Production inventory with service time and interruptions

This paper considers an (s,S) production inventory system with positive service time, with time for producing each item following Erlang distribution. Customers arrive according to a Poisson process. A customer who arrives when there is no inventory in the system is considered lost. On the other hand, a customer who finds a busy server with at least one inventory in the system joins a queue of infinite capacity. When the inventory level falls to s, production process is switched on, and it is switched off when the inventory level reaches back to S. Service time to each customer also follows an Erlang distribution. The service of a customer may be interrupted, where the time for such a phenomenon follows an exponential distribution, whenever it occurs. An interrupted service, after repair, resumes from where it was stopped. The correction/repair time follows an exponential distribution. We assume that the service of a single customer may encounter any number of interruptions and that the customer being served waits there until his service is completed. Moreover, at a time the server is subject to at most one interruption. We also assume that no inventory is lost due to a service interruption. Like the service process, the production process also is subject to interruptions, where the duration to an interruption follows an exponential distribution. However, in contrast to the service interruption, in the case of interruption to production process, we assume that the item being processed is lost because of interruption. That is, the production process, on being interrupted, restarts from the beginning, after repair. The repair time of an interrupted production process follows exponential distribution. Few of the last service phases are assumed to be protected in the sense that the service will not be interrupted while being in these phases. The same is assumed for the production process also.

The model is analysed as a level-independent quasi-birth–death process. We apply a novel method to obtain an explicit expression for the necessary and sufficient condition for the stability of the system under study. This method works even if we assume general phase-type distributions for the production as well as the service processes, and hence can be used to characterise the stability of inventory systems where the assumption of disallowing the customers to join the system, when there is a shortage of inventory has been made. Under stability, we apply matrix analytic methods to compute the system state distribution. In consequence to that, several system performance measures have been derived, and their dependence on the system parameters has been studied numerically.     

Sulphonic acids doped poly(N-ethyl aniline): A material for humidity sensing application

Substituted polyaniline, poly(N-ethyl aniline) (PNEA), doped with camphor sulphonic acid (CSA) and p-toluene sulphonic acid (p-TSA), was synthesized by single-step chemical polymerization method using ammonium persulphate as an oxidizing agent. This is a single-step polymerization process to synthesize directly the conducting emeraldine salt phase of the polymer using CSA and p-toluene sulphonic acid as dopants. The synthesized polymers were characterized by UV–vis and FTIR spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy, TGA/SDTA, DSC, and conductivity measurements. This single-step chemical synthesis method offers a polymer having very good physicochemical properties with good electrical conductivity. High temperature conductivity measurements show “thermal activated behavior.” The change in resistance with respect to % relative humidity (% RH) is observed, when pressed pellets of the polymer were exposed to the broad range of humidity (ranging between 20 and 100% RH). POLYM. ENG. SCI., 47:1621–1629, 2007. © 2007 Society of Plastics Engineers     

In-Situ Measurement of Emissivities of Ceramic—Polymer Composite Materials

Emissivities of high-dielectric ceramic composites used in microelectronic packaging were measured by a modified hot-filament ASTM method and infrared thermometry; total hemispherical emissivities were measured using the hot-filament method, and effective band emissivities were measured using infrared thermometry. Two ceramics—5μm alumina and 2–3μm aluminum nitride—were chosen as the base of the substrate. They were blended with poly(vinyl butyral) (PVB) with proper amounts of solvents and cast on a 304-stainless-steel strip used as the heating filament. Emissivity measurements in the temperature range of 380–1000 K were performed using three different sets of experiments. In the first set of experiments, the emissivities of unfired polymer composites were measured in the temperature range of 380–450 K, a temperature at which thermal degradation starts to occur. In the second set, the specimens were heated overnight in a furnace at 673 K for binder burnout, and measurements were conducted on fired composites in the temperature range of 380–1000 K. In the last set, the emissivity of the specimens were measured in situ in the temperature range of 380–1000 K by condensing the degradation products using a liquid-nitrogen cryogenic jacket on-line before the pump line to avoid contamination of the turbomolecular pump. The system pressure was controlled below 5 × 10⁻⁵ torr (}6.7 × 10⁻³ Pa) in all experiments to constrain nonradiative types of heat transfer inside the bell jar.     

A deterministic approach to throughput scaling in wireless networks

We address the problem of how throughput in a wireless network scales as the number of users grows. Following the model of Gupta and Kumar, we consider n identical nodes placed in a fixed area. Pairs of transmitters and receivers wish to communicate but are subject to interference from other nodes. Throughput is measured in bit-meters per second. We provide a very elementary deterministic approach that gives achievability results in terms of three key properties of the node locations. As a special case, we obtain /spl Omega/(/spl radic/n) throughput for a general class of network configurations in a fixed area. Results for random node locations in a fixed area can also be derived as special cases of the general result by verifying the growth rate of three parameters. For example, as a simple corollary of our result we obtain a stronger (almost sure) version of the /spl radic/n//spl radic/(logn) throughput for random node locations in a fixed area obtained by Gupta and Kumar. Results for some other interesting non-independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) node distributions are also provided.     

Exploring mesh and tree-based multicast. Routing protocols for MANETs

Recently, it became apparent that group-oriented services are one of the primary application classes targeted by MANETs. As a result, several MANET-specific multicast routing protocols have been proposed. Although these protocols perform well under specific mobility scenarios, traffic loads, and network conditions, no single protocol has been shown to be optimal in all scenarios. The goal of this paper is to characterize the performance of multicast protocols over a wide range of MANET scenarios. To this end, we evaluate the performance of mesh and tree-based multicast routing schemes relative to flooding and recommend protocols most suitable for specific MANET scenarios. Based on the analysis and simulation results, we also propose two variations of flooding, scoped flooding and hyper flooding, as a means to reduce overhead and increase reliability, respectively. Another contribution of the paper is a simulation-based comparative study of the proposed flooding variations against plain flooding, mesh, and tree-based MANET routing. In our simulations, in addition to "synthetic" scenarios, we also used more realistic MANET settings, such as conferencing and emergency response.     

Overlap pattern synthesis with an efficient nearest neighbor classifier

Nearest neighbor (NN) classifier is the most popular non-parametric classifier. It is a simple classifier with no design phase and shows good performance. Important factors affecting the efficiency and performance of NN classifier are (i) memory required to store the training set, (ii) classification time required to search the nearest neighbor of a given test pattern, and (iii) due to the curse of dimensionality the number of training patterns needed by it to achieve a given classification accuracy becomes prohibitively large when the dimensionality of the data is high. In this paper, we propose novel techniques to improve the performance of NN classifier and at the same time to reduce its computational burden. These techniques are broadly based on: (i) overlap based pattern synthesis which can generate a larger number of artificial patterns than the number of input patterns and thus can reduce the curse of dimensionality effect, (ii) a compact representation of the given set of training patterns called overlap pattern graph (OLP-graph) which can be incrementally built by scanning the training set only once and (iii) an efficient NN classifier called OLP-NNC which directly works with OLP-graph and does implicit overlap based pattern synthesis. A comparison based on experimental results is given between some of the relevant classifiers. The proposed schemes are suitable for applications dealing with large and high dimensional datasets like those in data mining.     

Investigations on an Axial Flow Fan Stage subjected to Circumferential Inlet Flow Distortion and Swirl

INTRODUCTIONInletfiowdistortionisatermusedtodenotethewriationofflowpropertiesasafunctionofthespa-tialcoordinatesandtime.Thenonuniformityoc-cursinconunonflowpropertiessuchastotalpressure,staticpressure'velocity,temperature,flowangleandgasconstituency.Swirlisthetermusedtodescribetherotationoffiowinrelationtotherotationoftheforor.Swirlmaybegeneratedasaconsequenceofsec-ondaryflowsinducedduetoflowcurvaturesorduetothepresenceofInletGuideVanes(IGV).DistortionandSwirl(inducedduetocurvatureoffl…     

Optimal sequences for CDMA under colored noise: a Schur-saddlefunction property

We consider direct sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA), modeling interference from users communicating with neighboring base stations by additive colored noise. We consider two types of receiver structures: first we consider the information-theoretically optimal receiver and use the sum capacity of the channel as our performance measure. Second, we consider the linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) receiver and use the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) of the estimate of the symbol transmitted as our performance measure. Our main result is a constructive characterization of the possible performance in both these scenarios. A central contribution of this characterization is the derivation of a qualitative feature of the optimal performance measure in both the scenarios studied. We show that the sum capacity is a saddle function: it is convex in the additive noise covariances and concave in the user received powers. In the linear receiver case, we show that the mini average power required to meet a set of target performance requirements of the users is a saddle function: it is convex in the additive noise covariances and concave in the set of performance requirements     

Vartalaap: A distributed multicast communication system

With the increasing proliferation of computer networks and distributed systems, there is a growing number of applications using multicast communication. This paper presents the Vartalaap system developed at IIT, Bombay. Vartalaap is an hierarchical distributed system for multicast communication over a network, implemented in a hardware-independent fashion. The multicast is achieved without resorting to unnecessary broadcasting of messages over the network. Issues covered in this paper include the primitives for multicast, the multicast model and the system architecture. We discuss the implementation of Vartalaap and compare it with some other systems. We conclude with a discussion on the limitations of the current implementation and directions for future work.