5381 results about "Cost savings" patented technology

Documents and other items can be delivered electronically from sender to recipient with a level of trustedness approaching or exceeding that provided by a personal document courier. A trusted electronic go-between can validate, witness and/or archive transactions while, in some cases, actively participating in or directing the transaction. Printed or imaged documents can be marked using handwritten signature images, seal images, electronic fingerprinting, watermarking, and/or steganography. Electronic commercial transactions and transmissions take place in a reliable, "trusted" virtual distribution environment that provides significant efficiency and cost savings benefits to users in addition to providing an extremely high degree of confidence and trustedness. The systems and techniques have many uses including but not limited to secure document delivery, execution of legal documents, and electronic data interchange (EDI).

An Energy and Cost Savings Calculation System is provided that automates the determination of energy and cost savings due to energy conservation measures. The system provides Multi-Variant, Non-Linear (MVNL) load forecasting techniques, energy and cost savings calculations, and Weather Ranking. The load forecasting technique may accept numerous external parameters as input. The technique may use multiple Baselines. It may also use multiple Basic Reference Periods to reduce the load forecasting error. The load forecasting technique may utilize external parameters that are updated on a daily basis, such as dry bulb temperature, dew point temperature, solar condition, and interval meter data. The technique may use Baseline Extensions to perform forecasts and Reference Period Modifications to enhance accuracy. The system may calculate energy and cost savings using Complex Rates and time-of-use (TOU) energy data. The system may rank a plurality of sources providing weather data to identify the most accurate weather data.

Aspects of the invention are directed to a visual-based system and method for non-destructively evaluating an uncoated turbine engine component. Aspects of the invention are well suited for high speed, high temperature components. Radiant energy emitted from an uncoated turbine engine component can be captured remotely and converted into a useful form, such as a high resolution image of the component. A plurality of images of the component can be captured over time and evaluated to identify failure modes. The system can also measure and map the temperature and/or radiance of the component. The system can facilitate the non-destructive evaluation of uncoated turbine components during engine operation without disassembly of the engine, thereby providing significant time and cost savings. Further, the system presents data to a user with sufficient context that allows an engine operator can evaluate the information with an increased degree of confidence and certainty.

Documents and other items can be delivered electronically from sender to recipient with a level of trustedness approaching or exceeding that provided by a personal document courier. A trusted electronic go-between can validate, witness and/or archive transactions while, in some cases, actively participating in or directing the transaction. Printed or imaged documents can be marked using handwritten signature images, seal images, electronic fingerprinting, watermarking, and/or steganography. Electronic commercial transactions and transmissions take place in a reliable, “trusted” virtual distribution environment that provides significant efficiency and cost savings benefits to users in addition to providing an extremely high degree of confidence and trustedness. The systems and techniques have many uses including but not limited to secure document delivery, execution of legal documents, and electronic data interchange (EDI).

A collaborative engineering environment (CEE) enables the effective capture, management, communication, and exploitation of all product related information to a project team. The systematic employment of this information offers substantial improvements in productivity, cost savings, cycle time reductions, product integrity, and lifetime supportability of the system. Advanced CEE capabilities exploit and leverage the engineering, architectural and technological expertise of enterprise subject matter experts (domain experts) across multiple complex systems development and integration activities. The CEE provides a tightly coupled process automation using reusable product elements for coupling information with engineering processes and ensuring adherence to repeatable and traceable engineering processes. A product catalog provides a single information management point for intrinsic complex product characteristics and facilitates the propagation of that information to engineering teams incorporating the complex product into their system designs. The intrinsic complex product characteristics are augmented with implementation specific information to fully describe the complex product in the system design.

A computerized system and method for providing cost savings for utility users is shown and which includes defining a database in a host computer; storing in the database variable business information from a plurality of goods and services providers; receiving into the host computer goods and services related consumption information and determining an optimal business expense from the variable business expense information to provide cost savings for the customer; processing the optimal business expense information, and goods and services consumption information to provide usage-based computer viewable data which is associated with a consumer's consumption of the goods and services; and providing the customer with computer access to the computer viewable data and wherein the customer can view the computer viewable data, from a location remote to the host computer.

The present invention is related to location positioning systems, and more particularly, to a method and apparatus for providing an update of ephemeris information. According to one aspect, GPS enabled devices in the signal unavailable area monitors the state of its ephemeris data and time information. When the ephemeris data and time information become out of date, the GPS enable device uses an ad hoc Bluetooth network to retrieve ephemeris data and time information from another GPS enabled device with more current data. According to further aspects, a map of a deep hole region in which GPS and other cellular signals are not available, is generated to enable power reduction and cost saving measures.

A method and apparatus for managing medical costs including prescription medicines is disclosed. A variety of cost-saving mechanisms are contemplated, which will be provided to purchasers via a specialized magnetic card.

A method and system are provided for finding items for grouping items according to sorting characteristics. For example, a price comparison engine is described that obtains the original total purchase price for all items placed in the customer's shopping cart and compares the original total purchase price to further generated total purchase price options to determine if any cost savings can be achieved. Those further total purchase price options are generated by computing the total purchase price resulting from each possible combination of sellers and items in the shopping cart. In some embodiments, heuristics may be used by the price engine to reduce the number of seller combinations and purchase price options generated, limit the price variations upon which the total purchase price options are computed, and/or filter or sort the purchase price options to be displayed.

Data storage operations, including content-indexing, containerized deduplication, and policy-driven storage, are performed within a cloud environment. The systems support a variety of clients and cloud storage sites that may connect to the system in a cloud environment that requires data transfer over wide area networks, such as the Internet, which may have appreciable latency and/or packet loss, using various network protocols, including HTTP and FTP. Methods are disclosed for content indexing data stored within a cloud environment to facilitate later searching, including collaborative searching. Methods are also disclosed for performing containerized deduplication to reduce the strain on a system namespace, effectuate cost savings, etc. Methods are disclosed for identifying suitable storage locations, including suitable cloud storage sites, for data files subject to a storage policy. Further, systems and methods for providing a cloud gateway and a scalable data object store within a cloud environment are disclosed, along with other features.

An integrated product data environment for system design and optimization, e.g., a Collaborative Engineering Environment (CEE). The CEE provides a multi-disciplinary engineering team with immediate access to all relevant product information. It is an enterprise system at the program as well as the company levels, managing product information as a program and corporate asset. Product-centric collaborative capabilities for the CEE are provided by extending the functionality of a commercial Product Data Management (PDM) System. Emerging web-centric commercial-off-tho-shelf (COTS) PDM capabilities, object-oriented technologies, associated rapid application development environments, sophisticated engineering toolsets, and COTS computing and communications technologies have been leveraged to establish the CEE for the complex electronic systems integration domain. The CEE offers substantial improvements in productivity, cost savings, cycle time reductions, product integrity and lifetime support of a system.

A method to integrate collected solar thermal energy into the feedwater system of a Rankine cycle power plant is disclosed. This novelty uses a closed loop, single phase fluid system to collect both the solar heat and to provide the heat input into the feedwater stream of a regenerative Rankine cycle. One embodiment of this method of integrating solar energy into a regenerative Rankine power plant cycle, such as a coal power plant, allows for automatic balancing of the steam extraction flows and does not change the temperature of the feedwater to the boiler. The concept, depending on the application, allows for the spare turbine capacity normally available in a coal plant to be used to produce incremental capacity and energy that is powered by solar thermal energy. By “piggybacking” on the available components and infrastructure of the host Rankine cycle power plant, considerable cost savings are achieved resulting in lower solar produced electricity costs.

A system for and method of modeling thermal performance characteristics of HVAC components in a building uses the building power or other meter to measure power consumed by the components. The models are used to test the components, preferably during off hours, to ensure proper and efficient operation. Preferably, the testing software is written in a high-level interpretive language that is independent of the HVAC component being modeled. The models are adaptively maintained by periodically ensuring that their measured output matches the predicted output. When the two do not match, the model parameters are updated. These models can also be used to generate reports comparing costs and cost savings for different temperature and other environmental settings within selected zones in the building.