Boynton Beach City Library Local History Archives

The mission of the Boynton Beach City Library Local History Archives is to collect, preserve, and make accessible the heritage of the people of our region. Our holdings include physical and digital collections of manuscripts, maps, books, scrapbooks, postcards, photographs, records, and ephemera. We welcome all members of the Boynton Beach communities and the general public

A DEA/Goal Programming Model for Incineration Plants Performance in the UK

Incineration plants in UK carry out two important tasks: reduction of waste disposed to landfills, and power/heat production from waste incineration distributed to the grid. However, incinerating waste produces, except for desirable outputs like exported power, harmful emissions, too. In this work, a DEA/Goal Programming model is presented to assess the performance of each incineration plant. Data from 22 incineration plants have been collected regarding capacity (waste and power), power exported, annual availability and levels of harmful emissions. The proposed model provides an allocation of the examined incineration plants, by shutting down a plant if it doesn’t meet environmental targets. Additional constraints are considered regarding levels of power exported and annual availability. The model is solved for multiple scenarios regarding the number of incineration plants that will be eventually installed. Results are provided regarding the optimal allocation of each incineration plant and the optimal values of under and over achievement of each environmental target. Additionally, a comparative analysis is conducted on the scores derived from the proposed method and DEA models that handle both desirable and undesirable outputs. No differences between the two rankings are derived by applying statistical analysis

A Computational Method for Solving DEA Problems with Infinitely Many DMUs

Semi-infinite programs as related to DEA with infinitely many DMUs will be solved by bisections within the framework of LPs. No gradient Information Is needed, contrary to the usual Newton-Raphson type methods for solving semi-Infinite programs.The rate of convergence is linear. The method has a stable convergency feature derived from the bisection rule.Reprinted from Research Report CCS 561, Center for Cybernetic Studies, The University of Texas, at Austin

Existence and representation of diophantine and mixed diophantine solutions to linear equations and inequalities

AbstractIn this paper we present necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of solutions to more general systems of linear diophantine equations and inequalities than have previously been considered. We do this in terms of variants and extensions of generalized inverse concepts which also permit us to give representation of the set of all solutions to the systems. The results are further extended to mixed integer systems

Maximin and maximal solutions for linear programming problems with possibilistic uncertainty

We consider linear programming problems with uncertain constraint coefficients described by intervals or, more generally, possi-bility distributions. The uncertainty is given a behavioral interpretation using coherent lower previsions from the theory of imprecise probabilities. We give a meaning to the linear programming problems by reformulating them as decision problems under such imprecise-probabilistic uncer-tainty. We provide expressions for and illustrations of the maximin and maximal solutions of these decision problems and present computational approaches for dealing with them

Analysis of Production and Location Decisions by Means of Multi-Criteria Analysis

During the last few years economists and operations researchers have paid much attention to multi-criteria analysis as a tool in modern decision-making. The basic feature of multi-criteria analysis is the fact that a wide variety of relevant decision aspects can be taken into account without a necessity to translate all these aspects in monetary terms. This article will give a brief survey of these new methods in both a quantitative and in a qualitative sense. After this survey the relevance of multi-criteria analysis for entrepreneurial decisions in the field of production and investments will be exposed. The analysis will be illustrated by means of two examples of entrepreneurial decision-problems, which have been solved by means of multi-criteria analysis

Asymptotic duality over closed convex sets

AbstractThe asymptotic duality theory of linear programming over closed convex cones [4] is extended to closed convex sets, by embedding such sets in appropriate cones. Applications to convex programming and to approximation theory are given

Double Bootstrap Confidence Intervals in the Two-Stage DEA Approach

Contextual factors usually assume an important role in determining firms' productive efficiencies. Nevertheless, identifying them in a regression framework might be complicated. The problem arises from the efficiencies being correlated with each other when estimated by Data Envelopment Analysis, rendering standard inference methods invalid. Simar and Wilson (2007) suggest the use of bootstrap algorithms that allow for valid statistical inference in this context. This article extends their work by proposing a double bootstrap algorithm for obtaining confidence intervals with improved coverage probabilities. Moreover, acknowledging the computational burden associated with iterated bootstrap procedures, we provide an algorithm based on deterministic stopping rules, which is less computationally demanding. Monte Carlo evidence shows considerable improvement in the coverage probabilities after iterating the bootstrap procedure. The results also suggest that percentile confidence intervals perform better than their basic counterpart