A Value-Based Approach for Sustainable Supplier-Customer Relationships: The Case of the Indian Steel Industry

The steel industry, which has endured years of mediocre performance due to a supply glut and consequent depressed world prices, has seen considerable resurgence during the last several months. The ever-widening demand-supply gap, and greatly increased input costs have resulted in prices firming up. The sharp increase in steel prices without any let-up is an issue that steel customers have found difficult to grapple with. Many customers believe that the steel industry is behaving opportunistically. The paper attempts to understand the dynamics of the Indian steel industry. Although the steel industry caters to both consumer (B2C) and business (B2B) markets, the focus of the paper is on the business markets, which accounts for 80% of the market. After presenting a picture of who the suppliers and customers of the steel industry are, the paper presents the various forces at play in the industry, a conceptual model to understand supplier-customer relationships in the industry, and traces the sources of animosity and hostility between the supplier and the customer firms. Forging meaningful value-based long-term relationships between supplier and customer firms as a way forward is explored. The paper presents possible remedies to the malady of distrust between customer and supplier firms. Collaborative working between competing suppliers and active pan-industry collaborative forums to bring better cooperation and trust between customer and supplier firms are essential first steps to bring normalcy back into the industry’s functioning.

Ladder operators for isospectral oscillators

We present, for the isospectral family of oscillator Hamiltonians, a systematic procedure for constructing raising and lowering operators satisfying any prescribed `distorted' Heisenberg algebra (including the $q$-generalization). This is done by means of an operator transformation implemented by a shift operator. The latter is obtained by solving an appropriate partial isometry condition in the Hilbert space. Formal representations of the non-local operators concerned are given in terms of pseudo-differential operators. Using the new annihilation operators, new classes of coherent states are constructed for isospectral oscillator Hamiltonians. The corresponding Fock-Bargmann representations are also considered, with specific reference to the order of the entire function family in each case.Comment: 13 page

Quantum revivals, geometric phases and circle map recurrences

Revivals of the coherent states of a deformed, adiabatically and cyclically varying oscillator Hamiltonian are examined. The revival time distribution is exactly that of Poincar\'{e} recurrences for a rotation map: only three distinct revival times can occur, with specified weights. A link is thus established between quantum revivals and recurrences in a coarse-grained discrete-time dynamical system.Comment: 9 page

An Aid for Mechanisation of Flight Control Systems on Micro-Computers

This paper deals with the development of an automated aid to translate the block diagram of flight control system (FCS) to assembly level code. By defining a suitable syntax and by building a matrix of inputs and outputs of the blocks, it becomes easy to translate the block diagram. It is also shown how the process of fault detection can be automated. The results obtained through the automated aid have been validated by ORACLE library using the block diagram of Cstar controller of F8 aircraft

Moduli of parahoric G-torsors on a compact Riemann surface

Let χ be an irreducible smooth projective algebraic curve of genus g ≥ 2 over the ground field C and let G be a semisimple simply connected algebraic group. The aim of this paper is to introduce the notion of a semistable and stable parahoric torsor under a certain Bruhat-Tits group scheme G, construct the moduli space of semistable parahoric G-torsors and identify the underlying topological space of this moduli space with certain spaces of homomorphisms of Fuchsian groups into a maximal compact subgroup of G. The results give a complete generalization of the earlier results of Mehta and Seshadri on parabolic vector bundles

Cosmic acceleration in a model of scalar-tensor gravitation

In this paper we consider a model of scalar-tensor theory of gravitation in which the scalar field, $\phi$ determines the gravitational coupling G and has a Lagrangian of the form, $\mathcal{L}_{\phi} =-V(\phi)\sqrt{1 - \partial_{\mu}\phi\partial^{\mu}\phi}$. We study the cosmological consequence of this theory in the matter dominated era and show that this leads to a transition from an initial decelerated expansion to an accelerated expansion phase at the present epoch. Using observational constraints, we see that the effective equation of state today for the scalar field turns out to be $p_{\phi}=w_{\phi}{\rho}_{\phi}$, with $w_{\phi}=-0.88$ and that the transition to an accelerated phase happened at a redshift of about 0.3.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures, matches published versio