Abstract: In this study we propose a novel monitor hydraulic
automatic gauge control (HAGC) system based on fuzzy feedforward
controller. This is used in the development of cold rolling
mill automation system to improve the quality of cold strip. According to features/ properties of entry steel strip like its average
yield stress, width of strip, and desired exit thickness, this controller realizes the compensation for the exit thickness error. The traditional methods of adjusting the roller position, can-t tolerate the variance in
the entry steel strip. The proposed method uses a mathematical model
of the system together with the expert knowledge to perform this adjustment while minimizing the effect of the stated problem. In
order to improve the speed of the controller in rejecting disturbances
introduced by entry strip thickness variations, expert knowledge is added as a feed-forward term to the HAGC system. Simulation
results for the application of the proposed controller to a real cold mill show that the exit strip quality is highly improved.
Abstract: This paper deals with the project selection problem. Project selection problem is one of the problems arose firstly in the field of operations research following some production concepts from primary product mix problem. Afterward, introduction of managerial considerations into the project selection problem have emerged qualitative factors and criteria to be regarded as well as quantitative ones. To overcome both kinds of criteria, an analytic network process is developed in this paper enhanced with fuzzy sets theory to tackle the vagueness of experts- comments to evaluate the alternatives. Additionally, a modified version of Least-Square method through a non-linear programming model is augmented to the developed group decision making structure in order to elicit the final weights from comparison matrices. Finally, a case study is considered by which developed structure in this paper is validated. Moreover, a sensitivity analysis is performed to validate the response of the model with respect to the condition alteration.
Abstract: Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) is a causal graph, which shows the relations between essential components in complex systems. Experts who are familiar with the system components and their relations can generate a related FCM. There is a big gap when human experts cannot produce FCM or even there is no expert to produce the related FCM. Therefore, a new mechanism must be used to bridge this gap. In this paper, a novel learning method is proposed to construct causal graph based on historical data and by using metaheuristic such Tabu Search (TS). The efficiency of the proposed method is shown via comparison of its results of some numerical examples with those of some other methods.
Abstract: Summarizing skills have been introduced to English
syllabus in secondary school in Malaysia to evaluate student-s comprehension for a given text where it requires students to employ several strategies to produce the summary. This paper reports on our effort to develop a computer-based summarization assessment system
that detects the strategies used by the students in producing their
summaries. Sentence decomposition of expert-written summaries is
used to analyze how experts produce their summary sentences. From
the analysis, we identified seven summarizing strategies and their
rules which are then transformed into a set of heuristic rules on how
to determine the summarizing strategies. We developed an algorithm
based on the heuristic rules and performed some experiments to
evaluate and support the technique proposed.
Abstract: The number of the companies accepting RFID in Korea
has been increased continuously due to the domestic development of
information technology. The acceptance of RFID by companies in
Korea enabled them to do business with many global enterprises in a
much more efficient and effective way. According to a survey[33,
p76], many companies in Korea have used RFID for inventory or
distribution manages. But, the use of RFID in the companies in Korea
is in the early stages and its potential value hasn-t fully been realized
yet. At this time, it would be very important to investigate the factors
that affect RFID acceptance. For this study, many previous studies
were referenced and some RFID experts were interviewed. Through
the pilot test, four factors were selected - Security Trust, Employee
Knowledge, Partner Influence, Service Provider Trust - affecting
RFID acceptance and an extended technology acceptance
model(e-TAM) was presented with those factors. The proposed model
was empirically tested using data collected from employees in
companies or public enterprises. In order to analyze some
relationships between exogenous variables and four variables in TAM,
structural equation modeling(SEM) was developed and SPSS12.0 and
AMOS 7.0 were used for analyses. The results are summarized as
follows: 1) security trust perceived by employees positively
influences on perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use; 2)
employee-s knowledge on RFID positively influences on only
perceived ease of use; 3) a partner-s influence for RFID acceptance
positively influences on only perceived usefulness; 4) service provider
trust very positively influences on perceived usefulness and perceived
ease of use 5) the relationships between TAM variables are the same as
the previous studies.
Abstract: Expert systems are used extensively in many domains.
This paper discusses the use of medical expert systems in Pakistan.
Countries all over the world pay special attention on health facilities.
A country like Pakistan faces a lot of trouble in health sector.
Several attempts have been made in Pakistan to improve the health
conditions of the people but the situation is still not encouraging.
There is a shortage of doctors and other trained personnel in
Pakistan. Expert systems can play a vital role in such cases where the
medical expert is not readily available. The purpose of this paper is
to analyze the role that such systems can play in improving the health
conditions of the people in Pakistan.
Abstract: A Decision Support System/Expert System for stock
portfolio selection presented where at first step, both technical and
fundamental data used to estimate technical and fundamental return
and risk (1st phase); Then, the estimated values are aggregated with
the investor preferences (2nd phase) to produce convenient stock
portfolio.
In the 1st phase, there are two expert systems, each of which is
responsible for technical or fundamental estimation. In the technical
expert system, for each stock, twenty seven candidates are identified
and with using rough sets-based clustering method (RC) the effective
variables have been selected. Next, for each stock two fuzzy rulebases
are developed with fuzzy C-Mean method and Takai-Sugeno-
Kang (TSK) approach; one for return estimation and the other for
risk. Thereafter, the parameters of the rule-bases are tuned with backpropagation
method. In parallel, for fundamental expert systems,
fuzzy rule-bases have been identified in the form of “IF-THEN" rules
through brainstorming with the stock market experts and the input
data have been derived from financial statements; as a result two
fuzzy rule-bases have been generated for all the stocks, one for return
and the other for risk.
In the 2nd phase, user preferences represented by four criteria and
are obtained by questionnaire. Using an expert system, four estimated
values of return and risk have been aggregated with the respective
values of user preference. At last, a fuzzy rule base having four rules,
treats these values and produce a ranking score for each stock which
will lead to a satisfactory portfolio for the user.
The stocks of six manufacturing companies and the period of
2003-2006 selected for data gathering.
Abstract: Increasing number of vehicles and lack of awareness among road users may lead to road accidents. However no specific literature was found to rank vehicles involved in accidents based on fuzzy variables of road users. This paper proposes a ranking of four selected motor vehicles involved in road accidents. Human and non-human factors that normally linked with road accidents are considered for ranking. The imprecision or vagueness inherent in the subjective assessment of the experts has led the application of fuzzy sets theory to deal with ranking problems. Data in form of linguistic variables were collected from three authorised personnel of three Malaysian Government agencies. The Multi Criteria Decision Making, fuzzy TOPSIS was applied in computational procedures. From the analysis, it shows that motorcycles vehicles yielded the highest closeness coefficient at 0.6225. A ranking can be drawn using the magnitude of closeness coefficient. It was indicated that the motorcycles recorded the first rank.
Abstract: The purpose of this study is to determine in what
ways elementary education prospective teachers are being informed
about innovations and to explain the role of social influence in the
usage process of a technological innovation in terms of genders. The
study group consisted of 300 prospective teachers, including 234
females and 66 males. Data have been collected by a questionnaire
developed by the researchers. The result of the study showed that,
while prospective teachers are being informed about innovations
most frequently by mass media, they rarely seek to take expert
advice. In addition, analysis of results showed that the social
influence on females were significantly higher than males in usage
process of a technological innovation.
Abstract: Pineapples can be classified using an index with seven
levels of maturity based on the green and yellow color of the skin. As
the pineapple ripens, the skin will change from pale green to a golden
or yellowish color. The issues that occur in agriculture nowadays are
to do with farmers being unable to distinguish between the indexes of
pineapple maturity correctly and effectively. There are several
reasons for why farmers cannot properly follow the guideline provide
by Federal Agriculture Marketing Authority (FAMA) and one of
reason is that due to manual inspection done by experts, there are no
specific and universal guidelines to be adopted by farmers due to the
different points of view of the experts when sorting the pineapples
based on their knowledge and experience. Therefore, an automatic
system will help farmers to identify pineapple maturity effectively
and will become a universal indicator to farmers.
Abstract: In many applications, it is a priori known that the
target function should satisfy certain constraints imposed by, for
example, economic theory or a human-decision maker. Here we
consider partially monotone problems, where the target variable
depends monotonically on some of the predictor variables but not all.
We propose an approach to build partially monotone models based
on the convolution of monotone neural networks and kernel
functions. The results from simulations and a real case study on
house pricing show that our approach has significantly better
performance than partially monotone linear models. Furthermore, the
incorporation of partial monotonicity constraints not only leads to
models that are in accordance with the decision maker's expertise,
but also reduces considerably the model variance in comparison to
standard neural networks with weight decay.
Abstract: The vast amount of information on the World Wide
Web is created and published by many different types of providers.
Unlike books and journals, most of this information is not subject to
editing or peer review by experts. This lack of quality control and the
explosion of web sites make the task of finding quality information
on the web especially critical. Meanwhile new facilities for
producing web pages such as Blogs make this issue more significant
because Blogs have simple content management tools enabling nonexperts
to build easily updatable web diaries or online journals. On
the other hand despite a decade of active research in information
quality (IQ) there is no framework for measuring information quality
on the Blogs yet. This paper presents a novel experimental
framework for ranking quality of information on the Weblog. The
results of data analysis revealed seven IQ dimensions for the Weblog.
For each dimension, variables and related coefficients were
calculated so that presented framework is able to assess IQ of
Weblogs automatically.
Abstract: In Both developed and developing countries,
governments play a basic role in making policies, programs and
instruments which support the development of micro, small and
medium enterprises. One of the mechanisms employed to nurture
small firms for more than two decades is business incubation. One of
the mechanisms employed to nurture small firms for more than two
decades is technology business incubation. The main aim of this
research was to establish influencing factors in Technology Business
Incubator's effectiveness and their explanatory model. Therefore,
among 56 Technology Business Incubators in Iran, 32 active
incubators were selected and by stratified random sampling, 528
start-ups were chosen. The validity of research questionnaires
was determines by expert consensus, item analysis and factor
analysis; and their reliability calculated by Cronbach-s alpha.
Data analysis was then made through SPSS and LISREL soft wares.
Both organizational procedures and entrepreneurial behaviors were
the meaningful mediators. Organizational procedures with (P < .01, β
=0.45) was stronger mediator for the improvement of Technology
Business Incubator's effectiveness comparing to entrepreneurial
behavior with (P < .01, β =0.36).
Abstract: The choice of studying economics instead of another subject should be motivated by the fact that economics training equips students with skills and knowledge that other disciplines do not provide. Which are these skills and knowledge, however, is not always very clear. This article clarifies such issue by first exploring the philosophical foundations and the defining features of the discipline, and then by investigating in which ways these are transferred to the students. In other words, we study what is meant by the 'economic way of thinking' that is passed on to the students.
Abstract: Open and distance learning is a fairly new concept in
Malawi. The major public provider, the Malawi College of Distance
Education, rolled out its activities only about 40 years ago. Over the
years, the demand for distance education has tremendously increased.
The present government has displayed positive political will to uplift
ODL as outlined in the Malawi Growth and Development Strategy as
well as the National Education Sector Plan. A growing national
interest in education coupled with political stability and a booming
ICT industry also raise hope for success. However, a fragile economy
with a GNI per capita of -US$ 200 over the last decade, poor public
funding, erratic power supply and lack of expertise put strain on
efforts towards the promotion of ODL initiatives. Despite the
challenges, the nation appears determined to go flat out and explore
all possible avenues that could revolutionise education access and
equity through ODL.
Abstract: Today, advantage of biotechnology especially in environmental issues compared to other technologies is irrefragable. Kimia Gharb Gostar Industries Company, as a largest producer of citric acid in Middle East, applies biotechnology for this goal. Citrogypsum is a by–product of citric acid production and it considered as a valid residuum of this company. At this paper summary of acid citric production and condition of Citrogypsum production in company were introduced in addition to defmition of Citrogypsum production and its applications in world. According to these information and evaluation of present conditions about Iran needing to Citrogypsum, the best priority was introduced and emphasized on strategy selection and proper programming for self-sufficiency. The Delphi technique was used to elicit expert opinions about criteria for evaluating the usages. The criteria identified by the experts were profitability, capacity of production, the degree of investment, marketable, production ease and time production. The Analytical Hierarchy Process (ARP) and Expert Choice software were used to compare the alternatives on the criteria derived from the Delphi process.
Abstract: Various formal and informal brand alliances are being formed in professional service firms. Professional service corporate brand is heavily dependent on brands of professional employees who comprise them, and professional employee brands are in turn dependent on the corporate brand. Prior work provides limited scientific evidence of brand alliance effects in professional service area – i.e., how professional service corporate-employee brand allies are affected by an alliance, what are brand attitude effects after alliance formation and how these effects vary with different strengths of an ally. Scientific literature analysis and theoretical modeling are the main methods of the current study. As a result, a theoretical model is constructed for estimating spillover effects of professional service corporate-employee brand alliances and for comparison among different professional service firm expertise practice models – from “brains" to “procedure" model. The resulting theoretical model lays basis for future experimental studies.
Abstract: One of the basic concepts in marketing is the concept
of meeting customers- needs. Since customer satisfaction is essential
for lasting survival and development of a business, screening and
observing customer satisfaction and recognizing its underlying
factors must be one of the key activities of every business.
The purpose of this study is to recognize the drivers that effect
customer satisfaction in a business-to-business situation in order to
improve marketing activities. We conducted a survey in which 93
business customers of a manufacturer of Diesel Generator in Iran
participated and they talked about their ideas and satisfaction of
supplier-s services related to its products. We developed the measures
for drivers of satisfaction first by as investigative research (by means
of feedback from executives and customers of sponsoring firm). Then
based on these measures, we created a mail survey, and asked the
respondents to explain their opinion about the sponsoring firm which
was a supplier of diesel generator and similar products. Furthermore,
the survey required the participants to mention their functional areas
and their company features.
In Conclusion we found that there are three drivers for customer
satisfaction, which are reliability, information about product, and
commercial features. Buyers/users from different functional areas
attribute different degree of importance to the last two drivers. For
instance, people from buying and management areas believe that
commercial features are more important than information about
products. But people in engineering, maintenance and production
areas believe that having information about products is more
important than commercial aspects. Marketing experts should
consider the attribute of customers regarding information about the
product and commercial features to improve market share.
Abstract: This article deals with the conceptual modeling under uncertainty. First, the division of information systems with their definition will be described, focusing on those where the construction of a conceptual model is suitable for the design of future information system database. Furthermore, the disadvantages of the traditional approach in creating a conceptual model and database design will be analyzed. A comprehensive methodology for the creation of a conceptual model based on analysis of client requirements and the selection of a suitable domain model is proposed here. This article presents the expert system used for the construction of a conceptual model and is a suitable tool for database designers to create a conceptual model.
Abstract: This study aims to analyze the effect of e-learning on
photonics technology and daily livings among college students. The
course contents of photonics technology and daily livings are first
drafted based on research discussions and expert interviews. Having
expert questionnaires with Delphi Technique for three times, the
knowledge units and items for the course of photonics technology and
daily livings are established. The e-learning materials and the drafts of
instructional strategies, academic achievement, and learning attitude
scales are then developed. With expert inspection, reliability and
validity test, and experimental instructions, the scales and the material
are further revised. Finally, the formal instructions are implemented to
test the effect of different instructional methods on the academic
achievement of photonics technology and daily livings among students
in universities of technology. The research results show that e-learning
could effectively promote academic achievement and learning
attitude, and the students with e-learning obviously outperform the
ones with trandition instructions.