Wholesale and retail sector companies improve their financial structure to be more resistant to economic fluctuations. Also, they are complying with instabilities in the economy where they could improve their activities and use their capital more efficiently to save costs and improve their...

Modern decision support systems need to be connected online to equipment so that the large amount of data available can be used to guide the decisions of shop floor operators, making full use of the potential of industrial manufacturing systems. This paper investigates a novel optimization and...

With the need of more responsive and resilient manufacturing processes for high value, customised products, Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) remain a very relevant manufacturing approach. Due to their complexity, quality monitoring in these types of systems can be very difficult,...

The practice of cultivating the soil, producing crops, and keeping livestock is referred to as farming. Agriculture is critical to a country's economic development. Nearly 58 percent of a country's primary source of livelihood is farming. Farmers till date had adopted conventional farming...

The Brazilian energy regulator has been applying data envelopment analysis to set operating costs for distribution system operators since 2013. In addition to data envelopment analysis, further adjustments using Bootstrap and a reference efficiency, estimated as 79%, allow companies to have cost...

In many markets there is some form of regulation; and when new policy measures are introduced into a particular sector, the question of how to structure an adequate regulatory process arises. This paper contributes to the literature by describing the approach taken in the nursing home sector in...

A Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method has been applied by the Brazilian regulator to set regulatory operational costs for 61 electricity distribution utilities. Recent studies show evidence that the current method still requires improvements. This study evaluates the use of Stochastic...

Power is a central phenomenon in human societies. Sociologists, politicians, philosophers in all cultures try to understand emergence and change processes of power. What was missing for a long time is measurement of power. First attempts were made in the last decades. This contribution...