Today's manufacturing enterprise relies heavily on the collaboration and coordination among the distributed manufacturing systems. The effective exchange of the various manufacturing information among the distributed organizations contributes a great deal to their productivity. An Internet-Based Manufacturing Desk is developed for the production of the press dies in the automobile industry in order to solve the manufacturing problems among the distributed organizations, to maintain their smooth and immediate information flow, and to increase their productivity finally. The CBR(Case-Based Reasoning) method is applied to achieve those effects. Using the method, the solutions and methods of the predetermined case-bases are retrieved and applied to solve a newly introduced problem. The developed system is implemented and applied successfully.

With rapid growth of internet technology, companies have developed an information system such as the electronic catalog for product data in the E-Business. Due to the heuristic nature of the catalog search for proper tools in the specific process, the intelligent and user friendly methods residing in the search process give a comfortable environment even for the beginners in the field. In this paper, we develop a web based catalog for machining tools especially in Milling process. It has two distinct procedures for the users of the catalog; Search and Analysis. The Search is to select a proper cutter, insert, component combination in the developed relational database based on the cutting process and material. The Analysis is to suggest a recommended optimal cutting conditions based on the machining tools and selected materials. All of these procedures are stored in a server with a program based on the ASP and Java Script where the procedure is initiated by the client using the internet which is accessed through insert. With the success on implementing the above engineering database in the internet, we can provide the foundation for developing PDM with heuristic procedure.

In Korea, cooling power load, which occupies about 20% of peak load in 2000 and fluctuates depending on the popular usage of air conditioning systems, has been recently the focus of the load management. The first work of KEPCO (Korea Electric Power Corporation) to regulate cooling load as low as possible was to estimate its approximate scale and to develop the indirect methods to estimate it from the available time series data for the average hourly loads. However, KEPCO would like to have their methods improved both theoretically and practically. In this paper, we analyze their current indirect methods and detect their faults to design better indirect estimation methods. Under one of the assumptions of "no cooling load in April or May", the linear relationship between basic loads and GDP's, and the normalized seasonal factors of the Winters' multiplicative seasonal model, we provide ten indirect estimation methods in total and suggest the estimated cooling load(1988-1999) based on our various indirect methods.

The maintenance cost in K Steelworks has been continuously increased in proportion to the production cost. However, there seems to be a possibility of reducing cost through the optimization of maintenance actions. The failure types of the equipment in steelworks ate various with different failure cost. Thus the failure rate and cost of each type of failures should be considered simultaneously when the optimum maintenance period is to be determined. It is considered that the equipment undergoes periodic replacement and a specified number of incomplete preventive maintenance actions are performed during a replacement period. Assuming that the time to failure follows a Weibull distribution, the parameters of the failure rate are estimated using the maximum likelihood estimation. The optimal replacement period is determined to minimize the average cost per unit time. As the result of analysis it is suggested that the existing maintenance period for a hot-rolling equipment can be extended significantly.

The Korean government has been working to reduce national logistics costs since the early 1990s. One of the major plans instituted by the government was to build five complex freight terminals using ICDs(inland container depots) as hub inland terminals. This paper explains the process and the methods adopted for site selection, with special focus on the Youngnam Freight Terminal. Among nineteen developable sites in Youngnam region, four candidates were selected based on the Map Overlay Approach under several criteria, including land acquisition costs, proximity to major highways and railroads, suitability of the terrain, etc. In this study, we used the AHP to select the best site among the four sites.

Ready-Mixed Concrete transportation business has been managed by the manual operation and intuitive decision making. This study is on the process improvement on ordering process, and allocation/transportation of trucks commuting between the batching plant and construction sites. Processes of order collection, job dispatch and allocation, and on-time-delivery are analysed and improved. The logistics control system, with GPS system, was developed and implemented based on the reconstructed processes. Performances are evaluated after improved business process and logistics system was applied, and it is shown that waiting time loss is decreased by 55%, and that efficiency is increased by 15%.

With the ubiquitous use of the Internet in daily business activities, most of modern firms are keenly interested in customer's behaviors on the Internet. That is because a wide variety of information about customer's intention about the target web site can be revealed from IP address, reference address, cookie files, duration time, all of which are expressing customer's behaviors on the Internet. In this sense, this paper aims to accomplish an objective of analyzing a set of exemplar web log files extracted from a specific P2P site, anti identifying information about customer segmentation strategies. Major web mining technique we adopted includes a machine learning like C5.0.

Virtual Manufacturing is a technology facilitating effective development and agile production of products via computer models representing physical and logical schema and the behavior of the real manufacturing systems including manufacturing resources, environments and products. For the successful application of this technology, a virtual factory as a well-designed and integrated environment is essential. To construct a virtual factory in effective and concurrent manners, a supporting information infrastructure for managing diverse models of virtual factory is very important. In this paper, we constructed the web-based information management system for many engineering activities related with a virtual factory. Using this system, users can handle all information and diverse digital files including attributes, parameters, 3-D CAD files, simulation models, and etc. of a cell, line and whole factory. We expect that this information management system for a virtual factory helps us achieve great time savings and advances in accuracy for construction and maintenance activities of virtual factories.

Recently, object-oriented techniques have been used more and more for developments of an information system. But, established object-oriented methodologies are hard to express a business process of various abstract degrees in the analysis level and independent components of the system. They have difficulties in developing a large-scale information system of manufacturing industry such as PDM and CIM. This paper proposes an information system development methodology that imports the object-oriented IDEF0 (OOIDEF0) function model in analysis level. This methodology is made up of requirements gathering, system analysis, system design, and implementation. In requirements gathering level, organization diagram and interview technique are used for input data of OOIDEF0 function model. The OOIDEF0 function model, the interface model and function descriptions are made out in analysis level. Information objects and implementation objects are designed on the basis of the OOIDEF0 function model in design level. The database is built and programming is accomplished in implementation level. In order to prove the consistency and efficiency of the proposed methodology, the PDM system for ship production is modeled and prototyped.

The purposes of this study are to investigate perceived discomfort for static joint motions, and to propose rankings for the joint motions based on the perceived discomfort. The perceived discomfort was measured through an experiment using the free modulus method of the magnitude estimation, in which ten healthy college-age female students participated. The results showed that joints, joint motions and their levels significantly affected the perceived discomfort at $\alpha$=0.01, and that the interaction of joints and joint motion levels was also significant. Based on the experimental results, three rankings were proposed by joint and joint motions, by joints and by joint motions, which were very different from the existing ones. Especially, the proposed rankings were different from the males' published before in their order and magnitude. These rankings can be used as a valuable tool for better understanding potentially adverse effects of poor working postures in industrial sites, and as basic data for developing the postural classification scheme.

This study proposed a method to apply risk management standards to a product safety management program and reviewed cases where a risk management cycle is applied to the product safety management program. Comparing the four product safety management programs suggested by several authors yielded common features of the risk management cycle: (1) organization for product safety, (2) risk identification, (3) risk evaluation, (4) risk treatment, (5) monitoring/communication, and (6) documentation. A Japan company(Ricoh)'s case showed that the risk management cycle to treat product liability risks can be used as a successful product safety management program.

Growth curves are widely used in forecasting the market demand. When there are only a few data points available, the estimated model parameters have a low confidence. In this case, if some expert opinions are available, it would be better for predicting future demand to adjust the model parameters using these information. This paper proposes the methodology for re-estimation of model parameters in growth curves when adjusting market potential and/or time of maximum sales. We also provide the detailed procedures for five growth curves including Bass, Logistic, Gompertz, Weibull and Cumulative Lognormal models. Applications to real data are also included.

Business integration has been considered as one of the most critical success factors that enable the firms to gain competitive edges. Despite this trend, it has also been found among not a few companies that the activities that should be functionally tied with are performed even independently. In this study, an integrated model of production planning and inventory has been developed. Computerization of the production planning activities is proposed and implemented. We also proposed the reasonable inventory levels of each item using historic data of the items, which are composed of safety stock from the given fill-rate, operating stock from the production patterns, and reserved stock from the production planning. This study has helped the firm to have clearer job definition of the related processes, to tightly control the inventory by setting and tracing the reasonable fill rates for every product, and to quickly respond to the market changes through the computerized production planning process.