Combining make to order and make to stock

In inventory control and production planning one is tempted to use one of two strategies: produce all demand to stock or produce all demand to order. The disadvantages are well-known. In the make everything to order case (MTO) the response times may become quite long if the load is high, in the make everything to stock case (MTS) one gets an enormous inventory if the number of different products is large.In this paper we study two simple models which combine MTO and MTS, and investigate the effect of combining MTO and MTS on the production lead times.     

Drawings of graphs on surfaces with few crossings

We give drawings of a complete graphK _n withO(n ⁴ log² g/g) many crossings on an orientable or nonorientable surface of genusg 2. We use these drawings ofK _n and give a polynomial-time algorithm for drawing any graph withn vertices andm edges withO(m ² log² g/g) many crossings on an orientable or nonorientable surface of genusg 2. Moreover, we derive lower bounds on the crossing number of any graph on a surface of genusg 0. The number of crossings in the drawings produced by our algorithm are within a multiplicative factor ofO(log² g) from the lower bound (and hence from the optimal) for any graph withm 8n andn ²/m g m/64.The research of the third and the fourth authors was partially supported by Grant No. 2/1138/94 of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and by EC Cooperative action IC1000 Algorithms for Future Technologies (Project ALTEC). A preliminary version of this paper was presented at WG93 and published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 790, 1993, pp. 388–396.     

Active fault detection and control: Unified formulation and optimal design

A new unified formulation of the active fault detection and control problem for discrete-time stochastic systems and its optimal solution are proposed. The problem formulation stems from the optimal stochastic control problem and includes important special cases: an active detector and controller, an active detector and input signal generator, and an active detector with a given input signal generator. The optimal solution is derived using the so-called closed loop information processing strategy. This strategy respects the influence of the current decision and/or input on the future behavior of the observed system, allows penalizing future wrong decisions, and improves the quality of fault detection. The proposed formulation and obtained solution also provide better understanding of the active fault detection and its relation to the optimal stochastic control. The results are illustrated in numerical examples.     

Effect of numerical integration on meshless methods

In this paper, we present the effect of numerical integration on meshless methods with shape functions that reproduce polynomials of degree k1. The meshless method was used on a second order Neumann problem and we derived an estimate for the energy norm of the error between the exact solution and the approximate solution from the meshless method under the presence of numerical integration. This estimate was obtained under the assumption that the numerical integration scheme satisfied a form of Green’s formula. We also indicated how to obtain numerical integration schemes satisfying this property.     

A comparative study of kriging variants for the optimization of a turbomachinery system

Kriging is a well-established approximation technique for deterministic computer experiments. There are several Kriging variants and a comparative study is warranted to evaluate the different performance characteristics of the Kriging models in the computational fluid dynamics area, specifically in turbomachinery design where the most complex flow situations can be observed. Sufficiently accurate flow simulations can take a long time to converge. Hence, this type of simulation can benefit hugely from the computational cheap Kriging models to reduce the computational burden. The Kriging variants such as ordinary Kriging, universal Kriging and blind Kriging along with the commonly used response surface approximation (RSA) model were used to optimize the performance of a centrifugal impeller using CFD analysis. A Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes equation solver was utilized to compute the objective function responses. The responses along with the design variables were used to construct the Kriging variants and RSA functions. A hybrid genetic algorithm was used to find the optimal point in the design space. It was found that the best optimal design was produced by blind Kriging, while the RSA identified the worst optimal design. By changing the shape of the impeller, a reduction in inlet recirculation was observed, which resulted into an increase in efficiency.     

A Unified Variational Volume Registration Method Based on Automatically Learned Brain Structures

We introduce a new volumetric registration technique that effectively combines active surfaces with the finite element method. The method simultaneously aligns multi-label automatic structural segmentation results, which can be obtained by the application of existing segmentation software, to produce an anatomically accurate 3D registration. This registration is obtained by the minimization of a single energy functional. Just like registering raw images, obtaining a 3D registration this way still requires solving a fundamentally ill-posed problem. We explain through academic examples as well as an MRI dataset with manual anatomical labels, which are hidden from the registration method, how the quality of a registration method can be measured and the advantages our approach offers.     

Online bin stretching with three bins

Online bin stretching is a semi-online variant of bin packing in which the algorithm has to use the same number of bins as an optimal packing, but is allowed to slightly overpack the bins. The goal is to minimize the amount of overpacking, i.e., the maximum size packed into any bin. We give an algorithm for online bin stretching with a stretching factor of \(11/8 = 1.375\) for three bins. Additionally, we present a lower bound of \(45/33 = 1.\overline{36}\) for online bin stretching on three bins and a lower bound of 19/14 for four and five bins that were discovered using a computer search.     

Observation of a half-quantum-flux periodicity pattern in an rf SQUID with small critical currents

We have found experimentally that rf SQUID's working in a nonhysteretic mode with small critical currents give exactly at resonance and at very low rf bias a triangular pattern with a period equal to half of one elementary quantum of magnetic flux. We discuss a possible explanation of this peculiar result.