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Organizations regardless of their size are facing increasing competition from global markets. Quality engineering (QE) tools and techniques are a cornerstone of continuous improvement. They have both specialist and universal applications. If they are not used in a systematic manner, quality improvements are likely to be random and spontaneous rather than comprehensive. The need for an improved understanding of the critical factors for effective and successful QE implementation is becoming more important. However it is the variety and by their nature complexity, that often can create difficulties in their selection, application and effective use. This paper is exploratory paper which explores automotive industries expert's opinion in Malaysia and Indonesia to investigate the difficulties associated with the use of QE tools and techniques, critical factors for effective QE practices and specific issues related to QE implementation. For the purpose, the Delphic Hierarchy Process (DHP) approach was employed as the methodology to evaluate the critical success factors for effective and successful implementation of QE tools and techniques in Malaysian's and Indonesian's automotive industries. As a result from exploratory study, a conceptual model using DHP approach is established. The DHP approach is a combination of the Delphi method and the analytical hierarchy process (AHP). The DHP can benefit from both a strong and widely used Delphi method and a powerful mathematical model, the AHP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a semantic space segmentation method for content-based image retrieval using the SVM decision boundary and principal axis analysis. Each object in an image has its activity scope, which conforms to semantic concept invariance. To find the maximum and fair activity scope for every object in an image in the best way is to discriminate the hidden semantic differences. A special property of SVM is known as maximum margin classifier, which simultaneously minimizes the empirical classification error and maximize the geometric margin. In this paper, the hidden semantic concepts based on the low-level features of region (object) will be found by using the Expectation-Maximization (EM) technique. The activity scope of each object and support vector will be decided by the SVM decision boundary and principal axis analysis which is used to construct a hyper-plane projection line with minimum inertia. Furthermore, a similarity measure, by integrating the high-level semantic distance and low-level features, is used to retrieve images. The proposed semantic learning scheme provides a way to bridge the gap between the high-level semantic concept and low-level features for content-based image retrieval. Experimental results show that the performance of the proposed method is excellent when compared with that of other methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the limitation of Principal Components Analysis in dealing with the nonlinear data, connecting with the Linear Programming Techniques for Multidimensional Analysis of Preference, this paper presents the Kernel Principal Components Analysis-Linear Programming Techniques for Multidimensional Analysis of Preference evaluation model. Kernel function maps linear inseparable input data into a high dimensional linear separable feature space via a nonlinear mapping technique. Then it carries on the linear principal components analysis in the high dimensional feature space. In addition, the weight of each index can be obtained in this model, thus it makes up another shortage of Principal Components Analysis. In the wastewater evaluation, the indices are numerous and the degree of correlation is not high, therefore, this model is more appropriate. Finally, this paper applies the model to the wastewater evaluation in Shanghai, and we obtain better evaluation results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gear shaving is commonly used as a finishing process for gear manufacturing. The parameters of the shaving machine will influence the precision of the shaved gear tooth profile significantly. This paper develops the mathematical model of the shaved gear with crowning taking into account the setting parameters of the gear shaving machine. The additional rotation angle is also set up when the shaving cutter moves along the axis of work piece. The shaved gear's tooth contact analysis is also studied. The results shown in this paper can be beneficial to the engineers in the industry of gear manufacture and control of a gear shaving machine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An algorithm for the calculation of the sequential parameters in the aircraft electrical system is designed in this paper. The original calculation model of the sequential component calculation is given as a complex formula which is inconvenient for the general digital programmable computation. The geometrical algorithm is presented in this paper in which the voltage vectors rotate and project to the coordinate axis to simplify the calculation. The projections on x and y coordinates may add up in algebra way, and only one projection is left on each axis. Then synthesize the two components to obtain the required sequential voltage vector. This algorithm may be used in the program design by ordinary programming languages in the fault diagnostics and protection to the electrical system. The asymmetry calculation by hand is also made possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gear shaving is commonly used as a finishing process for gear manufacturing. The parameters of the shaving machine will influence the precision of the shaved gear tooth profile significantly. This paper develops the mathematical model of the shaved gear with crowning taking into account the setting parameters of the gear shaving machine. The additional rotation angle is also set up when the shaving cutter moves along the axis of work piece. The shaved gear's tooth contact analysis is also studied. The results shown in this paper can be beneficial to the engineers in the industry of gear manufacture and control of a gear shaving machine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Veneer drying is an important process in manufacturing of plywood and laminated veneer lumber. In order to understand and to improve the veneer drying, a mathematical model was developed based on heat and moisture mass transfer processes within the wood in the air stream. The model was validated from commercial scale drying tests. Air temperature, humidity and exit air velocity all affect the veneering drying to a different extent. This paper describes the drying time of veneer for 0.5 mm to 2.0 mm thickness. The variables considered for two wood groups were temperature, thickness and moisture content. An empirical equation was derived from a simple physical model and used to correlate this data. The raw material used mainly are kanyin (Botanical Name: Dipterocarpus spp) and Inn. Drying is a process of reducing the water content of timber economically and with the minimal damage to the stock. The empirical equation depends on the measurement of the moisture content and indirectly the water potential, the temperature at the surface of a wood specimen and different thickness which were used for the determination of drying time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates an integrated inventory model with fuzzy order quantity and fuzzy shortage quantity. We express order quantity and shortage quantity as the normal triangular fuzzy numbers and then we will find the membership function of fuzzy cost and its centroid. We find that the estimated value of the total cost in the fuzzy sense is higher than in the crisp model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of commodities, such as electronic components, computer, communication and consumer electronics (3C) products, and fashion goods, are characterized by limited lifecycles with multiple replenishing cycles. A retailer can purchase these commodities many times within a short selling season. But these commodities can be replenished once during each cycle. Then, a multi-period newsboy model extended from a single period newsboy model can be applied. This paper will extend the traditional single period newsboy model to a multi-period model between a manufacturer and a retailer to determine replenishment decisions for a product characterized by multiple ordering during a selling season that is replenishing only once during each period. For achieving the value chain coordination and enhancing the profits of all supply chain members, some coordination mechanisms will be adopted. A numerical analysis will be provided to demonstrate the proposed model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Logistics networks configuration is such kind of problems concerning facility location, production and distribution planning along the whole process of material flow. Abundant research has been done in this field from modeling by considering different scenarios to methods such as different heuristic methods. However, the models do not consider the influence of the important postponement strategy on logistics networks in the era of mass customization. Furthermore, the multi-commodity models till now do not consider the influence of commonality among products. In this paper, a logistics network model considering product commonality and postponement is formulated. This model is expected to be used to analyze the impacts of commonality and postponement strategies on location-allocation decisions in logistics network planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper compares three different models that have been developed in the literature for modeling and forecasting human mortality rates over the age range. The first model is the quadratic Gompertz model where the quadratic line is fitted for age and sex. The second is the one-dimensional Spline model, which fits linear combinations of the Basis Splines. The last model is the Lee-Carter model which is used to fit each sex to a set of age-specific death rates by fitting Poisson log-bilinear regression model in generalized linear models (GLM). A time-varying index of mortality is then forecasted using a time series linear forecasting model autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA). These forecasts are used to generate projected age-specific mortality rates in Kuwait for ages 55 to 90 for the period 2006-2015, based on the mortality data for years 1993-2005 for males and females separately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We focus in this paper on the specification and the execution of behavioral concepts for Open Distributed Processing (ODP) Enterprise Language. The behavior of an ODP system is determined by the collection of all the possible actions in which the system (acting as an object), or any of its constituent objects, might take part, together with a set of constraints on when these actions can occur. In order to specify the executable behavior of a system and to make the processes of the enterprise executable and controllable, the Reference Model for ODP RM-ODP can be used as a meta-model for behavioral specifications. In the enterprise language the behavior is specified in terms of roles, processes, policies, and the relationships between these concepts. Firstly, we give the description and specification of the behavior by the activity diagrams. Secondly, we define the mapping from the concepts of behavior enterprise language to BPEL concepts and we present the syntax and the structure of a BPEL Behavior process. Then we generate the corresponding BPEL and computational files to implement the specified process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The majority of researches on scheduling assume setup times negligible or as a part of the processing time. In this paper, job shop scheduling with sequence dependent setup times is considered. After defining the problem, a mathematical model is developed. Implementing the mathematical model in large problems presents a weak performance to find the optimum results in reasonable computational times. Although the proposed mathematical model presents a good performance to obtain feasible solutions, it is unable to reach the optimum results in larger problems. Thus, a heuristic model based on priority rules is developed. Because of the inability to find optimum solutions in reasonable computational times, 3 different innovative lower bounds are developed, which could be implemented to evaluate different heuristics and metaheuristics in large problems. The performance of the heuristic model evaluated with a well-known example in the literature insures that the model seems to have a strong ability to solve job-shop scheduling with sequence dependent setup times problems and to obtain good solutions in reasonable computational times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the global output convergence for continuous time recurrent neural networks with continuous decreasing as well as increasing activation functions in probabilistic metric space. We establish three sufficient conditions to guarantee the global output convergence of this class of neural networks. The present result does not require symmetry in the connection weight matrix. The convergence result is useful in the design of recurrent neural networks with different converging conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How to keep a balance between exploitation and exploration in Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for efficiently solving various optimization problems is an important issue. In order to handle premature convergence in PSO search, this paper proposes a novel algorithm, called Particle Swarm Optimization with Diversive Curiosity (PSO/DC), that introduces a mechanism of diversive curiosity into PSO for preventing premature convergence and ensuring exploration. A crucial idea here is to monitor the status of behaviors of swarm particles in PSO search by an interior indicator, and when swarm particles dropped into local minimum, they will be spontaneously reinitialized to start on finding other new solutions in search space. Applications of the proposal to a 2-dimensional optimization problem well demonstrate its effectiveness. Our experimental results indicate that the performance (90%) of the proposed method is superior in terms of success ratio to that (60%) of the PSO model optimized by EPSO. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An agent usually holds a very large number of beliefs. Hopefully, efficient belief changes should be performed only in the part of its relevant states at a time. Parikh showed that AGM belief change operations do not always respect his relevance criterion. Kourousias and Makinson showed that they will do so if the given belief set K is in canonical form K'. However, even when K is closed under classical consequence, K' will be a belief base and usually is not closed under classical consequence. In this paper, we first show that there are two alternative approaches to guarantee the relevance criterion. They are constructed by replacing the family K⊥x with the family K⊥'x and K⊥*x respectively. The latter is general enough to generate all the relevance-respecting belief change operations definable on K itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 3 of the book "Handbook of Econometrics," edited by James J. Heckman and Edward E. Leamer is presented. It discusses three topics, including the identification of the distributions of treatment effects and the distributions of agent subjective evaluations of treatment effects, the recognition of dynamic treatment effects, and the summaries of the important ideas and papers in the available literature about general equilibrium evaluations of social programs.

This paper, an abridged version of [5], presents a first step toward a moment method for dose calculations in radiotherapy. Starting from a deterministic transport model for electron radiation and its Fokker-Planck approximation, a new macroscopic model is presented. We investigate several ways to simplify the deterministic model having two goals in mind, lower computation times on the one hand, high accuracy and model inherent incorporation of tissue inhomogeneities on the other hand. While being fast, the second property is lost in the often used pencil beam models. We discuss the properties of well-known macroscopic models and design a new model, which combines their advantages. Several test cases, including the irradiation of a water phantom, are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A comparison study is made to the installation of the aircraft seats in the direction of forwards and backwards, under the guidance of the system analysis. It focuses on the protection to the human body when accident occurs, basing on the inertial law of movement, by reference of the impact experiment of the car. The impact is forward, and then the passenger seats should be installed backwards in order to counteract the harmful force. A mathematic model is established in this paper after the system analysis of the mode of the movement and the injury. The calculation result shows that the synthesized protection in the backward seats will be seventy times higher than in the conventional forwards seats. Then the conclusion is reached that if the passenger seats are rearranged backwards, the injury will be alleviated and the survival rate would be enhanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a slacks-based and additive-based measure (SBM-ADD) of efficiency in context-dependent data envelopment analysis, called the SBM-ADD context-dependent DEA. In this proposed measure, we use the concept of the additive model developed by Charnes et al. (2000), which combines input-oriented and output-oriented models and the SBM proposed by Tone (2001), which evaluates the efficiency based on the slack values. The SBM-ADD context-dependent DEA takes into account of input slacks and output slacks in the objective function, and provides sharper attractiveness and progress scores for measuring the DMUs performance. A comparison among the CCR context-dependent DEA by Seiford and Zhu (2003), the SBM context-dependent DEA by Morita et al. (2005), and the SBM-ADD context-dependent DEA is made using a 32-printer benchmark data. The results show that SBM-ADD is able to provide a more appropriate stratification of the DMU performance levels than other two models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The management of railway safety system needs extended and integrated approaches of behavioral characteristics modeling. While most formal approaches to railway safety system modeling consider only the control-flow perspective, it is essential in a function-resource organizational context to link tasks. This paper presents the railway safety process models into a special type of object Petri nets called Petri Net with Object (PNO). The benefit of our approach is that by using PNO, the control-flow and the inter-organizational perspective can be integrated into a unique small scale, flexibility, and modularization formalism ready to be analyzed and application. Examples show these contributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A quality selection problem generally identifies the process parameters such as the initial process means of a production process. The joint determination of the initial process means and the production run has been reported in the literature. Most of these studies considered a process with multiple independent nominal-the-better type of quality characteristics. In a real industrial situation, the quality characteristics may depend on each other. In addition, the process could have other types of quality characteristics. In this paper, a mathematical model is developed that jointly determines the optimum initial process means and production run of a process with multiple dependent smaller-the-better type of quality characteristics. The genetic algorithm, a global optimisation algorithm, is used as an optimisation algorithm in this study, whereas local optimisation algorithms have commonly been used in preceding studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A particular planetary gear type inverted pendulum (PIP) is considered in this paper. The general winding problem due to mechanic limitation doesn't exist in the PIP. The PIP system is highly nonlinear and the exact mathematical model is difficult to obtain. An expert fuzzy control scheme is developed. VisSim-based real-time control approach is proposed. Experimental results are demonstrated. The control system is verified to possess strong robustness against external disturbances and perfect regulation capability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A feedrate override is a feedrate control signal that is applied to adjust the feedrate, providing the operators a convenient way to manipulate the feedrate during the running of NC code according to different situations either to increase the machining efficiency or the accuracy without revision of NC code and frequent stop/restart of a machining task during the trial running of a NC code. This paper studied response algorithms of feedrate override of S curve feedrate profile. According to diverse values of feedrate override, corresponding algorithms were adopted to adjust the programming feedrate. Through the establishment of a mathematical model of the AC servo system with a lead screw drive, the efficiency of the proposed response algorithms are experimentally verified. The presented algorithms have been applied in practical projects currently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A comparison study is made to the installation of the aircraft seats in the direction of forwards and backwards, under the guidance of the system analysis. It focuses on the protection to the human body when accident occurs, basing on the inertial law of movement, by reference of the impact experiment of the car. The impact is forward, and then the passenger seats should be installed backwards in order to counteract the harmful force. A mathematic model is established in this paper after the system analysis of the mode of the movement and the injury. The calculation result shows that the synthesized protection in the backward seats will be seventy times higher than in the conventional forwards seats. Then the conclusion is reached that if the passenger seats are rearranged backwards, the injury will be alleviated and the survival rate would be enhanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A quality selection problem generally identifies the process parameters such as the initial process means of a production process. The joint determination of the initial process means and the production run has been reported in the literature. Most of these studies considered a process with multiple independent nominal-the-better type of quality characteristics. In a real industrial situation, the quality characteristics may depend on each other. In addition, the process could have other types of quality characteristics. In this paper, a mathematical model is developed that jointly determines the optimum initial process means and production run of a process with multiple dependent smaller-the-better type of quality characteristics. The genetic algorithm, a global optimisation algorithm, is used as an optimisation algorithm in this study, whereas local optimisation algorithms have commonly been used in preceding studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A particular planetary gear type inverted pendulum (PIP) is considered in this paper. The general winding problem due to mechanic limitation doesn't exist in the PIP. The PIP system is highly nonlinear and the exact mathematical model is difficult to obtain. An expert fuzzy control scheme is developed. VisSim-based real-time control approach is proposed. Experimental results are demonstrated. The control system is verified to possess strong robustness against external disturbances and perfect regulation capability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of resource leveling is to minimize the deviation between the resource requirements and the desired resource profile to prevent problems that caused by fluctuation of required resources. It is a common problem and arises frequently in real situations and therefore has been studied numerous times. Almost in all of these studies and the resulting solutions, there exist a common element, which is once an activity is started, it cannot be stopped and restarted again. That is, it cannot be split. In many instances in actual construction, there exist activities that can be split. So, it seems to be very useful to develop a model for resource leveling problems that allows certain activities to be split. An important interesting property that such a model should have is its simplicity. By simplicity we mean its ease of use by inexpert users without strong mathematical background. This paper presents a model based on genetic algorithms to level resources that permits selected activities to stop and restart. This splitting of activities results in improvement to the leveling solution that is traditionally achieved when splitting is not allowed. Examples are presented that illustrate the improvement in the solution obtained from the proposed model compared to models that do not allow splitting and compares the result to that obtained using commercially available software. The model presented here is very efficient and effective. Therefore, it can be used in real situations to automatically solve resource leveling problems efficiently to obtain effective results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a new metamodel-assisted metaheuristic algorithm for optimisation problems involving computationally expensive simulations. The algorithm, called Global Probing Search, is a population-based algorithm designed for global optimisation. The main idea of the algorithm is to introduce a probing phase in the creating of the new generation of the population. In this probing phase, a large number of candidate solutions are generated and a computationally cheap metamodel function is used for choosing the most promising candidates to transfer to the next generation. This approach could significantly enhance the efficiency of the optimisation process by avoiding wasting valuable evaluation time on solutions that are likely to be inferior. During the optimisation, the accuracy of the metamodel is constantly improved through on-line updating. The proposed algorithm is implemented on a real-world optimisation problem and initial results indicate that the algorithm show good performance in comparison with a standard Genetic Algorithm and an existing metamodel-assisted metaheuristic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]