Collaborative study to improve the quality control of trace element determinations in polymers. Part 2. Certification of polyethylene reference materials (CRMs 680 and 681) for As, Br, Cd, Cl, Cr, Hg, Pb, and S content

Two polymer (polyethylene) reference materials have been produced in support of EC Directive 94/62/EC on plastic packaging and packaging material. The paper describes the preparation of the materials, the analytical work performed to characterize their homogeneity and stability, and the certification of the materials for a range of elements. The technical and statistical evaluation of the results are also summarized.     

Economic lot-sizing games

In this paper we introduce a new class of OR games: economic lot-sizing (ELS) games. There are a number of retailers that have a known demand for a fixed number of periods. To satisfy demand the retailers order products at the same manufacturer. By placing joint orders instead of individual orders, costs can be reduced and a cooperative game arises. In this paper we show that ELS games are balanced. Furthermore, we show that two special classes of ELS games are concave.     

On games corresponding to sequencing situations with ready times

This paper considers the special class of cooperative sequencing games that arise from one-machine sequencing situations in which all jobs have equal processing times and the ready time of each job is a multiple of the processing time.By establishing relations between optimal orders of subcoalitions, it is shown that each sequencing game within this class is convex.This author is financially supported by the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).     

On the unique reconstruction of a signal from its unthresholded recurrence plot

We address the information content of unthresholded recurrence plots, generated by the time-delay embedding method from scalar signals admitting a Fourier series representation (including periodic and sampled signals). This is important for making valid inferences from unthresholded recurrence plots. A graph theoretic framework is developed to give a complete analysis of the impact of the choice of time-delay and embedding dimension on information content. A distance measure for unthresholded recurrence plots is introduced to approach signal reconstruction and approximation by minimization, robust to inaccuracies and noise. Examples and an application from EEG analysis clarify the theoretical results and demonstrate their practical potential.