The capabilities ofBusiness Process Management Systems (BPMS's) are continuously extended to increase theeffectiveness of the management and enactment of business processes. This paper identifies the challenge ofcase prediction, which for a specific case under the control of a BPMS deals with the estimation of the remaining time until it is completed. An accurate case prediction facility is a valuable tool for the operationalcontrol of business processes, as it enables the pre-active monitoring of time violations. Little research has beencarried out in this area and few commercial tools support case prediction. This paper lists the requirements onsuch a facility and sketches sonae directions to reach a solution. To illustrate the depth of the problem, a smallaspect of the problem is treated in more detail. It involves the complex relations between tasks and resources inbusiness processes, which makes an exact analytical approach mfeasible.

Despite surging interests in analyzing business processes, there are few scientific approaches to analysis and redesign of organizational structures which can greatly affect the performance of business processes. This paper presents a method for deriving and analyzing organizational relations from process models using social network analysis techniques. Process models contain information on who performs which processes and activities, along with the assignment of organizational units such as departments and roles to related activities. To derive social relations between organizational units from process models, three types of metrics are formally defined: transfer of work metrics, subcontracting metrics, and cooperation metrics. By applying these metrics, various relations among organizational units can be derived and analyzed. To verify the proposed method and metrics, they are applied to standard process models of the semiconductor and electronic, and automotive industry in Korea. This paper presents a taxonomy for diagnosing organization structure based on the presented approach. The paper also discusses how to combine analyses in the taxonomy for redesign of organizational structures.

This study deals with waiting-time dependent backordering rate during stock-out period in the EconomicProduction Quantity (EPQ) model. Assuming that the backordering rate follows an exponentially decreasingfunction of the waiting time, the backorder rate is developed under First-Come-First-Served (FCFS) andLast-Come-First-Served (LCFS) Policy. The mathematical models are developed based on differential equations.Through numerical examples, the validity of the developed models is illustrated.

The pickup and delivery problem with time windows generally involves the construction of optimal routeswhich satisfy a set of transportation requests under pairing, precedence, time window, vehicle capacity, andavailability constraints. In this paper, we added some constraints to the problem and adopted an objectivefunction based on number of used vehicles, total travel distance and total schedule duration to consider morerealistic problems. A branch and price algohthm for the problem is proposed and an enumeration method is usedfor the subproblems. The algorithm was tested on randomly generated instances and computational results werereported.

The purpose of this study was to identify the relationship between the cumulative fatigue of trunk muscles andthe period of recovery time during repetitive lifting and lowering tasks with symmetric and asymmetric postures.Ten subjects participated in the experiment. Subjects had 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 minutes recovery time respectivelywhile they were performing the lifting and lowering task repeatedly for 3 minutes with the weight equivalent to25% level of MVC. EMG signals from ten trunk muscles were collected and the fatigue level was analyzedquantitatively. In results, the local muscle fatigue was no longer accumulated when 5 minutes recovery time wasgiven in symmetric position. For asymmetric position, it took longer minutes to prevent the fatigue accumul-ation. Different trunk muscles indicated slightly different recovery patterns in terms of MPF (Mean Powerfrequency) value.This result would help ergonomist design the length of recovery time to control the cumulative fatigue of trunkmuscles in industry with repetitive lifting and lowering task.

Estimating parameters of the lifetime distribution is investigated when field failure data are not completelyreported. To take into account the reality and the accuracy of the estimates in such a case, the failure reportingprobability is incorporated in estimating parameters, Firstly, method of maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) isused to estimate parameters of the lifetime distribution when failure reporting probability is known, Secondly,Expectation and Maximization (EM) algorithm is used to estimate the failure reporting probability and parame-ters of the lifetime distribution simultaneously when failure reporting probability is unknown. For both cases,procedures of estimation are illustrated for single Weibull distribution and mixed Weibull distribution. Simula-tion results show that MLE obtained by the proposed method is more accurate than the conventional MLE.

In a large complex system, maintenance priorities for the failed components are important to maintain the sys-tern reliability at required level. Commonly used methods of determining maintenance priorities are based onranking the failed components by using reliability importance measures such as Birnbaum reliability importance,risk achievement worth and F-V importance, etc. In the preceding works, maintenance priorities for the failedcomponents are determined by using such existing measures, In this study, a new method of determining main-tenance priorities, which utilizes the joint reliability importance is proposed. By investigating the sign of thejoint reliability importance, maintenance priorities obtained by the existing methods are adjusted to yield new re-vised priorities. The revised maintenance priorities are shown to be more effective than the existing ones fromthe standpoint of the speed of system recovery, Effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated by numericalexamples.

This paper discusses condition based preventive replacement for deteriorating systems. The system continuouslydeteriorates in time and fails at any deterioration level which is always monitored, It is replaced at failure or atsome deteriorated level preventively before failure. The deterioration process is represented by a Weibulldistribution with a time-linear scale parameter. The cost rate function is formed considering replacement costand opportunity loss cost and deterioration dependent failure distribution, If the system has an increasingdeterioration dependent failure rate, the optimal deterioration level for preventive replacement can be determinedfrom minimizing the cost rate. An illustrative example is given for a Weibull deterioration dependent failuredistribution.

A reliability acceptance sampling plan (RASP) consists of a set of life test procedures and rules for eitheraccepting or rejecting a collection of items based on the sampled lifetime data. Most of the existing RASPs areconcerned with the case where test items are available at the same time. However, as in the early stage ofproduct development, it may be difficult to secure test items at the same time. In such a case, it is inevitable toconduct a life test using sequentially supplied samples.In this paper, it is assumed that test items are sequentially supplied, the lifetimes of test items follow anexponential disthbution, failures are monitored continuously, arrival times of test items are known, and thenumber of test items at each arrival time is given. Under these assumptions, RASPs are developed by deter-mining the test completion time and the critical value for the maximum likelihood estimator of the mean lifetimesuch that the producer and consumer risks are satisfied. Then, the developed plans are compared to thetraditional Type-I censored RASPs in terms of the test completion time. Computational results indicate that thetest completion time of the developed RASP is shorter than that of the traditional Type-I censored plan in mostcases considered. It is also found that the superiority of the developed RASP becomes more prominent as theinter-arrival times of test items increase and/or the total number of test items gets larger.

This paper presents a heuristic algorithm for the traveling salesman problem with time windows (TSPTW). Aniterative insertion algorithm as a constructive search heuristic and a hybrid meta heuristic combining simulatedannealing and tabu search with the randomized selection of 2-interchange and a simple move operator as animproving search heuristic are proposed, Computational tests performed on 400 benchmark problem instancesshow that the proposed algorithm generates optimal or near-optimal solutions in most cases. New best knownheuristic values for many benchmark problem sets were obtained using the proposed approach.

To realize process-driven management, so many companies have been launching business process managementsystems. Business process is collection of standardized and structured tasks inducing value creation of acompany. Moreover, it is recognized as one of significant intangible business assets to achieve competitiveadvantages. This research introduces a novel approach of workflow process analysis, which has more and moresignificance as process-aware information systems are spreading widely into a lot of companies, In this paper, amethodology of workflow clustering based on process similarity has been proposed. The purpose of workflowclustering is to analyze accumulated process definitions in order to assist design of new processes andimprovement of existing ones. The proposed methodology exploits measures of structural similarity of workflowprocesses.The methodology has been experimented with synthetic process models for illustrating the implicationofworkflow clustering.

Various different types of yard cranes are used in container terminals. Examples are rubber tired gantry cranes,rail mounted gantry cranes, overhead bridge cranes, dual rail-mounted gantry cranes, and automated stacking cranes. The kinematics and handling characteristics of these yard cranes are different from each other. Ttiis study analyses charactehstics of generic types of yard cranes which represent various yard cranes m practice Demg used in several types of block layouts, Considering specifications of yard cranes and block layouts, expected cycle times and variances of the cycle time are estimated for different handling activities.

This study addresses the analytic models for estimating the capacity and performance of the multi-carrierCDMA system where several carriers would be assigned to a single cell to accommodate the required trafficdemand. Two key features of the multi-carrier CDMA system, carrier selections of new calls and inter-camerhard handoffs, are accommodated in the models, Computation experiments are conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed model.

There has been much effort to improve the accuracy of the Internet topology model and include its quantitativeand/or qualitative effects on studies of a variety of network problems. Such improvement is the primarymotivation of this paper in listing and classifying the body of literature addressing the Internet topology. Themetrics, which characterize the fundamental properties of the Internet, are also divided into five categories andtheir importance and applications are discussed. Finally, we suggest several future research topics for theInternet topology models to be more realistic and applicable.

An adaptive framework paradigm where the bandwidth values of the ongoing calls vary according to the trafficsituations is one of the promising concepts for overcoming poor resource conditions due to handoffs in mobilecellular networks. However, quantifying the level of bandwidth degradation of the ongoing calls in an adaptiveframework is important in view of Quality of Service (QoS) Provisioning. Therefore we introduce new QoSparameters, the Degradation Degree Ratio (DDR), which represents the average portion of the degradationdegree during degradation pehod of a call, and the Degradation Area Ratio (DAR), which represents the averageratio of a call's degradation level considering both the period and the degree of degradation jointly in multi-levelbandwidth service. We also develop a new analytical model for estimating the QoS measures such as theDegradation Pehod Ratio (DPR), DDR and DAR. We show how to calculate the QoS measures and illustrate themethod by numerical examples. The proposed model can be used to determine the optimal parameter of theCAC scheme and analyze the sensitivity ofthe QoS parameters in adaptive networks.