Banche dati per la matematica, cooperazione per il 2000

Maths’ impact in other fields, such as physical sciences, biomedics, various sectors of engineering, economic sciences and industry –above all aerospace industry-, is moulding structural models for the creation of databases which can play a crucial role in the development of tools for orienteering and analysis. Two are the main databases concerning with maths: MATH e MathSci. This paper stands like a support for the evaluation of the two databases’ organizational system and of the additional services that they offer. The topics of this analysis are the conditions, the ways and, above all, the limits of contracts and subscriptions. I hope this paper could be useful for those who need to have information on the way to get convenient prices, establishing the organizational processes. It is well known to many experts in the acquisition of database that the high prices of databases, mainly created outside Europe, deprives the research of a huge amount of funding sources. Often the licences applied in the American cooperatives, for example in the interuniversity consortia, cannot be simply applied in an effective way on the Italian universities’ current situation. As a consequence, the crucial presupposition nowadays is to the raise the awareness that librarians should become active partners in the review process on the policies concerning database prices

Scholarly Communication and Academic Presses

The objective of the meeting was to identify concrete ways for implementing proposals to foster the international scientific co-operation of universities and academic societies. Against the background of an assumed tendency towards knowledge monopolies, caused by the protection of intellectual property rights by a few publishers, the experts in the Conference discussed the potential of these academic e-presses for improving scientific article collection and treatment as well as facilitating the access to scientific knowledge. The papers in this volume can best be regarded as contributions to the areas of inquiry in a field that is continuing to change very rapidly

Scholarly Communication and Academic Presses: proceedings of the international conference, 22 March, 2001, University of Florence, Italy

The objective of the meeting was to identify concrete ways for implementing proposals to foster the international scientific co-operation of universities and academic societies. Against the background of an assumed tendency towards knowledge monopolies, caused by the protection of intellectual property rights by a few publishers, the experts in the Conference discussed the potential of these academic e-presses for improving scientific article collection and treatment as well as facilitating the access to scientific knowledge. The papers in this volume can best be regarded as contributions to the areas of inquiry in a field that is continuing to change very rapidly

Dynamic pricing services to minimise CO2 emissions of delivery vehicles

In recent years, companies delivering goods or services to customers have been under increasing legal and administrative pressure to reduce the amount of CO2 emissions from their delivery vehicles, while the need to maximise profit remains a prime objective. In this research, we aim to apply revenue management techniques, in particular incentive/dynamic pricing to the traditional vehicle routing and scheduling problem while the objective is to reduce CO2 emissions. With the importance of accurately estimating emissions recognised, emissions models are first reviewed in detail and a new emissions calculator is developed in Java which takes into account time-dependent travel speeds, road distance and vehicle specifications. Our main study is a problem where a company sends engineers with vehicles to customer sites to provide services. Customers request for the service at their preferred time windows and the company needs to allocate the service tasks to time windows and decide on how to schedule these tasks to their vehicles. Incentives are provided to encourage customers choosing low emissions time windows. To help the company in determining the schedules/routes and incentives, our approach solves the problem in two phases. The first phase solves time-dependent vehicle routing/scheduling models with the objective of minimising CO2 emissions and the second phase solves a dynamic pricing model to maximise profit. For the first phase problem, new solution algorithms together with existing ones are applied and compared. For the second phase problem, we consider three different demand modelling scenarios: linear demand model, discrete choice demand model and demand model free pricing strategy. For each of the scenarios, dynamic pricing techniques are implemented and compared with fixed pricing strategies through numerical experiments. Results show that dynamic pricing leads to a reduction in CO2 emissions and an improvement in profits