New product launch decisions with robust optimization

We consider a problem where a company must decide the order in which to launch new products within a given time horizon and budget constraints, and where the parameters of the adoption rate of these new products are subject to uncertainty. This uncertainty can bring significant change to the optimal launch sequence. We present a robust optimization approach that incorporates such uncertainty on the Bass diffusion model for new products as well as on the price response function of partners that collaborate with the company in order to bring its products to market. The decision-maker optimizes his worst-case profit over an uncertainty set where nature chooses the time periods in which (integer) units of the budgets of uncertainty are used for worst impact. This leads to uncertainty sets with binary variables. We show that a conservative approximation of the robust problem can nonetheless be reformulated as a mixed integer linear programming problem, is therefore of the same structure as the deterministic problem and can be solved in a tractable manner. Finally, we illustrate our approach on numerical experiments. Our model also incorporates contracts with potential commercialization partners. The key output of our work is a sequence of product launch times that protects the decision-maker against parameter uncertainty for the adoption rates of the new products and the response of potential partners to partnership offers.     

Limiting the Number of Potential Binding Modes by Introducing Symmetry into Ligands: Structure‐Based Design of Inhibitors for Trypsin‐Like Serine Proteases

In the absence of X‐ray data, the exploration of compound binding modes continues to be a challenging task. For structure‐based design, specific features of active sites in different targets play a major role in rationalizing ligand binding characteristics. For example, dibasic compounds have been reported as potent inhibitors of various trypsin‐like serine proteases, the active sites of which contain several binding pockets that can be targeted by cationic moieties. This results in several possible orientations within the active site, complicating the binding mode prediction of such compounds by docking tools. Therefore, we introduced symmetry in bi‐ and tribasic compounds to reduce conformational space in docking calculations and to simplify binding mode selection by limiting the number of possible pocket occupations. Asymmetric bisbenzamidines were used as starting points for a multistage and structure‐guided optimization. A series of 24 final compounds with either two or three benzamidine substructures was ultimately synthesized and evaluated as inhibitors of five serine proteases, leading to potent symmetric inhibitors for the pharmaceutical drug targets matriptase, matriptase‐2, thrombin and factor Xa. This study underlines the relevance of ligand symmetry for chemical biology.     

Liquid crystalline side group polymers with azo-chromophores and fluorinated tails of varying length

A series of side group liquid crystalline polymethacrylates with 4'-(1H,1H-perfluoroalkoxy)-azobenzene mesogenic units was synthesized and characterized by differential scanning calorimetry, polarizing optical microscopy and X-ray diffraction methods depending on the tail length. The phase behaviour is discussed as a function of the length of the tail groups. Very high clearing temperatures up to 290°C were observed for the polymers with long tail groups.     

On the nuclear density distribution for nucleus-nucleus scattering. II

We investigate the effect of the antisymmetrization on the density distribution for nucleus-nucleus scattering. In contrast to an earlier paper¹ the motion of the nuclei is now taken into account. For experimentally available energies we find no pronounced density compression in the overlap region. For very high energies a superposition of the densities is justified.     

Isolierung von (±)-Tembamid aus Zanthoxylum tingoassuiba L. (Rutaceae)

Isolation of (±)-Tembamid from the Bark of Zanthoxylum tingoassuiba L . (Rutaceae) Racemic tembamid ( 5 ) has been isolated from the bark, and (?)-sesamin ( 1 ) from the leaves of Zanthoxylum tingoassuiba L.     

Parallel Calculation of Accurate Path Lines in Virtual Environments through Exploitation of Multi-Block CFD Data Set Topology

The use of Virtual Reality (VR) techniques for the investigation of complex flow phenomena offers distinct advantages in comparison to conventional visualization techniques. Especially for unsteady flows, VR methodology provides an intuitive approach for the exploration of simulated fluid flows. However, the visualization of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) data is often too time-consuming to be carried out in real-time, and thus violates essential constraints concerning real-time interaction and visualization. To overcome this obstacle, we make use of the fact that typically a multi-block approach is employed for domain decomposition, and we use the corresponding data structures for the computation of path lines and for parallelization. In this paper, we present the synthesis of fragmented multi-block data sets and our implementation of an accurate path line integration scheme in order to speed up path line computations. We report on the results of our efforts and describe a combination of this algorithm with a highly efficient visualization approach of large amounts of particle traces, thus considerably improving interactivity when exploring large scale CFD data sets.Mathematics Subject Classifications (2000) 76Mxx, 76M27, 76M28, 65M55, 65L05, 65L06, 65D05, 65Y05, 68U05.