This study reexamines the relationship between energy consumption, urban population, economic growth and CO2 emissions in the BRICS countries (i.e., Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) during the period 2004–2010, by using a novel multi-variable grey model. The results indicate...

Crude oil prices have been fluctuating over time and by a large range. It is the disorganization of oil price series that makes it difficult to deduce the changing trends of oil prices in the middle- and long-terms and predict their price levels in the short-term. Following a price-state...

The United States is the only large federal country that does not have an explicit way to reduce the economic disparities among more and less developed regions. In Germany, for example, federal revenues are distributed by a formula that takes into account the relative level of wealth of each...

The effects of substrate-placing manner, deposition temperature and solution concentration on the preparation of ZnO films by chemical bath deposition were investigated in this work. The structures and the morphologies of as-deposited ZnO films were characterized by X-ray diffraction and...

In this paper, Trajectory Scheduling Methods (TSMs) are proposed for the permutation flowshop scheduling problem with total tardiness minimization criterion. TSMs belong to an iterative local search framework, in which local search is performed on an initial solution, a perturbation operator is...

In this paper, Trajectory Scheduling Methods (TSMs) are proposed for the permutation flowshop scheduling problem with total tardiness minimization criterion. TSMs belong to an iterative local search framework, in which local search is performed on an initial solution, a perturbation operator is...