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The implementation of soil and water conservation, and improved crop management programs in 1983 in a watershed area of Andhra Pradesh, India, has increased agricultural productivity. There has been an increase in the water-table and per capita income, improvement in the fodder supply, and a reduction in water runoff. Check dams were built and a percolation tank was modernized to store runoff water and check soil erosion. A system was developed to provide seeds, fertilizer and pesticides to the farmers instead of cash loans.

In this paper a new method for master production scheduling (MPS) is presented. The objective of this new method is to minimize schedule instability in the order driven company. In such companies the order arrival process is highly uncertain, and the production of an item is usually scheduled only after an order is received. Further, the customer usually demands a short delivery lead time. The new MPS method combines a rolling schedule approach with an overtime or subcontracting capability, and is labelled as MPS with incremental capacity allocation and a rolling horizon (MPS-IR). Two features distinguish this new approach. First, rather than allocating the entire production capacity of a future period at once, the MPS-IR does so in an incremental fashion over multiple periods. Second, rather than scheduling the entire demand for a future demand at once, the MPS-IR does so in an incremental fashion over multiple periods. In experimental tests the MPS-IR was found to outperform a Gantt chart based scheduler.

Agrihorticultural farming (AH) proved superior to annual cropping (AC), agroforestry (AF), and agrosilviculture (AS) for a semi-arid Alfisol, but all are feasible and sustainable. AH had the greatest initial cost but a value/cost ratio of 2.16; AC had 1.95; AF, 1.69; and AS, 1.52. AS had 3.8% runoff, AH 4.9% (with a steeper land slope), and AF 10.6%.

The magnetic properties of heat-treated, copper (Cu)-containing high-strength low-alloy (HSLA-100) steel and the variations of the magnetic properties during tensile deformation were studied. For samples aged at temperatures below 775 K, precipitation of nanosized coherent Cu particles occurred, causing an increase in hardness but a decrease in coercivity. For higher aging temperatures, the Cu precipitates coarsened and then were able to pin domain walls. As a result, magnetic coercivity increased. During tensile deformation of selected heat treated samples, the interaction of dislocations with the coherent and incoherent Cu precipitates influenced the magnetic properties. Systematic variation of coercivity with plastic strain was found for brittle and ductile types of fracture of the materials. Index Terms--Fracture, high-strength low-alloy steel (HSLA), magnetic properties, nondestructive evaluation, plastic deformation.

A solution procedure was presented to address the multiobjective transportation problem (MOTP) in which the source and destination parameters as well as the objective functions' coefficients are in the form of interval. The procedure initially involves transformation of the MOTP into a classical MOTP. It also involves conversion of the interval source and destination parameters' constraints into deterministic ones. It entails the use of the fuzzy programming technique to solve the transformed classical multiobjective transportation problem.