The role of foreign investment in U.S. infrastructure: opportunities and challenges ahead

The U.S. infrastructure has been issued a grade of D+ from the American Society of Civil Engineers because of the low funding for new construction, maintenance, and repair. It is now reaching the end of its useful life and cost estimates have reached as high as $3.6-trillion. The public infrastructure investment is at 2.4% of GDP, which is half of what it was 50-years ago. The U.S. has explored new ways to finance its infrastructure because of funding uncertainty. Investments such as, pensions, foreign investments, and sovereign wealth funds, manage trillions in assets and are forecasted to grow. This paper presents an overview of infrastructure funding and identifies possible approaches in addressing long-term financial needs with foreign capital partnershi

Minimizing WIP inventory in reliable production lines

This work deals with the well-known buffer allocation problem in short reliable production lines. The objective is to find the optimal buffer allocation (OBA) that minimizes the average work-in-process (WIP) inventory, subject to a minimum required throughput. The study leads to some insights concerning the evolution of the throughput and WIP as a function of the ordered buffer allocations. In the case of balanced lines, it is observed that the so-called self-similarity phenomenon prevails. It is also pointed out that the choice of the throughput level is critical for finding the OBA that minimizes the average WIP. Also a heuristic algorithm is proposed to find the OBA, which reduces the search space by over 50% compared to enumeration. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved

A heuristic algorithm for the buffer allocation in unreliable unbalanced production lines

In this work we investigate the buffer allocation problem (BAP) in short unbalanced production lines consisting of up to six machines that are subject to breakdowns. Times to failure are assumed exponential whereas service and repair times are allowed to follow any Erlang-k distribution (with k greater than or equal to 1). An algorithm that is based on the sectioning (segmentation) approach was developed which solves the BAP. This, in conjunction with a method not previously reported that determines a "good" initial solution for the buffer allocation constitutes the main contribution of the present work. The accuracy of the proposed heuristic algorithm is remarkably good and its convergence is fast making it a promising tool that can be implemented in conjunction with a fast decomposition method to solve the BAP in large production lines. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved

Impact of thearubigins on the estimation of total dietary flavonoids in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) study

Thearubigins (TR) are polymeric flavanol-derived compounds formed during the fermentation of tea leaves. Comprising similar to 70% of total polyphenols in black tea, TR may contribute majorly to its beneficial effects on health. To date, there is no appropriate food composition data on TR, although several studies have used data from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) database to estimate TR intakes. We aimed to estimate dietary TR in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) cohort and assess the impact of including TR or not in the calculation of the total dietary flavonoid intake. Dietary data were collected using a single standardized 24-h dietary recall interviewer-administered to 36 037 subjects aged 35-74 years. TR intakes were calculated using the USDA database. TR intakes ranged from 0.9 mg/day in men from Navarra and San Sebastian in Spain to 532.5 mg/day in men from UK general population. TR contributed <5% to the total flavonoid intake in Greece, Spain and Italy, whereas in the UK general population, TR comprised 48% of the total flavonoids. High heterogeneity in TR intake across the EPIC countries was observed. This study shows that total flavonoid intake may be greatly influenced by TR, particularly in high black tea-consuming countries. Further research on identification and quantification of TR is needed to get more accurate dietary TR estimations