This paper studies power and rate control for data users on the forward link of CDMA system with two cells. The QoS for data users is specified by delay and error rate constraints as well as a family of utility functions representing system throughput and fairness among data users. Optimal power and rate allocation problem is mathematically formulated as a nonlinear programming problem, which is to maximize total utility under delay and error rate constraints, and optimal power and rate allocation scheme (OPRAS) is proposed to obtain a good solution in a fast time. Computational experiments show that the proposed scheme OPRAS works very well and increases total utility compared to the separate power and rate allocation scheme (SPARS) which considers each cell individually.

The traffic scheduling problem for a satellite cluster with an arbitrary number of satellites is considered. which is one of the most interesting problems in the satellite communication scheduling area. This problem is to find a time slot assignment maximizing the transponder utilization for a satellite cluster This problem is known to be NP-complete, and several heuristic algorithms have been proposed. In this paper, we suggest new efficient algorithms for this problem, which have less time complexity than the best existing one and provide much better solution quality. Extensive simulation results are reported.

This paper deals with a stowage plan for plates in a warehouse. This plan includes how to place each plate and how to sequence outgoing lots for picking. A group of plates in an outgoing lot should be loaded in the same outgoing pallet and between two elates in the same lot, no plate from other than the lot should be placed. Since the approach to the plates is only from above, when the plates in the different lots are placed mixed in a warehouse, we have to temporarily move many of plates in some other place to let a plate in the lot for which loading is under way go out. Our purpose is to minimize those temporary moves. We analyze the computational complexity of several problems arising in the stowage plan of a plate warehouse.

In this study, we evaluate financial performance of 21 domestic life insurers using SAW (simple additive weighting), ELECTREII, cluster analysis respectively, and suggest a hybrid approach of combining cluster analysis and ELECTREII to reclassify the life insurers into more meaningful groups according to their respective financial features. We also perform the sensitivity analysis employing ANOVA and Tukey's test to examine the robustness of ELECTREII, which would be influenced by decision maker's subjective preference parameters. Consequently, it is shown that ELECTREII turns out to be a flexible method providing decision makers with useful ranking Information especially under fuzzy decision making situation with incomparable alternatives, and hence it can serve as a complementary method to overcome the weakness of classical cluster analysis.

This study empirically examined the impact of national culture on the amount of information provided by management accounting information systems (MAIS). Two very different cultures, the Korean and Australian cultures, were considered in our study The results showed that the much more flexibility performance information is provided in Korean firms, while the amount of quality performance information and traditional cost control information (TCCI) produced in Australian firms is much more than in Korean firms. However, it was found that in the amount of financial performance information and advanced cost control information (ACCI), there exist no significant differences between Korean firms and Australian firms. We also investigated the effect of the three-way interactions among national culture, level of advanced manufacturing technology (AMT), and information on production performance. The results of this study revealed a significant impact of three-way interactions on the improvement of production performance. In conclusion, we suggest that under high levels of AMT, Korean firms need a large amount of information-based MAIS, while Australian firms require the ACCI and nonfinancial performance information-oriented MAIS.

Customer retention is more emphasized for internet business than off-line shopping-malls. The loyals not only purchase a lot but also recommend the mall to new customers quickly using internet media, and there have been many studies on this subject. In this study, customer satisfaction and trust are suggested as preceding variables that have an influence on customer loyalty, and switching gains are suggested as a moderating variable between customer satisfaction & trust and customer loyalty. Many people think it would be easier to change business connection and customer loyalty for internet shopping-malls would be very low. This study, however, concluded that customer satisfaction and trust had a significant influence on customer loyalty even in internet shopping-mall, and that switching gains had moderating effect between satisfaction-attitudinal loyalty and trust-behavioral loyalty. These results are meaningful in that customer satisfaction or trust should be emphasized even on internet business and that switching gains can be strategic focus in building up customer loyalty and retention.

This paper considers a single facility scheduling problem for the fabrication of components supporting the subsequent assembly into products. Each product consists of two types of components, one is common to all products and the other is unique to itself. The unique components are processed individually and the common components are processed in batches, and a distinct setup is incurred for the production of a batch of common components. Under the so-called “batch availability” environment, we propose an efficient dynamic programming(DP) procedure for the optimal sequencing and batching schedule with minimum total completion times of products in the situation that each product is said to be complete if both common and unique components of the product are finished. Computational results show that the proposed DB procedure is more efficient than the previous work which has considered the same problem as this paper.

This paper suggests that the profit sharing contract can be Pareto optimal for both supplier and the purchaser. It is shown that Pareto optimal risk sharing contract can be obtained even though the decisions are made in a decentralized manner. The effect of risk attitude of the members of the supply chain is discussed. We examined various aspects of the risk sharing contract such as risk altitude, bargaining power, and cost of information system. The different risk attitude changes the optimal parameters and decision variables. Especially, we proved that, when both the supplier and the purchaser are risk averse, the purchaser orders less quantity than when the one is risk neutral and the other is risk averse. If the fixed cost for the information system is big enough to satisfy a certain condition, it is Pareto optimal not to share the profit and the purchaser takes all the risk even though he is risk averse.

In this paper, we present a survey about the various graph partition problems including the clustering problem, the k-cut problem, the multiterminal cut problem, the multicut problem, the sparsest cut problem, the network attack problem, the network disconnection problem. We compare those problems focusing on the problem characteristics such as the objective function and the conditions that the partitioned clusters should satisfy. We also introduce the mathematical programming formulations, and the solution approaches developed for the problems.

In this Paper, we examine the limiting distributional behaviour of extreme values of mixed Erlang random variables. We show that, in the finite mixture of Erlang distributions, the component distribution with an asymptotically dominant tail has a critical effect on the asymptotic extreme behavior of the mixture distribution and it converges to the Gumbel extreme-value distribution. Normalizing constants are also established. We apply this result to characterize the asymptotic distribution of maxima of sojourn times in M/M/s queuing system. We also show that Erlang mixtures with continuous mixing may converge to the Gumbel or Type II extreme-value distribution depending on their mixing distributions, considering two special cases of uniform mixing and exponential mixing.

In this research, the comprehensive evaluation model of IS(information systems) for public sectors is theoretically constructed through reviewing and integrating previous IS evaluation-related research. This model is hypothesized to consist of five sectors(System Sector, User Sector, Organization and Management Sector, Resource Management Sector and Strategic Contribution Sector), ten evaluation items belonging to these five evaluation sectors, and sixty two evaluation indices for these ten evaluation items. The results of empirical analyses to test the validity of the research model show that the evaluation sectors turn out to be the same ones as proposed in the hypothetical model. The evaluation items(System Quality, Information Quality, Service Quality) in System Sector proves to be consistent with the hypothetical model. However, in case of User Sector, two evaluation items(Perceived Usefulness and User Satisfaction) which are included in the hypothetical model are found to be merged into one item(User Satisfaction). And, it is shown that four evaluation items such as the Efficiency of Internal Process, Customer Satisfaction, Organizational Innovation, and the Degree of Informatization competence improvement are included in Organization and Management Sector, differently from the research model in which the items, Organizational innovation and the Degree of Informatization competence improvement, are not divided. As a final result, sixty two evaluation indices that comprise all the evaluation items belonging to five sectors are found to be reduced to fifty seven ones through factor analyses, criterion-related validity tests and reliability analyses.

The generalized knapsack problem or gknap is the combinatorial optimization problem of optimizing a nonnegative linear function over the integral hull of the intersection of a polynomially separable 0-1 polytope and a knapsack constraint. The knapsack, the restricted shortest path, and the constrained spanning tree problem are a partial list of gknap. More interesting1y, all the problem that are known to have a fully polynomial approximation scheme, or FPTAS are gknap. We establish some necessary and sufficient conditions for a gknap to admit an FPTAS. To do so, we recapture the standard scaling and approximate binary search techniques in the framework of gknap. This also enables us to find a weaker sufficient condition than the strong NP-hardness that a gknap does not have an FPTAS. Finally, we apply the conditions to explore the fully polynomial approximability of the constrained spanning problem whose fully polynomial approximability is still open.