As required by the Energy Policy Act of 2005, utility companies across the U.S. are offering TOU (time-of-use) based electricity demand response programs. The TOU rate gives consumers opportunities to manage their electricity bill by shifting use from on-peak periods to mid-peak and off-peak...

In the literature of reliability engineering, reliability of the weighted k-out-of-n system can be calculated using component reliability based on the structure function. The calculation usually assumes that the true component reliability is completely known. However, this is not the case in...

The growth of healthcare expenditure provokes constant comments and discussions, as countries battle the issues on cost containment and cost effectiveness. Prior to 1978, medical institutions in China were either state‐owned or were collective public hospitals. Since 1978, China has been...

PDMS (Polydimethylsiloxane) is a typical material used to fabricate optofluidic microreactors for photocatalytic water splitting application. However, conventional direct catalyst coating methods are unable to load catalysts firmly and uniformly on the PDMS substrate, which results in weak bond...

Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region is one of the severest desertification areas from wind erosion in North China, and it poses as a potential hazard factor for the slope stability of embankments. As the most common and abundant filler in embankment construction in the desert, Aeolian sandy soil is...

This paper introduces the achievements and development plan on developing and utilizing the renewable energy resources in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China. The fact shows that developing and utilizing renewable energy resources is a kind of feasible and effective way to solve the energy...

Two results in a recent paper by Wang and Cheng [Wang, J-B and TCE Cheng (2007). Asia-Pacific Journal of Operational Research, 24, 245–261] are incorrect because job processing times are variable due to both deteriorating jobs and learning effects, which is not taken into account by the...

A modified particle swarm optimization algorithm is proposed in this paper to investigate the dynamic of pedestrian evacuation from a fire in a public building—a supermarket with multiple exits and configurations of counters. Two distinctive evacuation behaviours featured by the shortest-path...

The reduction of the electricity demand during peak periods is considered a main objective of electricity load management. It can relieve the financial pressure of the investment on the capacity expansion for the power grid in the United States. Compared to a great deal of research on commercial...

We established the existence of weak solutions of the fourth-order elliptic equation of the form <Equation ID="Equa1"> <EquationSource Format="TEX">$$\begin{aligned} \Delta ^2 u -\Delta u + a(x)u=\lambda b(x) f(u) + \mu g (x, u), \qquad x \in \mathbb{R }^N, u \in H^2(\mathbb{R }^N), \end{aligned}$$</EquationSource> </Equation>where <InlineEquation ID="IEq3"> <EquationSource Format="TEX">$$\lambda $$</EquationSource> </InlineEquation> is a positive parameter, <InlineEquation ID="IEq4">...</inlineequation></equationsource></inlineequation></equationsource></equation>