Flow line design is one of the major tasks in production management. The decision to install a set of machines and buffers is often highly irreversible. It determines both cost and revenue to a large extent. In order to assess the economic impact of any possible flow line design, production rates and inventory levels have to be estimated. These performance measures depend on the allocation of buffers whenever the flow of material is occasionally disrupted, for example due to machine failures or quality problems. The book describes analytical methods that can be used to evaluate flow lines much faster than with simulation techniques. Based on these fast analytical techniques, it is possible to determine a flow line design that maximizes the net present value of the flow line investment. The flow of material through the line may be non-linear, for example due to assembly operations or quality inspections.

Flow line design is one of the major tasks in production management. The decision to install a set of machines and buffers is often highly irreversible. It determines both cost and revenue to a large extent. In order to assess the economic impact of any possible flow line design, production rates and inventory levels have to be estimated. These performance measures depend on the allocation of buffers whenever the flow of material is occasionally disrupted, for example due to machine failures or quality problems. The book describes analytical methods that can be used to evaluate flow lines much faster than with simulation techniques. Based on these fast analytical techniques, it is possible to determine a flow line design that maximizes the net present value of the flow line investment. The flow of material through the line may be non-linear, for example due to assembly operations or quality inspections.

This book was accepted in 1999 as doctoral thesis (Dr. oec. publ. ) by the faculty of economics of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat in Munich. It won the dissertation price of the Alumni-Club of the economics faculty in the academic year 2000. Financial assistance by the German Research Asso ciation (DFG) for printing costs is gratefully acknowledged. I have to thank the people behind the B\'IF,X-project, in particular Donald Knuth and Leslie Lamport, for their wonderful typesetting program. The supervisors of my thesis were Prof. Dr. G. Flaig and Prof. Dr. D. Marin. I would like thank both for their thorough reading of the book and their ideas and critical remarks. lowe much gratitude to my academic teacher Prof. Dr. G. Flaig for many insightful conversations about modern time series econometrics, asymptotic theory and data problems. His empha sis on clear theory combined with sound econometric methods formed my personal ideal of how to do applied economics. After he left the university in 1998I had the opportunity to continue my work at the Center for Economic Studies. Prof. Dr. H. -W. Sinn and my new colleaguesat CES provided a stim ulating environment for the completion of my dissertation. Finally, I want to thank my parents, my sister and my friends for being there and sharing my cheers and worries. Munich, October 2000 Michael Reutter Our main concern in philosophy and in science should be the search fortruth. Justification is not an aim; and brilliance and cleverness as such are boring.

Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to built the city. (Genesis 11.7-8) 1.1 Static Focal Points 1.1.1 Coordination In real life, people quite often face situations in which they prefer to act in the same way, but they are not particular about the concrete way of acting. Some examples are given below: Credit cards: Buyers want to possess the credit cards potential sellers do accept. Also, sellers wish to have contracted the credit card company the credit cards of which potential customers usually carry along. For both, basically, it is all the same which credit card this is. What matters is that both choices coincide. Communication, information transmission: The transmission of in formation requires that the signals used have the same meaning to both the sender and the receiver. But it is inessential which signal has a certain mean ing. In verbal communication, this basically means that the people involved use the same (natural) language, though even then some ambiguities remain. Things are a bit more difficult for non-verbal communication, for example data transmission between computers-both sides have to use the same or compatible protocols. Again, what matters is the protocols to be the same for both sides.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Symposium of Formal Methods Europe, FME 2001, held in Berlin, Germany, in March 2001. The 32 revised full papers presented together with abstracts of three invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 72 submissions. Focusing on increasing software productivity, all current aspects in formal methods are covered. Among the application areas addressed are avionics, smart cards, financial engineering, E-commerce, middleware, security, telecommunications, etc.

This book offers a novel perspective that allows to incorporate changing consumption and production structure into models of economic growth. Starting from the empirical observation that income and consumption structure are closely related, it develops a tractable theoretical framework which enables to analyze macroeconomic models consistent with these empirical facts. As a result, central macroeconomic phenomena are better understood: the reasons behind long-run growth, structural change, and the influence of inequality on innovations and growth.

Over more than two centuries the developmentofeconomic theory has created a wide array of different concepts, theories, and insights. My recent books, Capital and Knowledge (Zhang, 1999) and A TheoryofInternational Trade (Zhang, 2000) show how separate economic theories such as the Marxian economics, the Keynesian economics, the general equilibrium theory, the neoclassical growth theory, and the neoclassical trade theory can be examined within a single theoretical framework. This book isto further expand the frameworkproposed in the previous studies. This book is a part of my economic theory with endogenous population, capital, knowledge, preferences, sexual division of labor and consumption, institutions, economic structures and exchange values over time and space (Zhang, 1996a). As an extension of the Capital and Knowledge, which is focused on the dynamics of national economies, this book is to construct a theory of urban economies. We are concerned with dynamic relations between division of labor, division ofconsumption and determination of prices structure over space. We examine dynamic interdependence between capital accumulation, knowledge creation and utilization, economicgrowth, price structuresand urban pattern formation under free competition. The theory is constructed on the basisofa few concepts within a compact framework. The comparative advantage of our theory is that in providing rich insights into complex of spatial economies it uses only a few concepts and simplified functional forms and accepts a few assumptions about behavior of consumers, producers, and institutionalstructures.