A state-of-the-art review of efforts in smoke movement and smoke control is presented. Basic principles, experimental techniques and results, computer models, and smoke control methods which have been employed are presented. The paper covers all work in the area of smoke movement and smoke control but emphasizes the work of NBS.

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A one step ahead optimal strategy is proposed for the inventory control and management problem, and rewritten as a linear programming problem, permitting practical implementation. Important novel aspects of the proposed solution are that it uses economic value added (EVA), a comprehensive performance index commonly used in business management, instead of regulation to a set point or to a interval of stock values; it does not require knowledge or prediction of the demand distribution; it achieves good efficiency with respect to a globally optimal value, defined in this paper, and no significant bullwhip effect, while being robust to demand and lead time variations. The proposed one step ahead optimal controller is compared with the classical ( s,S ) controller, as well as with a representative of the inventory and order-based production controller family. In order to make a fair comparison, this paper also proposes a tuning method for the latter two controllers. Numerical experiments based on average performance of the three controllers for a set of normally distributed demands show the superiority of the proposed one step ahead optimal controller, in terms of EVA as well as in terms of other measures proposed in the paper.

Supplier evaluation and selection is one of the most important processes to achieve an efficient supply chain. It is usually regarded as a multiple critera decision-making (MCDM) problem. Data on the whole supply chain, including the purchasing process is now easily available. This paper proposes a methodology that defines indices of performance of suppliers, based on real data, and ranks them by the heuristic VIKOR method. The ratings reflect reliability, mean delivery time, and percentage of orders shipped to buyer on or before original promised ship date. The methodology was validated using principal components analysis, followed by k-means clustering and biplots to help in labeling and interpreting the clusters. The overall conclusion is that the proposed methodology is capable of choosing suppliers that will result in increased supply chain efficiency, due to decreased lead times and lower operational costs of the purchasing process. Resumo: A avaliação e seleção de fornecedoresé um dos processos mais importantes para se obter uma cadeia de suprimentos eficiente, sendo considerado um problema de tomada de decisão multi-critérios. Os dados de cadeias de suprimentos, incluindo o processo de compras, agora estão facilmente disponíveis. Este trabalho propõe uma metodologia que defineíndices de desempenho de fornecedores, com base em dados reais, e ranqueia-os pelo método heurístico VIKOR. Os ratings refletem a confiabilidade, a média de tempos de entrega e a média de prazos originais prometidos de envio ao comprador. A metodologia foi validada usando análise por componentes principais, seguida por clusterização k-means e biplots para ajudar na rotulagem e interpretação dos clusters. A conclusão geralé que a metodologia propostaé capaz de escolher fornecedores que resultarão em maior eficiência da cadeia de suprimentos, devidoà redução de leadtimes e a menores custos operacionais dos processos de compras.