An alternative to traditional production planning and control systems such as MRP and JIT is the drum-buffer-rope(DBR). Using the DBR system, companies can achieve a large reduction of work-in-process (WIP) and finished-goods inventories (FGI), significant improvement in scheduling performance, and substantial earnings increase. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effect of the DBR system in a serial production line. Using Markov process, we modeled a DBR system with three stages. For the model developed, we analyze the system characteristics and then present an optimization model for system design. The system performance is also analyzed through sensitivity analysis.

In this paper, stochastically dependent single and sequential acceptance sampling plans are dealt when the process follows a Polya process model. A Monte-Cairo algorithm is used to find the acceptance and rejection probabilities of a lot. The number of defectives for the test to be accepted and rejected in a probability ratio sequential test can be found by using these probabilities. The formula to measure performance of these sampling plans is developed. Type I and II error probabilities are estimated by simulation. Dependent multiple acceptance sampling plans can be derived by extending the sequential sampling procedure. In numerical examples, single and sequential sampling plans of a Polya dependent process are examined and the characteristics are compared according to the change of the dependency factor.

The machine-part group formation is to group the sets of parts having similar processing requirements into part families, and the sets of machines needed to process a particular part family into machine cells. The purpose of this study is to develop a two-phase machine-part group formation algorithm based on Self-Organizing Maps (SOM). In phase I, it forms machine cells from the machine-part incidence matrix by means of SOM whose output layer is one-dimension and the number of output nodes is the twice as many as the number of input nodes in order to spread out the input vectors. In phase II, it generates part families which are assigned to machine cells by means of machine ratio related with processing part and it gives machine-part group formation. The proposed algorithm performs remarkably well in comparison with many well-known algorithms for the machine-part group formation problems.

As more companies are equipped with data aquisition systems for their products, huge amount of field warranty data has been accumulated. We focus on the case when the field data for a given product comprise with the number of sales and the number of the first failures for each period. The number of censored items and their ages are assumed to be given. This type of data are incomplete in the sense that the age of a failed item is unknown. We construct a model for this type of data and propose an algorithm for nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation of the product reliability. Unlike the nonhomogeneous Poisson process(NHPP) model, our method can handle the data with censored items as well as those with small population. A few examples are investigated to characterize our model, and a real field warranty data set is analyzed by the method.

In this paper, we study the competition between two kinds of suppliers, a bricks and mortars(B&M) and a clicks and mortars(C&M). Using the circular spatial market model, we derive and analyze the Nash and Stackelberg equilibria as a function of offline market share and efficiency of online channel of the C&M supplier. The result can be summarized as follows: (1) Stackelberg equilibrium is always superior to the Nash equilibrium, (2) Under certain conditions, the price of online channel can be higher than that of offline channel, (3) It is impossible for the C&M supplier to encroach on all of the B&M supplier's market, (4) In some cases, the C&M supplier has incentive to lower the efficiency of its online channel for more profit.

We present a meaningful interpretation of the equations for the steady-state queue length distribution of the GI/GI/c/K queue so that the equations are better understood and become more applicable. As a byproduct, we present an exact expression of the mean queue waiting time for the M/GI/c queue.

A study was conducted to develop Internet Literacy Questionnaire(ILQ) to investigate the levels of user's knowledge on Internet literacy. ILQ was found to be reliable (showed an internal consistency) with Cronbach's alpha of 0.93(p-value<0.001) and valid with test-retest correlation of 0.90 (p-value<0.001). ILQ, composed of 21 questions, was developed to test four areas of user's Internet literacy: general experience on Internet, advanced experience on Internet, knowledge on Internet program languages, and Internet application software programs. These four factors represented 69.2% of the knowledge of all areas of Internet literacy. As a result, ILQ could be used to differentiate the levels of user's Internet knowledge as beginners, intermediates, and experts before any Internet application programs are to be developed.

The inherent reliability of a product is primarily determined in the design stage, and therefore, design engineers should be able to design reliability into the product in an efficient manner. Especially, the product should be designed such that its reliability is robust to various noise factors encountered in production and field environments. The Taguchi method can be effectively used for this purpose. However, there exist only a few attempts to integrate the Taguchi method with reliability design, and in addition, the existing works do not sufficiently consider the robustness and/or the distinction between noise and acceleration factors. This paper develops a unified approach to robust reliability design assuming that accelerated life tests are conducted at each combination of design and noise conditions. First, an experimental structure for assigning not only acceleration but also noise factors is presented. Second, the reliability at the use condition is estimated using the assumed accelerated life test model. Third, reliabilities are transformed into 'efforts' using an effort function which reflects the degree of difficulty involved in improving the reliability. Finally, an optimal setting of design parameters is determined based on the mean and standard deviation of the effort values. The above approach is illustrated with an example of a paper feeder design.

Semiconductor manufacturing has been emerged as a highly competitive but profitable business. Accordingly it becomes very important for semiconductor manufacturing companies to meet customer demands at the right time, in order to keep the leading edge in the world market. However, due-date oriented production is very difficult task because of the complex job flows with highly resource conflicts in fabrication shop called FAB. Due to its cyclic manufacturing feature of products, to be completed, a semiconductor product is processed repeatedly as many times as the number of the product manufacturing cycles in FAB, and FAB processes of individual manufacturing cycles are composed with similar but not identical unit processes. In this paper, we propose a production scheduling and control scheme that is designed specifically for semiconductor scheduling environment (FAB). The proposed scheme consists of three modules: simulation module, cycle due-date estimation module, and dispatching module. The fundamental idea of the scheduler is to introduce the due-date for each cycle of job, with which the complex job flows in FAB can be controlled through a simple scheduling rule such as the minimum slack rule, such that the customer due-dates are maximally satisfied. Through detailed simulation, the performance of a cycle due-date based scheduler has been verified.

Mobility of service users makes location update and paging (L/P) procedures indispensable features in mobile communication networks. Importance of optimizing the configuration of L/P areas has been increased by the growth of L/P related signaling. In this study, we deal with the L/P configuration which an LA (Location Area) may contain multiple PAs (Paging Areas). Given the network topology, L/P related parameters, and traffics generated by each cell, is provided the problem of finding optimal LA/PA configuration minimizing the amount of L/P related signaling. The optimization problem is solved using a simulated annealing, and detailed computational results are conducted to capture the effects of mobility, call arrival patterns and boundary crossing rate on the LA and PA configurations.

It is difficult to access and share design data among heterogeneous CAD systems. Usually, different CAD systems exchange the design data using a neutral format such as IGES or STEP. A prototype CAD system which uses a geometric kernel and a commercial database management system has been implemented. The prototype system used the Open Cascade geometric kernel and the commercial object-oriented database ObjectStore. STEP provides the database schema. The database can be accessed from commercial CAD systems such as SolidWorks or Unigraphics. The data access module from a commercial CAD system is developed with the CAD system's native API, ObjectStore API functions, and ActiveX.

Many firms are trying to optimize their production and distribution systems separately, but possible profit increase by this approach is limited. Nowadays, it is more important to analyze these two systems simultaneously for the integrated supply chain management. This paper is a computational study to investigate the effectiveness of integrating production and distribution scheduling. We are interested in a multi-plant, multi-retailer, multi-product and multi-period industrial problem where the objective in solving production and distribution scheduling problem is to maximize the total net profit. Computational results on test problems of various sizes using the heuristic we developed show a substantial advantage of the integrated scheduling approach over the decoupled scheduling process. Sensitivity analysis on the parameter values indicates that, under the right conditions, the effectiveness of integrating production and distribution functions can be extremely high.