The research presented in this paper is oriented on the transition of the manufacturing industry towards the delivery of product-service system. The paper presents the first results in the development of a decision support system dedicated to help in configuring service-oriented production systems, notably with an objective of capacity management. An illustrative case study is presented, linked...

In project-oriented production systems where hundreds of thousands of operations are carried out each month subject to precedence and resource constraints, long-term scheduling is a challenging problem for any branch of operation research or artificial intelligence. In a dynamically changing environment, fixing a schedule for several months in advance would be pointless, and, furthermore, the s...

Transthoracic intra-aortic balloon pump (IABP) insertion has been a relatively rare and uncommon procedure. However, it is an established beneficial option in patients with severe peripheral vascular disease (PVD) accompanied with bi-lateral femoral arterial occlusion. There are several viable alternatives to trans-aortic IABP insertion, including trans-axillary or in abdominal aorta (requiring...

The development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is deeply changing the way to do business for several manufacturing companies. Especially, Business-to-Business (B2B) applications are demonstrating the capacity to provide real value to manufacturing industries by allowing industry global performance to increase. According to Rangone et al. (2004) a basic classification of B2B...

Introduction Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) are widely recognized as a promising alternative and cost-effective technology for solar-toelectric energy conversion. Current silicon solar cells are limited due to their lack of flexibility, high cost of manufacturing and installation, and heavy weight. Alternatively, dye-sensitized solar cells have a very simple fabrication process, low fabrica...