EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Having confidence in the permanence of a digital resource requires a deep understanding of the preservation activities that will need to be performed throughout its lifetime, and an ability to plan and resource for those activities. The LIFE (Lifecycle Information for E-Literature) Project has advanced understanding of the short and long-term costs in this complex area, facili...

Short product lifecycles, fickle consumers and dispersed supply chains characterize today’s Retail, Apparel and Footwear environment. While companies have made advancements in improving execution and cost efficiencies, lack of synergy across functional areas has prevented them from maximizing the impact of their initiative to the company bottom line. This paper presents insights on supply chain...

Business entities with lifecycles (BEL’s) (a.k.a. business artifacts) are used to model conceptual entities that are central to guiding the operations of a business, and whose content changes as they move through those operations. The recently introduced Guard-StageMilestone (GSM) meta-model for BEL lifecycles is declarative in nature, and allows concurrent execution of long-running (possibly h...

Closed-loop supply chain systems are increasingly attracting attention because of cost competition, resource constraints and environmental issues. Electronic products are of particular concern due to short lifecycles and hazardous material used in production. We formulate the closed-loop product lifecycle system with stochastic dynamic programming methodology. By applying the reverse logistics ...

What are Lepidoptera? Butterflies, moths and skippers form the order of insects known as Lepidoptera. Estimated to include more than 150,000 species, they are widely studied and have long been known to have highly complex morphologies, fascinating lifecycles and remarkable ecologies. Their broad wings are invariably covered with arrays of minute scales. Each scale is a thin, flattened, cuticula...

Product take-back and reuse is sometimes at odds with the rapidly evolving desires of some customers. For other customers, the environmental benefits of reuse more than compensate for minor drawbacks. “Selling a service” (rather than a product) through leasing enables the manufacturer to control the timing and quality of product take-back but current methods assume a fixed leasing period. What ...

Forecasting demand for new products is increasingly difficult as the technology treadmill drives product lifecycles shorter and shorter. The task is even more challenging for electronic goods, where product lifecycles are measured in quarters, manufacturing processes in months, while the market volatility takes place on a day-to-day basis. We present a model that perpetually reduces forecast va...