary storage of vehicles, and on deployment scheduling, i.e. the allocation of drivers to the vehicles that have to be moved in the terminal area. These planning tasks, which in pra...

The presence of pharmaceutical compounds in treated wastewater and in surface waters is a growing environmental concern. This paper provides information about general awareness of the issue, disposal practices, willingness to pay for a disposal program, and willingness to participate in a disposal program. The results are based on a telephone survey of 1005 residents in southern California. Les...