Abstract: Product Lead Time (PLT) is the period of time from
receiving a customer's order to delivering the final product. PLT is an
indicator of the manufacturing controllability, efficiency and
performance. Due to the explosion in the rate of technological
innovations and the rapid changes in the nature of manufacturing
processes, manufacturing firms can bring the new products to market
quicker only if they can reduce their PLT and speed up the rate at
which they can design, plan, control, and manufacture. Although
there is a substantial body of research on manufacturing relating to
cost and quality issues, there is no much specific research conducted
in relation to the formulation of PLT, despite its significance and
importance. This paper analyzes and formulates PLT which can be
used as a guideline for achieving the shorter PLT. Further more this
paper identifies the causes of delay and factors that contributes to the
increased product lead-time.
Abstract: The nanosized polymeric micelles release the drug
due to acoustic cavitation, which is enhanced in dual frequency
ultrasonic fields. In this study, adult female Balb/C mice were
transplanted with spontaneous breast adenocarcinoma tumors and
were injected with a dose of 1.3 mg/kg doxorubicin in one of three
forms: free doxorubicin, micellar doxorubicin without sonication and
micellar doxorubicin with sonication. To increase cavitation yield,
the tumor region was sonicated with low level dual frequency of 3
MHz and 28 kHz. The animals were sacrificed 24 h after injection,
and their tumor, heart, spleen, liver, kidneys and plasma were
separated and homogenized. The drug content in their tumor, heart,
spleen, liver, kidneys and plasma was determined using tissue
fluorimetry. The results show that in the group that received micellar
doxorubicin with sonication, the drug concentration in the tumor
tissue was nine and three times higher than in the free doxorubicin
group and the micellar doxorubicin without sonication group,
respectively. In the micellar doxorubicin with sonication group, the
drug concentration in other tissues was lower than other groups
(p
Abstract: The volume of XML data exchange is explosively increasing, and the need for efficient mechanisms of XML data management is vital. Many XML storage models have been proposed for storing XML DTD-independent documents in relational database systems. Benchmarking is the best way to highlight pros and cons of different approaches. In this study, we use a common benchmarking scheme, known as XMark to compare the most cited and newly proposed DTD-independent methods in terms of logical reads, physical I/O, CPU time and duration. We show the effect of Label Path, extracting values and storing in another table and type of join needed for each method's query answering.
Abstract: Not all types of mobile phone are successful in entering the market because some types of the mobile phone have a negative perception of user. Therefore, it is important to understand the influence of mobile phone's characteristics in the local user perception. This research investigates the influence of QWERTY mobile phone's forms in the perception of Indonesian user. First, some alternatives of mobile phone-s form are developed based on a certain number of mobile phone's models. At the second stage, some word pairs as design attributes of the mobile phone are chosen to represent the user perception of mobile phone. At the final stage, a survey is conducted to investigate the influence of the developed form alternatives to the user perception. Based on the research, users perceive mobile phone's form with curved top and straight bottom shapes and mobile phone's form with slider and antenna as the most negative form. Meanwhile, mobile phone's form with curved top and bottom shapes and mobile phone-s form without slider and antenna are perceived by the user as the most positive form.
Abstract: In this paper, a neural tree (NT) classifier having a
simple perceptron at each node is considered. A new concept for
making a balanced tree is applied in the learning algorithm of the
tree. At each node, if the perceptron classification is not accurate and
unbalanced, then it is replaced by a new perceptron. This separates
the training set in such a way that almost the equal number of patterns
fall into each of the classes. Moreover, each perceptron is trained only
for the classes which are present at respective node and ignore other
classes. Splitting nodes are employed into the neural tree architecture
to divide the training set when the current perceptron node repeats
the same classification of the parent node. A new error function based
on the depth of the tree is introduced to reduce the computational
time for the training of a perceptron. Experiments are performed to
check the efficiency and encouraging results are obtained in terms of
accuracy and computational costs.
Abstract: Optical 3D measurement of objects is meaningful in
numerous industrial applications. In various cases shape acquisition
of weak textured objects is essential. Examples are repetition parts
made of plastic or ceramic such as housing parts or ceramic bottles as
well as agricultural products like tubers. These parts are often
conveyed in a wobbling way during the automated optical inspection.
Thus, conventional 3D shape acquisition methods like laser scanning
might fail. In this paper, a novel approach for acquiring 3D shape of
weak textured and moving objects is presented. To facilitate such
measurements an active stereo vision system with structured light is
proposed. The system consists of multiple camera pairs and auxiliary
laser pattern generators. It performs the shape acquisition within one
shot and is beneficial for rapid inspection tasks. An experimental
setup including hardware and software has been developed and
implemented.
Abstract: The elimimation of mefenamic acid has been carried
out by photolysis, ozonation, adsorption onto activated carbon (AC)
and combinations of the previous single systems (O3+AC and
O3+UV). The results obtained indicate that mefenamic acid is not
photo-reactive, showing a relatively low quantum yield of the order
of 6 x 10-4 mol Einstein-1. Application of ozone to mefenamic
aqueous solutions instantaneously eliminates the pharmaceutical,
achieving simultaneously a 40% of mineralization. Addition of AC to
the ozonation process does not enhance the process, moreover,
mineralization is completely inhibited if compared to results obtained
by single ozonation. The combination of ozone and UV radiation led
to the best results in terms of mineralization (60% after 120 min).
Abstract: Nagaland, the 16th state of India in order of
statehood, is situated between 25° 6' and 27° 4' latitude north and
between 93º 20' E and 95º 15' E longitude of equator in the North
Eastern part of the India. Endowed with varied topography, soil and
agro climatic conditions it is known for its potentiality to grow all
most all kinds of horticultural crops. Pineapple being grown since
long organically by default is one of the most promising crops of the
state with emphasis being laid for commercialization by the
government of Nagaland. In light of commercialization, globalization
and scope of setting small-scale industries, a research study was
undertaken to examine the socio-economic and personal
characteristics, entrepreneurial characteristics and attitude of the
pineapple growers towards improved package of practices of
pineapple cultivation. The study was conducted in Medziphema
block of Dimapur district of the Nagaland state of India following ex
post facto research design. Ninety pineapple growers were selected
from four different villages of Medziphema block based on
proportionate random selection procedure. Findings of the study
revealed that majority of the respondents had medium level of
entrepreneurial characteristics in terms of knowledge level, risk
orientation, self confidence, management orientation, farm decision
making ability and leadership ability and most of them had
favourable attitude towards improved package of practices of
pineapple cultivation. The variables age, education, farm size, risk
orientation, management orientation and sources of information
utilized were found important to influence the attitude of the
respondents. The study revealed that favourable attitude and
entrepreneurial characteristics of the pineapple cultivators might be
harnessed for increased production of pineapple in the state thereby
bringing socio economic upliftment of the marginal and small-scale
farmers.
Abstract: This paper proposes the hypothesis that multilateralism and regionalism are complementary, and that regional income convergence is likely with a like minded and committed regionalism that often has links geographically and culturally. The association between international trade, income per capita, and regional income convergence in founder members of ASEAN and SAARC, is explored by applying the Lumsdaine, and Papell approach. The causal relationships between the above variables are also studied in respective trade blocs by using Granger causality tests. The conclusion is that global reforms have had a greater impact on increasing trade for both trade blocs and induced convergence only in ASEAN-5 countries. The experience of ASEAN countries shows a two-way causal relationship between the flow from trade to regional income convergence, and vice versa. There is no evidence in SAARC countries for income convergence and causality.
Abstract: Five crystal modifications of water insoluble
artesunate were generated by recrystallizing it from various solvents
with improved physicochemical properties. These generated crystal
forms were characterized to select the most potent and soluble form.
SEM of all the forms showed changes in external shape leading them
to be different morphologically. DSC thermograms of Form III and
Form V showed broad endotherm peaks at 83.04oC and 76.96oC prior
to melting fusion of drug respectively. Calculated weight loss in TGA
revealed that Form III and Form V are methanol and acetone solvates
respectively. However, few additional peaks were appeared in XRPD
pattern in these two solvate forms. All forms exhibit exothermic
behavior in buffer and two solvates display maximum ease of
molecular release from the lattice. Methanol and acetone solvates
were found to be most soluble forms and exhibited higher
antimalarial efficacy showing higher survival rate (83.3%) after 30
days.
Abstract: Support vector regression (SVR) has been regarded
as a state-of-the-art method for approximation and regression. The
importance of kernel function, which is so-called admissible support
vector kernel (SV kernel) in SVR, has motivated many studies
on its composition. The Gaussian kernel (RBF) is regarded as a
“best" choice of SV kernel used by non-expert in SVR, whereas
there is no evidence, except for its superior performance on some
practical applications, to prove the statement. Its well-known that
reproducing kernel (R.K) is also a SV kernel which possesses many
important properties, e.g. positive definiteness, reproducing property
and composing complex R.K by simpler ones. However, there are a
limited number of R.Ks with explicit forms and consequently few
quantitative comparison studies in practice. In this paper, two R.Ks,
i.e. SV kernels, composed by the sum and product of a translation
invariant kernel in a Sobolev space are proposed. An exploratory
study on the performance of SVR based general R.K is presented
through a systematic comparison to that of RBF using multiple
criteria and synthetic problems. The results show that the R.K is
an equivalent or even better SV kernel than RBF for the problems
with more input variables (more than 5, especially more than 10) and
higher nonlinearity.
Abstract: As in today's semiconductor industries test costs can make up to 50 percent of the total production costs, an efficient test error detection becomes more and more important. In this paper, we present a new machine learning approach to test error detection that should provide a faster recognition of test system faults as well as an improved test error recall. The key idea is to learn a classifier ensemble, detecting typical test error patterns in wafer test results immediately after finishing these tests. Since test error detection has not yet been discussed in the machine learning community, we define central problem-relevant terms and provide an analysis of important domain properties. Finally, we present comparative studies reflecting the failure detection performance of three individual classifiers and three ensemble methods based upon them. As base classifiers we chose a decision tree learner, a support vector machine and a Bayesian network, while the compared ensemble methods were simple and weighted majority vote as well as stacking. For the evaluation, we used cross validation and a specially designed practical simulation. By implementing our approach in a semiconductor test department for the observation of two products, we proofed its practical applicability.
Abstract: The introduction of sowing technologies into minimum- or no-tillage soil has a number of economical and environmental virtues, such as improving soil properties, decreasing soil erosion and degradation, and saving working time and fuel. However, the main disadvantage of these technologies is that plant residues on the soil surface reduce the quality of the planted crop seeds, thus requiring plant residues to be removed or cut. This paper presents a analysis of disc coulter parameters and an experimental investigation of cutting spring barley straw containing various amounts of moisture with different disc coulters (smooth and notched).
Abstract: Majority of researches conducted on Iranian urban
development plans indicate that they have been almost unsuccessful
in terms of draft, execution and goal achievement. Lack or shortage
of essential statistics and information can be listed as an important
reason of the failure of these plans. Lack of figures and information
has turned into an obvious part of the country-s statistics officials.
This problem has made urban planner themselves to embark on
physical surveys including real estate and land pricing, population
and economic census of the city. Apart from the problems facing
urban developers, the possibility of errors is high in such surveys.
In the present article, applying the interview technique, it has
been mentioned that utilizing multipurpose cadastre system as a land
information system is essential for urban development plans in Iran.
It can minimize or even remove the failures facing urban
development plans.
Abstract: This paper considers the development of a two-point
predictor-corrector block method for solving delay differential
equations. The formulae are represented in divided difference form
and the algorithm is implemented in variable stepsize variable order
technique. The block method produces two new values at a single
integration step. Numerical results are compared with existing
methods and it is evident that the block method performs very well.
Stability regions of the block method are also investigated.
Abstract: A concern that researchers usually face in different
applications of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is determination of
the size of effective domain in time series. In this paper, trial and
error method was used on groundwater depth time series to determine
the size of effective domain in the series in an observation well in
Union County, New Jersey, U.S. different domains of 20, 40, 60, 80,
100, and 120 preceding day were examined and the 80 days was
considered as effective length of the domain. Data sets in different
domains were fed to a Feed Forward Back Propagation ANN with
one hidden layer and the groundwater depths were forecasted. Root
Mean Square Error (RMSE) and the correlation factor (R2) of
estimated and observed groundwater depths for all domains were
determined. In general, groundwater depth forecast improved, as
evidenced by lower RMSEs and higher R2s, when the domain length
increased from 20 to 120. However, 80 days was selected as the
effective domain because the improvement was less than 1% beyond
that. Forecasted ground water depths utilizing measured daily data
(set #1) and data averaged over the effective domain (set #2) were
compared. It was postulated that more accurate nature of measured
daily data was the reason for a better forecast with lower RMSE
(0.1027 m compared to 0.255 m) in set #1. However, the size of input
data in this set was 80 times the size of input data in set #2; a factor
that may increase the computational effort unpredictably. It was
concluded that 80 daily data may be successfully utilized to lower the
size of input data sets considerably, while maintaining the effective
information in the data set.
Abstract: This study examines perception of environmental
approach in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) – the
process by which firms integrate environmental concern into
business. Based on a review of the literature, the paper synthesizes
focus on environmental issues with the reflection in a case study in
the Czech Republic. Two themes of corporate environmentalism are
discussed – corporate environmental orientation and corporate
stances toward environmental concerns. It provides theoretical
material on greening organizational culture that is helpful in
understanding the response of contemporary business to
environmental problems. We integrate theoretical predictions with
empirical findings confronted with reality. Scales to measure these
themes are tested in a survey of managers in 229 Czech firms. We
used the process of in-depth questioning. The research question was
derived and answered in the context of the corresponding literature
and conducted research. A case study showed us that environmental
approach is variety different (depending on the size of the firm) in
SMEs sector. The results of the empirical mapping demonstrate
Czech company’s approach to environment and define the problem
areas and pinpoint the main limitation in the expansion of
environmental aspects. We contribute to the debate for recognition of
the particular role of environmental issues in business reality.
Abstract: In this paper we present a noise reduction filter for video processing. It is based on the recently proposed two dimensional steering kernel, extended to three dimensions and further augmented to suit the spatial-temporal domain of video processing. Two alternative filters are proposed - the time symmetric kernel and the time asymmetric kernel. The first reduces the noise on single sequences, but to handle the problems at scene shift the asymmetric kernel is introduced. The performance of both are tested on simulated data and on a real video sequence together with the existing steering kernel. The proposed kernels improves the Rooted Mean Squared Error (RMSE) compared to the original steering kernel method on video material.
Abstract: Although backpropagation ANNs generally predict
better than decision trees do for pattern classification problems, they
are often regarded as black boxes, i.e., their predictions cannot be
explained as those of decision trees. In many applications, it is
desirable to extract knowledge from trained ANNs for the users to
gain a better understanding of how the networks solve the problems.
A new rule extraction algorithm, called rule extraction from artificial
neural networks (REANN) is proposed and implemented to extract
symbolic rules from ANNs. A standard three-layer feedforward ANN
is the basis of the algorithm. A four-phase training algorithm is
proposed for backpropagation learning. Explicitness of the extracted
rules is supported by comparing them to the symbolic rules generated
by other methods. Extracted rules are comparable with other methods
in terms of number of rules, average number of conditions for a rule,
and predictive accuracy. Extensive experimental studies on several
benchmarks classification problems, such as breast cancer, iris,
diabetes, and season classification problems, demonstrate the
effectiveness of the proposed approach with good generalization
ability.
Abstract: During the last couple of years, the degree of dependence on IT systems has reached a dimension nobody imagined to be possible 10 years ago. The increased usage of mobile devices (e.g., smart phones), wireless sensor networks and embedded devices (Internet of Things) are only some examples of the dependency of modern societies on cyber space. At the same time, the complexity of IT applications, e.g., because of the increasing use of cloud computing, is rising continuously. Along with this, the threats to IT security have increased both quantitatively and qualitatively, as recent examples like STUXNET or the supposed cyber attack on Illinois water system are proofing impressively. Once isolated control systems are nowadays often publicly available - a fact that has never been intended by the developers. Threats to IT systems don’t care about areas of responsibility. Especially with regard to Cyber Warfare, IT threats are no longer limited to company or industry boundaries, administrative jurisdictions or state boundaries. One of the important countermeasures is increased cooperation among the participants especially in the field of Cyber Defence. Besides political and legal challenges, there are technical ones as well. A better, at least partially automated exchange of information is essential to (i) enable sophisticated situational awareness and to (ii) counter the attacker in a coordinated way. Therefore, this publication performs an evaluation of state of the art Intrusion Detection Message Exchange protocols in order to guarantee a secure information exchange between different entities.