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There is a simple concept that can significantly improve the environmental balance of battery electric vehicles and at the same time avoid the known disadvantages of these vehicles (short range, long charging times, high acquisition costs) without having to wait for further developed batteries or a higher proportion of green electricity. For this purpose, the vehicles are equipped with built-in batteries for short and medium distances and are therefore sufficient for the majority of daily journeys. For long-distance journeys, the driver borrows charged additional battery packs at swapping stations, which are automatically inserted into a standardised exchange slot within a few minutes. This paper focuses on the improvements in electric vehicles that can be achieved by combining built-in and exchangeable battery technique and also on the practical feasibility of the concept. It is shown that the battery capacity required for the entire vehicle fleet can be significantly reduced. The resulting ecological advantages on the one hand and grid-stabilising effects of a nationwide network of swapping stations on the other hand, support the transition to environmentally sustainable mobility. The characteristics of the concept presented are advantageous for its practical implementation. The acceptance by customers and manufacturers can thus be improved compared to previous battery swapping systems. The loan system for the exchange batteries may be designed conveniently and information security as well as data protection will be strictly complied.

In the first part, this paper aims to analyze the optical and electronic performance of advanced drivers for LED lighting applications, taking into account the financial aspects. Consequently, for two price classes (low- and high-cost), we investigate the power conversion efficiency, their grid impact, lighting characteristics, and finally the cost-benefit ratio. Experimental measurements on physical prototypes validate the simulations performed with real supplying conditions. The final part of the paper explains some optimization steps for price-performance ratio according to a multicriteria matrix or to the main criteria established by the beneficiary. The study should be a useful decision making tool for both the scientific community and the contracting authorities.

Rising demand for solar power generation will lead to increased land use competition, and thus to potential economic and social conflict. A solution to this challenge is to produce food and energy within an agrophotovoltaics (APV) system. Since 2017, governments in Japan, France, Massachusetts (USA), South Korea, and China have introduced policies supporting APV implementation. Governments considering APV implementation – e.g. in India and Germany – for evidence-based policy making are demanding information on how levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) of APV differs from that of conventional ground-mounted photovoltaics (PV), as well as on how additional costs associated with APV installation relate to the benefit of maintaining agricultural activity under APV. Data for a techno-economic price-performance ratio calculation has been retrieved from an inter- and transdisciplinary APV case study in Germany. We observed that the LCOE of APV with €0.0828 kWh−1 is 38% higher than that of ground-mounted PV, resulting in an annual cropland preservation price of €9,052 ha−1 a−1. The annual revenue of potato and winter wheat production under APV resulted in a performance of €10,707 ha−1 a−1 and €1,959 ha−1 a−1 respectively, leading to a beneficial price-performance ratio of 0.85 for potato production and, with a ratio of 4.62, a disadvantageous result for winter wheat. Overall, APV is not necessarily recommended in crop rotating systems. However, in combination with permanent cultures – e.g. berries, fruits, or wine grapes – as the price for these types of applications is lower, while at the same time providing higher performance by optimizing techno-ecological synergies.

This paper focuses on seeking a new heuristic scheme for an influence maximization problem in social networks: how to economically select a subset of individuals (so-called seeds) to trigger a large cascade of further adoptions of a new behavior based on a contagion process. Most existing works on selection of seeds assumed that the constant number $k$ seeds could be selected, irrespective of the intrinsic property of each individual's different susceptibility of being influenced (e.g., it may be costly to persuade some seeds to adopt a new behavior). In this paper, a price-performance-ratio inspired heuristic scheme, PPRank, is proposed, which investigates how to economically select seeds within a given budget and meanwhile try to maximize the diffusion process. Our paper's contributions are threefold. First, we explicitly characterize each user with two distinct factors: the susceptibility of being influenced (SI) and influential power (IP) representing the ability to actively influence others and formulate users' SIs and IPs according to their social relations, and then, a convex price-demand curve-based model is utilized to properly convert each user's SI into persuasion cost (PC) representing the cost used to successfully make the individual adopt a new behavior. Furthermore, a novel cost-effective selection scheme is proposed, which adopts both the price performance ratio (PC-IP ratio) and user's IP as an integrated selection criterion and meanwhile explicitly takes into account the overlapping effect; finally, simulations using both artificially generated and real-trace network data illustrate that, under the same budgets, PPRank can achieve larger diffusion range than other heuristic and brute-force greedy schemes without taking users' persuasion costs into account.

OVERVIEW: Emerging economies, with their vast, untapped markets, present new growth opportunities for multinational companies willing to accommodate the particular needs of these markets. Our study analyzes four innovative firms in Asia that became multinational companies on the back of disruptive products developed specifically to address the needs of consumers in emerging economies. The cases suggest that firms wishing to operate in these markets must be receptive to the opportunities arising from the resource constraints typical of consumers in the markets and willing to develop the capabilities to meet the aggressive price/performance ratios required by consumers. Our study highlights critical R&D and managerial practices that are vital for creating new, affordable products or services for the unserved mass markets in developing countries. This analysis has important implications for reverse innovation.

Picture-archiving and communication systems are complex entities, but at core they consist of compute processors that are networked together to store and retrieve objects. Therein lay fundamental aspects of both performance benchmarking and predicting future costs, provided one can accurately predict trends in both exam volumes and sizes. Hence, determining the correct amount of capital to reserve annually for the information technology infrastructure can be a difficult process for the administrator of a medical center. Both exam volumes and sizes tend to increase over time. In addition, users demand more compute-intensive applications and expect exam delivery to the desktop to be ever timelier despite the increase in size. Against this, storage, compute, and networking costs tend to decrease over time for the same performance level. At the end of the day, the question of whether to budget more or less capital for next year’s infrastructure is not trivial. This paper develops a methodology that uses current baseline data to predict the “ampleness” of a budget to meet future needs.

A set of experiments is performed to experimentally validate that Learning Feed-Forward Control can compensate for reproducible errors that were introduced because of a low-cost electro-mechanical construction. A linear motor is used in this set of experiments in which the magnet plates and the driving coils could be exchanged. Several configurations are tested with different combinations of magnet plates and coils while Learning Feed-Forward Control is used to compensate for the disturbing effects. It is shown that the tracking error after learning is hardly influenced by the accuracy of the placement of the magnets and the tolerance on their strength. This allows to use low-cost magnets in a linear motor without degenerating the performance. The quality of the driving coils has a more significant influence on the tracking error after learning.

client/server(C/S) systems have revolutionized the systems development approach. Among the drivers of the C/S systems is the lower price/performance ratio compared to the mainframe‐based transaction processing systems. Data mining is a process of identifying patterns in corporate transactional and operational databases (also called data warehouses). As most Fortune 500 companies are moving quickly towards the client server systems, it is increasingly becoming important that a data mining approaches should be adapted for C/S systems. In the current paper, we describe different data mining approaches that are used in the C/S systems.

The high-speed wire electrical discharge machining (WEDM-HS) machine has been more and more favoured by customers for the low manufacturing cost, the degree of automation and the advantages over the WEDM-LS in price performance ratio. However, the processing quality (the precision of form and position and the surface quality) of WEDM-HS is poorer than that of WEDM-LS, and the processing quality is one of the main technical indicators of WEDM. There are many factors on the processing quality of WEDM-HS, the effects of non-electrical parameters, including the machine precision, the wire-moving system and wire-moving way of the wire electrode and the working solution, on the processing quality of WEDM-HS are discussed, and the corresponding measures of improving the processing quality are put forward, which provide the sufficient basis for further improving the processing quality of WEDM-HS.

Phasor measurement unit (PMU) is the basic unit in wide area protection (WAP) in power system. At present, development of PMU based on American GPS (Global Positioning System) is very common. However, because GPS is developed and held by American independently and some other reasons, PMU based on GPS exists unavoidable potential security hazard. Therefore, research and development of PMU based on satellite navigation system developed by our own country is both inevitable and necessary. This paper analyzes the importance and feasibility of PMU based on "Beidou I" satellite navigation system, which is developed by China and has been put into civil use. "Beidou I" satellite navigation system's service area satisfies the interconnection requirement throughout the whole country's power grids. The one way time transmission accuracy is up to 100 ns, which can already meets the PMU requirement for synchronous signals. The price performance ratio is relatively higher than PMU based on GPS. Therefore the paper introduces a PMU design scheme based on "Beidou I" satellite navigation system. The technology shall be of great use for the future development of China's wide area protection system.

Smart Grids is a common denominator for a wide range of developments that make medium and low voltage grids more intelligent and flexible than they are nowadays. Main motive for Smart Grid initiatives is that such developments improve reliability of supply and/or support the trend towards a more sustainable energy supply. At this moment, medium and low voltage networks can not be remotely observed and controlled. Various companies are developing technologies aiming at creating smarter networks. However, these developments tend to root in technological possibilities, rather than in a sound problem analysis and a structured approach towards its solution. In the recent past, a great variety of sensors, protocols, communication equipment and the like has been designed to support the move towards Smart Grids. However, many of them have not found wide application, which can be at least partly attributed to the fact that there were no "problems" for which they provided a solution so that it was not possible to draw up a positive business case. In summary, there was too much technology push and too little market pull. The fact that some of manufacturers of unsuccessful technologies even blame network operators as conservative instead of improving the price performance ratio of their products further hampers a real take off of Smart Grids. Notwithstanding the mixed present picture, Enexis has high expectations of the future of Smart Grid technologies. In the short term, Enexis focuses on applying Smart Grid technologies for improving the reliability of supply through increasing the speed of restoration after an interruption. To this end, Enexis has planned the large-scale deployment of remote control on certain points in the medium voltage networks to detect and localize outages due to component failures. This makes it no longer necessary to rely on phone calls of people whose lights and televisions turn off for outage detection and makes fault location much quicker. Smart Grid technologies can thus battle the expected increase in component failures, the inevitable consequences of an ageing infrastructure. In the longer term, Smart Grid technologies will play an important role in maintaining reliability of supply and improving sustainability. The complexity of electricity distribution increases. Gardeners connect CHP plants to the grids and the number of wind turbines increases. This also applies for small generators, such as micro CHP plants and PV panels. Smart Grids support these developments by continuously monitoring and controlling the grid and the generators. Enexis believes that effective deployment of Smart Grid technologies requires a top down approach. Therefore Enexis is developing a vision on the role of the medium and low voltage networks in a sustainable energy future. With Enexis' vision becoming clearer over time, ever greater efforts will be spent on developing the appropriate and necessary Smart Grid technologies in cooperation with commercial energy companies, other grid operators and suppliers, as well as to increasingly focused discussions with the regulator and the government on the future energy supply and the role of Smart Grids in it. (21 pages)

This paper discussed advantage and disadvantage of solution scheme of embedded ship navigation system platform, established a ship navigation embedded terminal platform base on S3C2440 which has high price performance ratio. Introduced bootloader designation, Linux kernel porting and graphic library QTE porting, as well as ship navigation application framework and implemented result based on this platform. With combination of global satellite, position technology, wireless communication technology and embedded system technology, realized embedded platform and confirmed the practicability of platform by navigation application.

During the last few years there has been a dramatic change in the price performance ratio of computer technology. If this development continues, we can expect that, in the near future, we will be able to have a stereoscopic view of a product, using Internet applications together with stereoscopic consumer monitors. Furthermore, it will be possible, not only to touch the product virtually using force feedback input devices, but also to manipulate the product’s shape with new interaction metaphors. This chapter shows how a future client, without any technical or CAD background, will be able to influence the geometric shape of a product (e.g. a vehicle rim or a phone) using three dimensional Internet. In 10 years, this market triggered trend of demanding more individualised products, so called “Design to Demand”, will be one of the challenges for companies developing products.

Panel method, or boundary element method is widely used in marine hydrodynamics computations, especially for lifting flows in which forces are to be obtained for foil or blade sections. For simulation of multiple propellers and foils, a couple of large, dense and asymmetric matrices are to be generated and to be solved a number of times during a numerical iteration process. A parallel BiCGSTAB matrix solver is developed for this engineering application and tested to run under four different MPI software libraries (MPICH, MPI/Pro, WMPI and Compaq Tru64 MPI) and three different operating systems (Windows 2000 Pro, Red Hat Linux 7.2 and Tru64) under a Compaq Proliant sever and a Compaq Alpha ES40 Server. Performance of the matrix solver, for this application case, for each configuration is evaluated in terms of computational time, speed, and price performance ratio for three different matrix sizes: 256MB, 1GB and 4GB.

The paper discusses the principles and issues for the shielding of a screened room. It does not go into the details of general shielding design, but specifically looks at screened rooms and their parameters, including performance, testing and specifications. The reason for producing this document is that the author has seen many different manufacturers' designs and claims (realistic or otherwise) which severely confuse the potential end-user. The aim is to clarify these issues and produce a reference document by which the potential user of a screened room is able to make informed judgements on what is required, what is feasible and where potential problems may lie, hopefully getting the best product/price performance ratio.

The authors introduce a formalism which allows to treat computer architecture as a formal optimization problem. They apply this to the design of shared memory parallel machines. Present computers of this type support the programming model of a shared memory. But simultaneous access to the shared memory by several processors is in many situations processed sequentially. Asymptotically good solutions for this problem are offered by theoretical computer science. The authors modify these constructions under engineering aspects and improve the price/performance ratio by roughly a factor of 6. The resulting machine has surprisingly good price/performance ratio even if compared with distributed memory machines. For almost all access patterns of all processors into the shared memory, access is as fast as the access of only a single processor. The re-engineered machine is based on Fluent Machine.

The VMX host machine is a hardware-firmware environment for implementation of actual computer systems with a favorable price performance ratio. The article presents the host framework architecture, together with all units which are used to build actual systems. The advantages and future potential of the architecture is briefly discussed. The notion of memory directives within the frame-work of an active (or “intelligent”) memory unit is introduced. This notion serves as one example of the possibilities that are built into the architecture of the VMX host.

In the November 1978 issues of Datamation, in an arcticle entitled "The Changing Face of Applications Programming", Daniel McCracken, President of the ACM, defined procedural versus non-procedural languages. He says that "despite improvements the productivity of today's programmers is no more than two of three times the productivity of programmers a quarter of a century ago. In the same period, the price performance ratio of the computer hardware has improved by a factor of perhaps a million. People wanting to use this low cost hardware are frustrated by the handicaps imposed by writing programs in...procedural languages." He goes on to state that "by the mid-80's more than half of all computer time will be spent running applications programs constructed with non-procedural oriented languages." (Many companies have already become aware of the cost benefits of non-procedural languages and are already using them. Schering-Plough was to be one of these astute companies).

This improvement in thermal stability is achieved with a new vinyl ester resin priced in the range of high temperature polyesters of the bisphenol A type. The ease of processing characteristic of vinyl esters has not been sacrificed. In the future we will see even more novel and useful properties being “built” into vinyl ester resins.

Background The use of technical solutions and conventional mobility supporting aids can support the independence of people into old age in their own homes. However, we found relatively few empirical investigations on the effects and costs of these systems. Methods The aim of the study was to investigate usability, user satisfaction and the correlation between costs and benefits of different built-in smart home solutions and conventional mobility supporting tools in the home of elderly, partially care-dependent tenants (> 65 years). A cross-sectional survey was conducted from February to March 2018 with tenants of a housing association in apartments equipped with smart home technology and conventional mobility supporting tools. The response rate in the intervention group was n = 37 persons (out of 46 tenants with installed smart home and conventional solutions) and in the control group n = 64 persons (out of 100 tenants without built-in smart home and conventional solutions). Data were collected by a written questionnaire regarding usability and satisfaction of the tenants with the built-in smart home solutions and conventional mobility supporting tools. In addition, both the intervention and the control group were asked general questions about communication, safety and how to deal with the need for long-term care in their own living environment. Results Results showed that with regard to usability, satisfaction and price performance ratio of the installed smart home solutions, the installation of the corresponding solutions with an overall score of 1.41 (on a scale of 1 (very good) to 6 (unsatisfactory)) was mostly positively evaluated by the tenants. Overall, users rated the installed smart home solutions better than the conventional mobility supporting tools (such as handholds and increased balcony floor level). Conclusions Analysis of the price performance ratio showed that smart home solutions are generally more expensive than conventional tools, but also contribute significantly to an increased security of the tenants, and thus may enable longer living in a familiar environment. We recommend modularized offers consisting of various components of smart home solutions, since this significantly reduces installation costs and allows for an individual composition according to requirements. Moreover, smart home solutions should be considered to be listed as medical aids.