Abstract: In this paper, multi-processors job shop scheduling problems are solved by a heuristic algorithm based on the hybrid of priority dispatching rules according to an ant colony optimization algorithm. The objective function is to minimize the makespan, i.e. total completion time, in which a simultanous presence of various kinds of ferons is allowed. By using the suitable hybrid of priority dispatching rules, the process of finding the best solution will be improved. Ant colony optimization algorithm, not only promote the ability of this proposed algorithm, but also decreases the total working time because of decreasing in setup times and modifying the working production line. Thus, the similar work has the same production lines. Other advantage of this algorithm is that the similar machines (not the same) can be considered. So, these machines are able to process a job with different processing and setup times. According to this capability and from this algorithm evaluation point of view, a number of test problems are solved and the associated results are analyzed. The results show a significant decrease in throughput time. It also shows that, this algorithm is able to recognize the bottleneck machine and to schedule jobs in an efficient way.
Abstract: Reliability Centered Maintenance(RCM) is one of
most widely used methods in the modern power system to schedule a
maintenance cycle and determine the priority of inspection. In order
to apply the RCM method to the Smart Grid, a precedence study for
the new structure of rearranged system should be performed due to
introduction of additional installation such as renewable and
sustainable energy resources, energy storage devices and advanced
metering infrastructure. This paper proposes a new method to
evaluate the priority of maintenance and inspection of the power
system facilities in the Smart Grid using the Risk Priority Number. In
order to calculate that risk index, it is required that the reliability
block diagram should be analyzed for the Smart Grid system. Finally,
the feasible technical method is discussed to estimate the risk
potential as part of the RCM procedure.
Abstract: The grey oyster mushroom, Pleurotus sajor-caju
(PSC), is a common edible mushroom and is now grown
commercially around the world for food. This fungus has been
broadly used as food or food ingredients in various food products for
a long time. To enhance the nutritional quality and sensory attributes
of bakery-based products, PSC powder is used in the present study to
partially replace wheat flour in baked product formulations. The
nutrient content and sensory properties of rice-porridge and
unleavened bread (paratha) incorporated with various levels of PSC
powder were studied. These food items were formulated with either
0%, 2%, 4% or 6% of PSC powder. Results show PSC powder
recorded β-glucan at 3.57g/100g. In sensory evaluation, consumers
gave higher score to both rice-porridge and paratha bread containing
2-4% PSC compared to those that are not added with PSC powder.
The paratha containing 4% PSC powder can be formulated with the
intention in improving overall acceptability of paratha bread.
Meanwhile, for rice-porridge, consumers prefer the formulated
product added with 4% PSC powder. In conclusion, the addition of
PSC powder to partially wheat flour can be recommended for the
purpose of enhancing nutritional composition and maintaining the
acceptability of carbohydrate-based products.
Abstract: The contact width is important design parameter for
optimizing the design of new metal gasket for asbestos substitution
gasket. The contact width is found have relationship with the helium
leak quantity. In the increasing of axial load value, the helium leak
quantity is decreasing and the contact width is increasing. This study
provides validity method using simulation analysis and the result is
compared to experimental using pressure sensitive paper. The results
denote similar trend data between simulation and experimental result.
Final evaluation is determined by helium leak quantity to check
leakage performance of gasket design. Considering the phenomena of
position change on the convex contact, it can be developed the
optimization of gasket design by increasing contact width.
Abstract: There are many problems associated with the World Wide
Web: getting lost in the hyperspace; the web content is still accessible only
to humans and difficulties of web administration. The solution to these
problems is the Semantic Web which is considered to be the extension
for the current web presents information in both human readable and
machine processable form. The aim of this study is to reach new
generic foundation architecture for the Semantic Web because there
is no clear architecture for it, there are four versions, but still up to
now there is no agreement for one of these versions nor is there a
clear picture for the relation between different layers and
technologies inside this architecture. This can be done depending on
the idea of previous versions as well as Gerber-s evaluation method
as a step toward an agreement for one Semantic Web architecture.
Abstract: We analyze the problem of decision making under
ignorance with regrets. Recently, Yager has developed a new method
for decision making where instead of using regrets he uses another
type of transformation called negrets. Basically, the negret is
considered as the dual of the regret. We study this problem in detail
and we suggest the use of geometric aggregation operators in this
method. For doing this, we develop a different method for
constructing the negret matrix where all the values are positive. The
main result obtained is that now the model is able to deal with
negative numbers because of the transformation done in the negret
matrix. We further extent these results to another model developed
also by Yager about mixing valuations and negrets. Unfortunately, in
this case we are not able to deal with negative numbers because the
valuations can be either positive or negative.
Abstract: A product development for green logistics model using
the fuzzy analytic network process method is presented for evaluating
the relationships among the product design, the manufacturing
activities, and the green supply chain. In the product development
stage, there can be alternative ways to design the detailed components
to satisfy the design concept and product requirement. In different
design alternative cases, the manufacturing activities can be different.
In addition, the manufacturing activities can affect the green supply
chain of the components and product. In this research, a fuzzy analytic
network process evaluation model is presented for evaluating the
criteria in product design, manufacturing activities, and green supply
chain. The comparison matrices for evaluating the criteria among the
three groups are established. The total relational values between the
three groups represent the relationships and effects. In application, the
total relational values can be used to evaluate the design alternative
cases for decision-making to select a suitable design case and the green
supply chain. In this presentation, an example product is illustrated. It
shows that the model is useful for integrated evaluation of design and
manufacturing and green supply chain for the purpose of product
development for green logistics.
Abstract: This research studied recycled waste by the Recyclable Material Bank Project of 4 universities in the central region of Thailand for the evaluation of reducing greenhouse gas emissions compared with landfilling activity during July 2012 to June 2013. The results showed that the projects collected total amount of recyclable wastes of about 911,984.80 kilograms. Office paper had the largest amount among these recycled wastes (50.68% of total recycled waste). Groups of recycled waste can be prioritized from high to low according to their amount as paper, plastic, glass, mixed recyclables, and metal, respectively. The project reduced greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to about 2814.969 metric tons of carbon dioxide. The most significant recycled waste that affects the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is office paper which is 70.16% of total reduced greenhouse gasses emission. According to amount of reduced greenhouse gasses emission, groups of recycled waste can be prioritized from high to low significances as paper, plastic, metals, mixed recyclables, and glass, respectively.
Abstract: B2E portals represent a new class of web-based
information technologies which many organisations are introducing
in recent years to stay in touch with their distributed workforces and
enable them to perform value added activities for organisations.
However, actual usage of these emerging systems (measured using
suitable instruments) has not been reported in the contemporary
scholarly literature. We argue that many of the instruments to
measure usage of various types of IT-enabled information systems
are not directly applicable for B2E portals because they were
developed for the context of traditional mainframe and PC-based
information systems. It is therefore important to develop a new
instrument for web-based portal technologies aimed at employees. In
this article, we report on the development and initial qualitative
evaluation of an instrument that seeks to operationaise a set of
independent factors affecting the usage of portals by employees. The
proposed instrument is useful to IT/e-commerce researchers and
practitioners alike as it enhances their confidence in predicting
employee usage of portals in organisations.
Abstract: The building of a factory can be a strategic investment
owing to its long service life. An evaluation that only focuses, for
example, on payments for the building, the technical equipment of
the factory, and the personnel for the enterprise is – considering the
complexity of the system factory – not sufficient for this long-term
view. The success of an investment is secured, among other things,
by the attainment of nonmonetary goals, too, like transformability.
Such aspects are not considered in traditional investment calculations
like the net present value method. This paper closes this gap with the
enhanced economic evaluation (EWR) for factory planning. The
procedure and the first results of an application in a project are
presented.
Abstract: In most study fields, a phenomenon may not be
studied directly but it will be examined indirectly by phenomenon
model. Making an accurate model of system, there is attained new
information from modeled phenomenon without any charge, danger,
etc... there have been developed more solutions for describing and
analyzing the recent complicated systems but few of them have
analyzed the performance in the range of system description. Petri
nets are of limited solutions which may make such union. Petri nets
are being applied in problems related to modeling and designing the
systems. Theory of Petri nets allow a system to model
mathematically by a Petri net and analyzing the Petri net can then
determine main information of modeled system-s structure and
dynamic. This information can be used for assessing the performance
of systems and suggesting corrections in the system. In this paper,
beside the introduction of Petri nets, a real case study will be studied
in order to show the application of generalized stochastic Petri nets in
modeling a resource sharing production system and evaluating the
efficiency of its machines and robots. The modeling tool used here is
SHARP software which calculates specific indicators helping to
make decision.
Abstract: Vibration characteristics of subcooled flow boiling on
thin and long structures such as a heating rod were recently
investigated by the author. The results show that the intensity of the
subcooled boiling-induced vibration (SBIV) was influenced strongly
by the conditions of the subcooling temperature, linear power density
and flow velocity. Implosive bubble formation and collapse are the
main nature of subcooled boiling, and their behaviors are the only
sources to originate from SBIV. Therefore, in order to explain the
phenomenon of SBIV, it is essential to obtain reliable information
about bubble behavior in subcooled boiling conditions. This was
investigated at different conditions of coolant subcooling
temperatures of 25 to 75°C, coolant flow velocities of 0.16 to
0.53m/s, and linear power densities of 100 to 600 W/cm. High speed
photography at 13,500 frames per second was performed at these
conditions. The results show that even at the highest subcooling
condition, the absolute majority of bubbles collapse very close to the
surface after detaching from the heating surface. Based on these
observations, a simple model of surface tension and momentum
change is introduced to offer a rough quantitative estimate of the
force exerted on the heating surface during the bubble ebullition. The
formation of a typical bubble in subcooled boiling is predicted to
exert an excitation force in the order of 10-4 N.
Abstract: This paper presents a new technique for generating sets of synthetic classifiers to evaluate abstract-level combination methods. The sets differ in terms of both recognition rates of the individual classifiers and degree of similarity. For this purpose, each abstract-level classifier is considered as a random variable producing one class label as the output for an input pattern. From the initial set of classifiers, new slightly different sets are generated by applying specific operators, which are defined at the purpose. Finally, the sets of synthetic classifiers have been used to estimate the performance of combination methods for abstract-level classifiers. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Abstract: The evaluation of conversational agents or chatterbots question answering systems is a major research area that needs much attention. Before the rise of domain-oriented conversational agents based on natural language understanding and reasoning, evaluation is never a problem as information retrieval-based metrics are readily available for use. However, when chatterbots began to become more domain specific, evaluation becomes a real issue. This is especially true when understanding and reasoning is required to cater for a wider variety of questions and at the same time to achieve high quality responses. This paper discusses the inappropriateness of the existing measures for response quality evaluation and the call for new standard measures and related considerations are brought forward. As a short-term solution for evaluating response quality of conversational agents, and to demonstrate the challenges in evaluating systems of different nature, this research proposes a blackbox approach using observation, classification scheme and a scoring mechanism to assess and rank three example systems, AnswerBus, START and AINI.
Abstract: Due to dynamic evolution, the ability of a
manufacturing technology to produce a special product is changing.
Therefore, it is essential to monitor the established techniques and
processes to detect whether a company-s production will fit future
circumstances. Concerning the manufacturing technology planning
process, companies must decide when to change to a new technology
for maintaining and increasing competitive advantages. In this
context, the maturity assessment of the focused technologies is
crucial. This article presents an approach for defining the maturity of
a manufacturing technology from a strategic point of view. The
concept is based on the approach of technology readiness level
(TRL) according to NASA (National Aeronautics and Space
Administration), but also includes dynamic changes. Therefore, the
model takes into account the concept of the technology life cycle.
Furthermore, it enables a company to estimate the ideal date for
implementation of a new manufacturing technology.
Abstract: Intelligent systems are required in order to quickly and accurately analyze enormous quantities of data in the Internet environment. In intelligent systems, information extracting processes can be divided into supervised learning and unsupervised learning. This paper investigates intelligent clustering by unsupervised learning. Intelligent clustering is the clustering system which determines the clustering model for data analysis and evaluates results by itself. This system can make a clustering model more rapidly, objectively and accurately than an analyzer. The methodology for the automatic clustering intelligent system is a multi-agent system that comprises a clustering agent and a cluster performance evaluation agent. An agent exchanges information about clusters with another agent and the system determines the optimal cluster number through this information. Experiments using data sets in the UCI Machine Repository are performed in order to prove the validity of the system.
Abstract: In countries with hot climates, air-conditioning forms
a large proportion of annual peak electrical demand, requiring
expansion of power plants to meet the peak demand, which goes
unused most of the time. Use of well-designed cool storage can offset
the peak demand to a large extent. In this study, an air conditioning
system with naturally stratified storage tank was designed,
constructed and tested. A new type of diffuser was designed and used
in this study. Factors that influence the performance of chilled water
storage tanks were investigated. The results indicated that stratified
storage tank consistently stratified well without any physical barrier.
Investigation also showed that storage efficiency decreased with
increasing flow rate due to increased mixing of warm and chilled
water. Diffuser design and layout primarily affected the mixing near
the inlet diffuser and the extent of this mixing had primary influence
on the shape of the thermocline. The heat conduction through tank
walls and through the thermocline caused widening of mixed volume.
Thermal efficiency of stratified storage tanks was as high as 90
percent, which indicates that stratified tanks can effectively be used
as a load management technique.
Abstract: This study used Item Analysis, Exploratory Factor
Analysis (EFA) and Reliability Analysis (Cronbach-s α value) to
exam the Questions which selected by the Delphi method based on the
issue of “Socio-technical system (STS)" and user-centered
perspective. A structure questionnaire with seventy-four questions
which could be categorized into nine dimensions (healthcare
environment, organization behaviour, system quality, medical data
quality, service quality, safety quality, user usage, user satisfaction,
and organization net benefits) was provided to evaluate EMR of the
Taiwanese healthcare environment.
Abstract: Exponentially weighted moving average control chart (EWMA) is a popular chart used for detecting shift in the mean of parameter of distributions in quality control. The objective of this paper is to compare the efficiency of control chart to detect an increases in the mean of a process. In particular, we compared the Maximum Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (MaxEWMA) and Maximum Generally Weighted Moving Average (MaxGWMA) control charts when the observations are Exponential distribution. The criteria for evaluate the performance of control chart is called, the Average Run Length (ARL). The result of comparison show that in the case of process is small sample size, the MaxEWMA control chart is more efficiency to detect shift in the process mean than MaxGWMA control chart. For the case of large sample size, the MaxEWMA control chart is more sensitive to detect small shift in the process mean than MaxGWMA control chart, and when the process is a large shift in mean, the MaxGWMA control chart is more sensitive to detect mean shift than MaxEWMA control chart.
Abstract: Acetaminophen (Paracetamol) tablets are popular OTC products among patients as analgesics and antipyretics. Paracetamol is marketed by a lot of suppliers around the world. The aim of the present investigation was to compare between many types of paracetamol tablets obtained from different suppliers (six brands produced by different pharmaceutical companies in middle east countries, and Panadol® manufactured in Ireland), by different quality control tests according to USP pharmacopeia.Using Non official tests-hardness and friability; official tests- disintegration, dissolution, and drug content. Additionally, evaluate the influence of temperatures 4°C, 25°C and 40°C at 75% relative humidity on the stability of the same brands in their original packaging has been conducted for two months. The results revealed that all paracetamol tablet brands complied with the official USP specifications. In conclusion, paracetamol tablets preferred to be stored at 25°C. All the tested brands being biopharmaceutically and chemically equivalent.