The selection of the best suppliers is a key issue for many companies. Nevertheless, it is important to highlight that the most economical supplier may not be the one that has the lowest purchase price. The cheapest supplier is the one that represents the lowest cost to the company, after being considered various aspects of supplying, such as quality, reliability of deliveries, the history of s...

Private forests harbor considerable biodiversity, however, they are under greater threat than reserved areas, particularly from urbanization, agriculture, and intense exploitation for timber and fuel wood. The extent to which they may act as habitats for biodiversity and how level of protection impacts trends in biodiversity and forest structure over time remain underresearched. We contribute t...

the conflict between investors' interests and managers is an important issue which has been attracted researchers attentions in last decade. according to the related literature, corporate governance body of research has offered alternatives for solving this problem such as ownership structure. this research investigates the effect of ownership structure on firm performance. the factors whi...

Many computation-intensive iterative or recursive applications commonly found in digital signal processing and image processing applications can be represented by data-flow graphs (DFGs). The execution of all tasks of a DFG is called an iteration, with the average computation time of an iteration the iteration period. A great deal of research has been done attempting to optimize such applicatio...

Obstacle avoidance is an essential capability of an autonomous robot. This paper presents a method that enables a mobile robot to locate obstacles in its eld of view using two images of its surroundings. The method is based on the assumption that the robot is moving on a locally planar ground. Using a set of point features (corners) that have been matched between the two views using normalized ...

Coastal and estuarine margins are considered natural resources with various functions covered by different management protection tools. In Portugal, the Maritime Public Domain (MPD) aims to regulate property in maritime coastal areas, assuming that these public of nation. Little is known, however, about how MPD considers margins, which also valuable, vulnerable, environmental areas. This articl...