Providing clean and sustainable energy for all is an ever elusive challenge, especially encountered in remote and poor rural areas. Cost-effective solutions have been found through renewable energy systems (RES) which, when combined with specialized products like rechargeable lamps using light...

Dynamic performance of adsorption chillers (ACs) with adsorbent beds of loose grains is addressed in this paper. Temporal evolution of quasi-isobaric ad-/desorption curves for simple bed configuration of n-layers of loose grains (n = 1, 2, 4, and 8) located on a heat transfer metal support is...

We consider a health authority seeking to allocate annual budgets optimally over time to minimize the discounted social cost of infection(s) evolving in a finite set of groups. This optimization problem is challenging since the standard SIS epidemiological model describing the spread of the...

Future harvests from commercial fish stocks are unlikely to increase substantially due to biological and regulatory constraints. Developing alternative sets of processed seafood products is one strategy for increasing welfare while managing the risks inherent in a variable and renewable natural...

We analyse how progressive taxation and education subsidies affect schooling decisions when the returns to education are stochastic. We use the theory of real options to solve the problem of education choice in a dynamic, life-cycle consistent, stochastic model. We show that education attainment...

During system development, large-scale, complex energy systems require multi-disciplinary efforts to achieve system quality, cost, and performance goals. As systems become larger and more complex, the number of possible system configurations and technologies, which meet the designer’s...

We obtain a recursive formulation for a general class of contracting problems involving incentive constraints. These constraints make the corresponding maximization sup problems non-recursive. Our approach consists of studying a recursive Lagrangian. Under standard general conditions, there is a...

Persistent and significant privately held stockpiles of minerals have long been an important empirical regularity in the United States. Such stockpiles would not rationally be held in a traditional Hotelling-style model, though firms could be willing to hold inventories if extraction costs are...