This paper presents a constraint management methodology, which facilitates tradeoff studies during conceptual design. This approach represents design models as constraints between variables, and uses the resulting constraint network to automatically derive computational procedures for performing userspecified tradeoff studies. By decomposing large constraint networks into smaller pieces that ca...

The paper applies a computer-based method involving stochastic search, multi-criteria optimization and color filtering to investigate the tradeoff between the life-cycle profitability of highrise commercial office buildings and their load-path safety against progressive collapse under abnormal loading. The study was motivated by the progressive-collapse failure of the twin towers of the World T...

This paper develops and analyzes a dynamic model of leverage, taking account of tax deductibility of interest payments and the endogenous expected cost of default. The interest rate on debt includes a premium to compensate lenders for expected losses in default. Lenders are unwilling to lend an amount that would trigger immediate default, which places a borrowing constraint on the firm. When th...

We present some results regarding the paging cost gains and the cost-delay tradeoff that can be achieved by using sequential paging to locate mobile users in cellular networks. We describe tight bounds on the average paging cost and the paging delay and quantify the intuition that greater gains are achieved when the mobile user’s location probabilities are concentrated in a small portion of the...

An insurance model, with realistic assumptions about coverage, deductible and premium, is studied. Insurance is shown to decrease the variance of the cost to the insured, but increase the expected cost, a tradeoff that places our model in the Markowitz mean–variance model.

Our study concerns bargaining behavior in situations where one party is in a stronger position than the other. We investigate both the tradeoff the favored party makes between pursuing his strategic advantage and giving weight to other players’ concern for fairness, and the tradeoff the disadvantaged player makes between pursuing a fair outcome from a disadvantaged position and the cost of that...

Location management plays the central role in providing ubiquitous communications services in the future wireless mobile networks. Location update and paging are commonly used in tracking mobile users on the move, location update is to update a mobile user’s current location while the paging is used to locate a mobile user, both will incur signaling traffic in the wireless networks. The more fr...

Split-Merge MCMC (Monte Carlo Markov Chain) is one of the essential and popular variants of MCMC for problems when an MCMC state consists of an unknown number of components. It is well known that state-of-the-art methods for split-merge MCMC do not scale well. Strategies for rapid mixing requires smart and informative proposals to reduce the rejection rate. However, all known smart proposals in...

Cobb-Douglas Production Function was widely used in economics and productivity studies across many sectors. The function's quantitative modeling of resource inputs and production outputs is appealing to the research domain of construction management. In this thesis we explored this function's application in construction schedule crashing and project risk analysis related to duration of construc...