This paper presents a new method that can solve the integrated problem of combined location routing and inventory problem (CLRIP) efficiently. The CLRIP is used to establish facilities from several candidate depots, to find the optimal set of vehicle routes, and to determine the inventory policy in order to minimize the total system cost. We propose a mathematical model for the CLRIP with budget constrained. Because this model is a nonpolynomial (NP) problem, we propose a endosymbiotic evolutionary algorithm (EEA) which is a kind of symbiotic evolutionary algorithm (SEA). The heuristic method is used to obtaining the initial solutions for the EEA. The experimental results show that EEA perform very well compared to the existing heuristic methods with considering inventory control decisions.

Ergonomic product design considering users' natural use motion is of importance to improve the usability and satisfaction of a product. A five-step process of product design was developed in the present study by measuring and analyzing users' natural product-use motion with a motion capture system. The developed process was applied to ergonomic design improvement of a half guard installation part of refrigerator; new guard designs (diagonal and arc shape) were developed with the process and evaluated in terms of validity during the development as two measures (task satisfaction and similarity of natural motion). According to the evaluation result, the satisfaction at putting in- and out-task of new guard designs ($6.3{\pm}0.5$ points) was significantly higher than that of existing guard designs ($3.3{\pm}1.0$ points); the difference between natural motion and product-use motion in new guard designs ($1.0{\pm}0.3cm$) was significantly less than that of existing guard designs ($2.0{\pm}0.2cm$). The proposed process of natural motion analysis and product design is applicable to ergonomic product design and evaluation.

Cellular network is comprised of several base stations which serve cellular shaped service area and each base station (BS) is connected to the mobile switching center (MSC). In this paper, the configuration modeling and algorithm of a cellular mobile network with the aim of minimizing the overall cost of operation (handover) and network installation cost (cabling cost and installing cost of mobile switching center) are considered. Handover and cabling cost is one of the key considerations in designing cellular telecommunication networks. For real-world applications, this configuration study covers in an integrated framework for two major decisions: locating MSC and assigning BS to MSC. The problem is expressed in an integer programming model and a heuristic algorithm based on Lagrangian relaxation is proposed to resolve the problem. Searching for the optimum solution through exact algorithm to this problem appears to be unrealistic considering the large scale nature and NP-Completeness of the problem. The suggested algorithm computes both the bound for the objective value of the problem and the feasible solution for the problem. A Lagrangian heuristics is developed to find the feasible solution. Numerical tests are performed for the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed heuristic algorithm. Computational experiments show that the performance of the proposed heuristics is satisfactory in the quality of the generated solution.

In recent years, driver information systems (DIS's) became popular and the use of DIS's increased significantly. A majority of DIS's provides touch-screen interfaces because of intuitiveness of the interaction and the flexibility of interface design. In many cases, touch-screen interfaces are mainly manipulated by fingers. In this case, investigating the effect of touch-key sizes on usability is known to be one of the most important research issues, and lots of studies address the effect of touch-key size for mobile devices or kiosks. However, there is few study on DIS's. The importance of touch-key size study for DIS's should be emphasized because it is closely related to safety issues besides usability issues. In this study, we investigated the effect of touch-key sizes of DIS's while simulated driving (0, 50, and 100km/h) considering driving safety (lateral deviation, velocity deviation, total glance time, mean glance time, total time between glances, mean number of glances) and usability of DIS's (task completion time, error rate, subjective preference, NASA TLX) simultaneously. As a result, both of driving safety and usability of DIS's increased as driving speed decreased and touch-key size increased. However, there were no significant differences when touch-key size is larger than a certain level (in this study : 17.5mm).

A central theme in recent IT (information technology) industry is a mobile ecosystem. While a concept of business ecosystem, which is an economic community of firms and individuals producing and consuming goods and services, has been around for about 20 years now, the recent spotlight is mainly caused by the enormous success of iPhone. Many hand-set makers or platform developers want to mimic Apple's iPhone ecosystem from which both application developers and hand-set users can benefit. In this study, a representation model of the business ecosystem is proposed for supporting systematic design and analysis of ecosystems. Whereas previous studies also proposed some representation models, they emphasized only on the value chain between participating players. The proposed model, which is named relation-based ecosystem model, represents an ecosystem with the requirement relationships between product and service components and the roles of players, as well as their value chain. Such comprehensive representation explicitly reveals the strategic difference between ecosystems. This advantage was illustrated by comparing a Korean traditional mobile ecosystem and an emerging smart-phone ecosystem represented by the proposed model.

This study presents characteristics of representative five hand dimensions including hand length, medius finger length, hand circumference, hand breadth and hand thickness, and hand scales by gender and age for Koreans. The study was based on data of hand dimensions published in 2008 by Korean Agency for Technology and Standards. The hand dimensions of males were nearly the same as those of females until age of 12~13(10~11 in hand thickness), but the males' were larger than the females' from age group of 14~15 or 12~13. The growth of the hand dimensions was found until age of 12~13(14~15 in hand thickness) in females and 16~17 in males. After the age groups, the hand dimensions was almost the same irrespective of age groups. ANOVA was performed to investigate significant factors affecting hand dimensions. Representative five hand dimensions were significantly affected by gender and age, while they were not affected by occupation. Two hand scales were proposed depending upon gender, for easily using hand characteristics in design stage of hand relevant products. In addition, regression equations were provided for quantitatively predicting hand dimensions on the basis of representative five hand dimensions.

Oil price prediction is an important issue for the regulators of the government and the related industries. When employing the time series techniques for prediction, however, it becomes difficult and challenging since the behavior of the series of oil prices is dominated by quantitatively unexplained irregular external factors, e.g., supply- or demand-side shocks, political conflicts specific to events in the Middle East, and direct or indirect influences from other global economical indices, etc. Identifying and quantifying the relationship between oil price and those external factors may provide more relevant prediction than attempting to unclose the underlying structure of the series itself. Technically, this implies the prediction is to be based on the vectoral data on the degrees of the relationship rather than the series data. This paper proposes a novel method for time series prediction of using Semi-Supervised Learning that was originally designed only for the vector types of data. First, several time series of oil prices and other economical indices are transformed into the multiple dimensional vectors by the various types of technical indicators and the diverse combination of the indicator-specific hyper-parameters. Then, to avoid the curse of dimensionality and redundancy among the dimensions, the wellknown feature extraction techniques, PCA and NLPCA, are employed. With the extracted features, a timepointspecific similarity matrix of oil prices and other economical indices is built and finally, Semi-Supervised Learning generates one-timepoint-ahead prediction. The series of crude oil prices of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) was used to verify the proposed method, and the experiments showed promising results : 0.86 of the average AUC.

The Bass model is a cornerstone in diffusion theory which is used for forecasting demand of durables or new services. Three well-known estimation methods for parameters of the Bass model are Ordinary Least Square (OLS), Maximum Likelihood Estimator (MLE), Nonlinear Least Square (NLS). In this paper, a hybrid method incorporating OLS and NLS is presented and it's performance is analyzed and compared with OLS and NLS by using simulation data and empirical data. The results show that NLS has the best performance in terms of accuracy and our hybrid method has the best performance in terms of stability. Specifically, hybrid method has better performance with less data. This result means much in practical aspect because the avaliable data is little when a diffusion model is used for forecasting demand of a new product.