Steel structures such as bridges, tanks and pylons are exposed to outdoor weathering conditions. In order to prevent them from corrosion they are protected by an organic coating system. Unfortunately, the coating system itself is also subject to deterioration. Imperfect maintenance actions such...

In the year 2000 some $142 billion in royalties were paid internationally by users of a specific piece of knowledge that were protected under Intellectual Property Right law (IPR) to those parties that owned these rights. Under current circumstances where knowledge & innovation play an...

In this paper, we consider a continuous review inventory system of a slow moving item for which the demand rate drops to a lower level at a pre-determined time. Inventory system is controlled according to one-for-one replenishment policy with fixed lead time. Adaptation to the lower demand rate...

This paper discusses how markets and society relate to each other. We present and discuss three views: markets as separate, markets as embedded, and markets as impure. One’s stance on the contribution of markets to welfare hinges on the conceptualization of market and other spheres in society....

In the warehouse of Ankor, a wholesaler of tools and garden equipment, various problems concerning the storage and retrieval of products arise. For example, heavy products have to be retrieved prior to light products to prevent damage. Furthermore, the layout of the warehouse differs from the...

In this paper we deal with a common problem found in the operations of security and preventive/corrective maintenance services: that of routing a number of mobile resources to serve foreseen and unforeseen tasks during a shift. We define the (Mobile Re-Allocation Problem) MRAP as the problem of...

Services form an important part of the economy today. Innovation for service firms is as important as for manufacturing, but the innovation process for service firms is comparatively little studied. In this paper, I review the literature there is on the innovation process for service firms, and...

In contrast to findings in other countries, and surprisingly in view of the literature, high tech economic activity in the Netherlands is not spread geographically according to either relevant labour market characteristics or because of localized agglomeration effects. Instead, statistical...

Real-time railway operations are subject to stochastic disturbances. However, a railway timetable is a deterministic plan. Thus a timetable should be designed in such a way that it can absorb the stochastic disturbances as well as possible. To that end, a timetable contains buffer times between...

The interrelationships among technology, organization, and territory in an economic system have been considered as a 'holy trinity' from the perspective of regional development studies. The mutual information in three dimensions was proposed as an indicator of the surplus value (entropy) in...