Automating the detection of Turning Points: Inventory control at ComputerShop

Abstract Inventory control for a product catalogue of 3000 products is carried out by two managers at ComputerShop. While there is a substantial level of automation of product flow in this company, there is no analysis of inventory levels, nor of trends in demand for each product. Inventory management thus is an area that imposes a high workload on the managers and is characterized by the usual problem of inventory and demand being poorly balanced. In this paper we have studied two techniques that can be applied to detect turning points in a sequence of sales data. We have demonstrated that both of these techniques can be used to support the partial automation of decisions on inventory control

A New Approach to the Process of Identifying Lead Users in Open Source Software Communities

ABSTRACT This paper presents a methodology that is designed to improve upon established approaches to the identification of lead users amongst communities of end users. While it is clear that organisation

Instabilities in the wake of an inclined prolate spheroid

We investigate the instabilities, bifurcations and transition in the wake behind a 45-degree inclined 6:1 prolate spheroid, through a series of direct numerical simulations (DNS) over a wide range of Reynolds numbers (Re) from 10 to 3000. We provide a detailed picture of how the originally symmetric and steady laminar wake at low Re gradually looses its symmetry and turns unsteady as Re is gradually increased. Several fascinating flow features have first been revealed and subsequently analysed, e.g. an asymmetric time-averaged flow field, a surprisingly strong side force etc. As the wake partially becomes turbulent, we investigate a dominating coherent wake structure, namely a helical vortex tube, inside of which a helical symmetry alteration scenario was recovered in the intermediate wake, together with self-similarity in the far wake.Comment: Book chapter in "Computational Modeling of Bifurcations and Instabilities in Fluid Dynamics (A. Gelfgat ed.)", Springe