A re-entrant gas-liquid spinodal was proposed as a possible explanation of the apparent divergence of the compressibility and specific heat off supercooling water. Such a counter-intuitive possibility, e.g., a liquid that becomes unstable to gas-like fluctuations on cooling at positive pressure, has never been observed, neither in real substances nor in off-lattice simulations. More recently, s...

This paper deals with a flowshop scheduling problem with a special blocking RCb (Release when Completing Blocking). In some industrial environments, such flexible production systems can be encountered. Genetic algorithms are good methods to solve these problems. A method is proposed to further improve solutions already found by genetic algorithms. It consists in marking out recurrent genes asso...

The two-stage assembly flowshop scheduling problem is addressed with the objective of minimizing total tardiness. An insertion algorithm, a genetic algorithm, and a hybrid of the insertion and genetic algorithms, are developed for the problem. Conducted computational experiments reveal that the hybrid algorithm significantly outperforms the genetic algorithm while the best performing algorithm ...

The received wisdom is that sunk costs create a barrier to entry—if entry fails, then the entrant, unable to recover sunk costs, incurs greater losses. In a strategic context where an incumbent may prey on the entrant, sunk entry costs have a countervailing effect: they may effectively commit the entrant to stay in the market. By providing the entrant with commitment power, sunk investments may...

In this paper a new metaheuristic method is proposed to solve the classical permutation flowshop scheduling problem with the objective of minimizing sum of completion times. The representative neighbourhood combines the stochastic sampling method mainly used in Simulated Annealing and the best descent method elaborated in Tabu Search and integrates them naturally into a single method. The metho...

The paper considers the problem of preemptive scheduling in a two-stage flowshop with parallel unrelated machines at the first stage and a single machine at the second stage. At the first stage, jobs use some additional renewable resources which are available in limited quantities. The resource requirements are of 0-1 type. The objective is minimization of the makespan. The problem is NP-hard. ...

Flowshop scheduling deals with the sequencing of a set of jobs that visit a set of machines in the same order. A tabu search procedure is proposed for the flowshop scheduling problem with the makespan minimization criterion. Different from other tabu search procedures, the neighborhood of a solution is generated using a combination of three different exchange mechanisms. This has resulted in a ...

Dogs 3-7 days following ligation of the anterior descending coronary artery representing a remarkably stable model for re-entrant ventricular arrhythmias (RVA) and allowed detailed electrophysiologic studies of the re-entrant mechanism. In these dogs, we could regularly illustrate the presence of continuous electrical activity originating from the infarction zone (IZ) and bridging the diastolic...

Comparative advertising content di¤ers from generic. We discover that dissipative advertising has consequences depending upon content and cost. Comparison advertising may trigger legal action by rival ...rms that are named. In the model an entrant signals its product quality. By a comparative ad the entrant refers to the incumbent’s product. We show that comparison can enhance the signaling pot...

Firms might not launch a next generation product as soon as a more efficient technology or a better product design is ready. We use a stylized model to analyze firms’ product launch and upgrade decisions in an incumbent-vs-entrant setting. We find that large profit margins from the next generation product alone do not provide the entrant sufficient incentives to launch the next generation produ...