North Carolina is challenged to foster economic development while protecting environmental assets under regulatory and legislative mandate. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are the major economic drivers in North Carolina, and in the United States as a whole, but existing support networks for...

As the world's largest carbon resources country with relatively great carbon emission, China in has just started its carbon trade. China is only a passive participant in international carbon trading market, rarely participating in the project of Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Therefore,...

Machinery investments represent a substantial portion of agribusiness firms’ costs. Because of high machinery costs, variable profit margins, and increasing competition, agribusiness managers continually seek methods to maintain profitability and manage risk. One relatively new method is...

Reverse production systems are often comprised of several tiers with independent members competing at each tier. This research develops and designs a decision-making process for decentralized reverse production systems where each participant in the network determines its decisions in a...

Braess' paradox is a counter-intuitive phenomenon which can occur in congesting networks.It refers to those cases where the introduction of a new link in the network results in thetotal travel time on the network increasing.The dissertation starts by introducing the traffic assignment problem...