To improve the productivities of an automated container terminal, it is important to schedule different types of handling equipment in an integrated way. A mixed-integer programming model, which considers various constraints related to the integrated operations between different types of...

In the crowd security research area a primary concern is to identify the macro state of crowd behaviors to prevent disasters and to supervise the crowd behaviors. The entropy is used to describe the macro state of a self-organization system in physics. The entropy change indicates the system...

Global warming is predicted to have adverse effects on crop productivity and will present an enormous challenge to sustainable development and food security, especially in dryland regions. Prior studies have identified that adapted crop cultivars could effectively act to offset the effects of...

We propose a structural model to study the effect of online product reviews on consumer purchases of experiential products. Such purchases are characterized by limited repeat purchase behavior of the same product item (such as a book title) but significant past usage experience with other...

Rain-fed maize production in semi-arid areas of the Loess Plateau in China is constrained by low temperatures and water limitations during the early growth stage. Traditionally, gravel mulching was an effective strategy to increase soil temperature and moisture and, therefore, crop production;...

Boron-doped ZnO (BZO) films deposited by metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) generally act as transparent conductive oxide films in hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) solar cells and exhibit a high external quantum efficiency (EQE) performance in the short-wavelength region....

This paper provides an exploratory study of price dispersion in the grocery market and checks for the consistency of the evidence on this price dispersion with the existing theories of price dispersion due to costly consumer search, competition, and consumer heterogeneity in the context of the...

In this paper, we develop a simultaneous model of consumer brand choice and negotiated price in the highly relevant marketing context of automobile transactions. Consumer brand choice is modeled as a multinomial probabilistic outcome, and the individual consumer-level transaction price is...