Empirical evidence on the relationship between democracy and economic reforms is limited to few reforms, countries, and years. This paper studies the impact of democracy on the adoption of economic reforms using a new dataset on reforms in the financial, capital and banking sectors, product...

The EU Nitrate Directive has spurred many countries to regulate manure production and manure application. Farmers have three allocation options: spreading manure on their own land, transporting manure to other farmers' land or processing manure. The manure problem can be seen as an allocation...

In this paper, we discuss the cross-effects on the productive strategy of French dairy farms due to the decoupling and to price variation. A model based on mathematical programming has been developed to determine how dairy farmers might re-evaluate their systems to identify an optimal production...

A web based Spatial Decision Support System (web SDSS) has been implemented in Thessaly, the most significant arable cropping region in Greece, in order to evaluate selected energy crop supply. The web SDSS uses an optimization module to support the decision process, incorporating user input...

We present a detailed analysis of the patient and resource scheduling problem in rehabilitation hospitals. In practice, the predominantly therapeutical treatments and activities which are prescribed for the patients are typically scheduled manually. This leads to rigid and inefficient schedules...

The 2003 CAP reform considerably affects cropping patterns in European agriculture. At the same time the imperatives of the forthcoming Water Framework Directive (WFD) is expected to modify irrigation decisions especially in Southern Europe where irrigated agriculture utilizes about 70-80% of...

RegMAS (Regional Multi Agent Simulator) is an open-source spatially explicit multi-agent model framework specifically designed for long-term simulations of the effects of policies on agricultural systems. Using iterated conventional optimisation problems as agents’ behavioural rules, it allows...

This paper reports on early work and concept development for Optimal Mine Site Energy Supply, where the specific energy supply requirements and constraints for mineral production operations are considered against methodologies that have been applied for other sectors and in other energy policy...

The focus of this paper is on the demonstration that some rather well-known network-based formulation in operations research, that have heretofore largely gone unnoticed in activity-based travel research, offer a potentially powerful technique for advancing the general development of the...

Penalty function is an important tool in solving many constrained optimization problems in areas such as industrial design and management. In this paper, we study exactness and algorithm of an objective penalty function for inequality constrained optimization. In terms of exactness, this...