A Stackelberg game theoretic model for optimizing product family architecting with supply chain consideration

Planning of an optimal product family architecture (PFA) plays a critical role in defining an organization's product platforms for product variant configuration while leveraging commonality and variety. The focus of PFA planning has been traditionally limited to the product design stage, yet with limited consideration of the downstream supply chain-related issues. Decisions of supply chain configuration have a profound impact on not only the end cost of product family fulfillment, but also how to design the architecture of module configuration within a product family. It is imperative for product family architecting to be optimized in conjunction with supply chain configuration decisions. This paper formulates joint optimization of PFA planning and supply chain configuration as a Stackelberg game. A nonlinear, mixed integer bilevel programming model is developed to deal with the leader–follower game decisions between product family architecting and supply chain configuration. The PFA decision making is represented as an upper-level optimization problem for optimal selection of the base modules and compound modules. A lower-level optimization problem copes with supply chain decisions in accordance with the upper-level decisions of product variant configuration. Consistent with the bilevel optimization model, a nested genetic algorithm is developed to derive near optimal solutions for PFA and the corresponding supply chain network. A case study of joint PFA and supply chain decisions for power transformers is reported to demonstrate the feasibility and potential of the proposed Stackelberg game theoretic joint optimization of PFA and supply chain decisions

A Comprehensive Ubiquitous Healthcare Solution on an Android™ Mobile Device

Provision of ubiquitous healthcare solutions which provide healthcare services at anytime anywhere has become more favorable nowadays due to the emphasis on healthcare awareness and also the growth of mobile wireless technologies. Following this approach, an Android™ smart phone device is proposed as a mobile monitoring terminal to observe and analyze ECG (electrocardiography) waveforms from wearable ECG devices in real time under the coverage of a wireless sensor network (WSN). The exploitation of WSN in healthcare is able to substitute the complicated wired technology, moving healthcare away from a fixed location setting. As an extension to the monitoring scheme, medicine care is taken into consideration by utilizing the mobile phone as a barcode decoder, to verify and assist out-patients in the medication administration process, providing a better and more comprehensive healthcare service

Shining the Light to Terahertz Spectroscopy of nL-Volume Biological Samples

International audienceWe present a technique allowing the confinement of a broadband terahertz pulse to a few-nL volume. The method is approved in terahertz time-domain spectroscopy study of biological samples and further perspectives are discussed

The two-boundary sine-Gordon model

We study in this paper the ground state energy of a free bosonic theory on a finite interval of length $R$ with either a pair of sine-Gordon type or a pair of Kondo type interactions at each boundary. This problem has potential applications in condensed matter (current through superconductor-Luttinger liquid-superconductor junctions) as well as in open string theory (tachyon condensation). While the application of Bethe ansatz techniques to this problem is in principle well known, considerable technical difficulties are encountered. These difficulties arise mainly from the way the bare couplings are encoded in the reflection matrices, and require complex analytic continuations, which we carry out in detail in a few cases.Comment: 34 pages (revtex), 8 figure

Weak coupling expansion of a chiral gauge theory on a lattice in the overlap formulation

Weak coupling expansion of a chiral gauge theory on a lattice is discussed in the overlap formulation. We analyze the fermion propagator and the fermion-fermion-gauge boson vertex in the one loop level. The chiral properties of the propagator and vertex are correctly preserved without tuning the parameters involved even after the one-loop renormalization, and the ultraviolet divergent parts agree with the continuum theory. Our analysis, together with the existing studies on the vacuum polarization and the gauge boson n-point functions, completes the proof of the renormalizability of this formulation to the one loop level.Comment: LaTeX, 23 page

Lattice perturbation theory in the overlap formulation for the Yukawa and gauge interactions

Lattice perturbation theory is discussed in the overlap formulation for the Yukawa and gauge interactions. One and two point functions are studied for fermion, scalar and gauge fields, taking the Standard Model as an example. The formulae for the self-energies are given from which their divergent and finite parts can be computed at the one loop level.Comment: LaTeX, 25 page

The Reading Palaeofire Database : an expanded global resource to document changes in fire regimes from sedimentary charcoal records

Sedimentary charcoal records are widely used to reconstruct regional changes in fire regimes through time in the geological past. Existing global compilations are not geographically comprehensive and do not provide consistent metadata for all sites. Furthermore, the age models provided for these records are not harmonised and many are based on older calibrations of the radiocarbon ages. These issues limit the use of existing compilations for research into past fire regimes. Here, we present an expanded database of charcoal records, accompanied by new age models based on recalibration of radiocarbon ages using IntCal20 and Bayesian age-modelling software. We document the structure and contents of the database, the construction of the age models, and the quality control measures applied. We also record the expansion of geographical coverage relative to previous charcoal compilations and the expansion of metadata that can be used to inform analyses. This first version of the Reading Palaeofire Database contains 1676 records (entities) from 1480 sites worldwide. The database (RPDv1b - Harrison et al., 2021) is available at https://doi.org/10.17864/1947.000345.Peer reviewe