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The challenge in last-mile supply chains deliveries is to maintain and improve the operational cost-effectiveness by the implementation of efficient procedures while facing increased levels of congestion in cities. One competitive alternative is Horizontal Cooperation (HC). City distribution problems under HC conditions can be modeled as multi-depot vehicle routing problems, which are NP-hard problems...
Since early days of computer science, researchers ask themselves where is the line that separates tasks machine can do from those only human beings can really accomplish. Several tasks were pointed as impossible to machines and later conquered by new advances in Artificial Intelligence. Nowadays, it seems we are not far from the day when driving cars will be included among the tasks machines can do...
The trend of product individualization results in a growing product variety while at the same time the globalized competition forces companies to react on the severe cost rivalry. An increasing number of companies develop new or adapt existing modular product platforms for their product portfolio as an approach in order to tackle these challenges. The structure of modular platforms thereby plays a...
In this paper a framework for the categorization of cost drivers in product-service systems is presented. Cost drivers were derived in a literature research and allocated to the corresponding categories within the product or service domain. The significance of the identified cost drivers was validated by an empirical study analyzing the impact of cost drivers on the organization. The study particularly...
Modularization is a complex strategy characterized by both technical and managerial decisions. This paper aims at understanding practitioners' perceptions about two of the most important elements to be taken into account in a proper decision-making process, i.e. barriers to and impacts of modularization. The adopted methodology is the analysis of a number of questionnaires distributed during two of...
For modern industry, data generated by machines and devices, product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions, production planning systems or quality and inventory management systems has reached a volume of more than a thousand Exabyte annually and is expected to increase in the next years. This has led to the need of “Big Data” which originally referred to the huge flood of data, has extended the scope...
Negotiation is a fundamental mechanism in multi-agent systems. It may be a complex mechanism involving multiple agents with conflicting interests that need to reach a joint agreement. Complexity intensifies when moving from bilateral to multilateral negotiation. An important issue in such negotiation is to define a specific and effective protocol that guides the interactions between the agents. In...
Electronic business (e-business) can potentially develop SME's adeptness and efficacy in facing the fast-changing and competitive business environment. Despite the success of many larger counterparts, SMEs are still lagging behind in using the Internet for their business especially in the context of developing countries. Although it is observed that some SMEs are beginning to catch up, still many...
The mathematical framework of networks is well suited to describe several systems consisting of a large number of entities interacting with each others. Every entity is represented by a network node and each interaction by a link between two nodes. It is therefore possible to model these networks as graphs. In this paper, we present a reliability study for chain topologies based on spanning tree in...
Trust is a widely understood construct utilized across most disciplines. Unlike trust, distrust is less studied and understood. For the last two decades, researchers have been engaged in a discussion - are trust and distrust distinct constructs or just two ends of the same continuum? This study investigates that question by surveying more than 1000 consumers involved in technology-driven transactions...
Estimation is very important and integral part of software development life cycle. Without estimation of effort, duration and cost, software cannot be developed. It is important to do accurate estimation as much as possible. Today in Information technology Industry Estimation in agile software development is mostly based on heuristic approaches like expert judgment and planning poker. In absence of...
Achieving cloud security is not a trivial problem and developing and enforcing good cloud security controls is a fundamental requirement if this is to succeed. The very nature of cloud computing can add additional problem layers for cloud security to an already complex problem area. We discuss why this is such an issue, consider what desirable characteristics should be aimed for and propose a novel...
Creating opportunities for comprehensive workplace learning requires that work systems and their environments are designed in a learning-enhancing way. This is regarded as a prerequisite for the creation of innovations and the strengthening of a company's flexibility in the fast changing industrial environment of digitization. However, learning-enhancing work design can so far only be measured retrospectively...
The problem of choosing an open-pit mining investment portfolio can be stated as, given a budget, picking among the possible projects the combination that will incur in the best increase for the mine's productivity when applied. Due to interaction between projects even a seemingly cheap and effective project may not be the most appropriate choice as, in the complete portfolio, it may interact badly...
There is growing interest in multiplex networks where individual nodes take part in several layers of networks simultaneously. From transportation networks to complex infrastructures, and to social and communication networks, a large variety of systems can be described in terms of multiplexes formed by a set of nodes interacting through different layers of networks, for example, in social networks...
In recent year, the rise of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software-defined Networking (SDN) makes the service chain and application provisioning process much agile and simpler, promoting the development of Service Function Chaining (SFC). Service Function Chaining (SFC) provides flexibility and agility for deploying and managing network services. The most challenging problems in SFC are...
A Schema-less NoSQL system refers to solutions where users do not declare a database schema and, in fact, its management is moved to the application code. This paper presents a study that allows us to evaluate, to some extent, the data structuring impact. The decision of how to structure data in semi-structured databases has an enormous impact on data size, query performance and readability of the...
Different companies in the same line of business can have similar computer systems with built-in diagnostic routines, and the ability to regularly send error-driven or event-driven environmental diagnostic messages in XML backto the system manufacturer. The system manufacturer typically uses these to determine faults in the system. The outcome of this troubleshooting can also assist end-users and...
The Internet offers a set of information that is constantly growing in both size and complexity, becoming an indispensable tool to our daily-lifes. A particular group of Web users are those with some sort of disabilities or incapacities. These users need this technology to be adaptable to their incapacities and limitations, thus the need fo the entities behind their development assume the inherent...
Nowadays, new in-memory-based Enterprise Resource Planning solutions are available for the companies. One of the main purposes of these solutions are the availability of real-time analytics. In a previous paper [1], we discussed, how Oracle In-Memory Database solutions can support faster on-line analytical processing queries and measured and discussed the limitations of the Oracle in-memory extension...
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