Major goals for the future of transportation materials include reduced weight of components, reduced cost of materials and increased use of renewable content. Reinforcement of transportation composites with plant fibers has the potential to decrease component weight relative to glass fiber reinforcement, reduce cost of materials relative to carbon fiber reinforcement, and significantly increase...

What is the reason for acquisitions? Till now, strategies related to the daily operations of the firm like increased sale, reduced cost or managerial ambitions have been the prevalent motive. However, a new dynamic motive, the competence explanation is emerging. The purpose of this paper is to develop the existing typology on acquisition motives with a combined approach of competence, resource ...

Laser forming of sheet metal offers the advantages of requiring no hard tooling and thus reduced cost and increased flexibility. It also enables forming of some materials and shapes that are not possible now. In single-axis laser bending of plates, the bending edge is found to be somewhat curved and the bending angle varies along the laser-scanning path. These phenomena are termed edge effects,...

We propose an effective Hamiltonian approach to investigate decoherence of a quantum system in a non-Markovian reservoir, naturally imposing the complete positivity on the reduced dynamics of the system. The formalism is based on the notion of an effective reservoir, i.e., certain collective degrees of freedom in the reservoir that are responsible for the decoherence. As examples for completely...

In this paper a general shop scheduling problem with sequence dependent setup times arid alternative r[.~ sources is considered, where optimization criteria are both makespan and sum of setup times. Two cooperative models for the problem based on Constraint Programming arc proposed. The first is used to model the scheduling constraints, while the second is a muhipath model used for setup optimi...

In the field of robotics there is a great interest in developing strategies and algorithms to reproduce human-like behaviors. In this paper, we consider motion planning for humanoid robots based on the concept of virtual holonomic constraints. At first, recorded kinematic data of particular human motions are analyzed in order to extract consistent geometric relations among various joint angles ...

In this paper we present suucient conditions for the controllability of the reduced dynamics of a class of mechanical systems with symmetry. We prove conditions (boundedness of coadjoint orbits and existence of a radially unbounded Lyapunov function) under which the drift vector eld (of the reduced system) is weakly positively Poisson stable (WPPS). The WPPS nature of the drift vector eld along...