It is widely known that labor costs are continuously and rapidly growing in terms of the raw cost of products in Korea. The increased labor costs are degrading the competitiveness of dairy industry sector as in the other major industrial fields. Furthermore, the number of dairy farms is constantly decreasing while that of dairy cattle is increasing. Thus, mechanized and/or automated stockbreeding management systems are crucially required to support professional stockbreeding management, as well as to enhance the productivity of the sector. Hence this paper develops an IIS (Integrated Information System) for dairy cattle stockbreeding management. IIS is composed of five application modules and associated utility programs. The five modules are individual stock management, milking management, feeding management, propagation management, and disease management. The utility programs are involved in stock farm accounting, and handy unloading of individual stock data into a personal data acquisition device. Compared with existing foreign products, the developed system takes advantages of various stock body measurement data such as body weight, body temperature, milk conductivity, milking amount, and the number of walking steps. All the measured data are transmitted into a programmable logic controller that monitors and controls measurement devices. The transmitted data are finally aggregated into an integrated database located in the main personal computer. The integrated data are analyzed and reformed in the five modules of IIS, then, used for providing farmers with various farm states and information through application module scenes. Hence, IIS keeps the each module work in a systematic and compatible manner, while supervising the whole stockbreeding management system.

Recently, many enterprises are adopting EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) technologies for integrating heterogeneous enterprise information systems. Among EAI levels, data-level integration is relatively straightforward and most popular. However, most commercial solutions provide complex functionalities and are expensive for implementing the data integration tasks at the small & medium enterprises. Also, they have their own proprietary architectures and have a restricted interoperability. Proposed in this paper is the development of a data integration middleware for facilitating data exchanges between the heterogeneous information systems. The main feature of this middleware is a explicit mapping of meta data about the relationships between source and target data. Based on this explicit mapping, users who do not have expertise in information technology at the small & medium enterprises can easily execute data exchange tasks among various information systems.

This study presents the decision of priority for optimal design guide to improve disassembly process. Disassembly process is divided into recognition, transfer and disassembly of assembly point and recognition, transfer and remove of grasp point. Significant influential factors are derived from analyzing the above process. And those factors are used for making the check list to evaluate the properties of parts in each process. Furthermore, the weight with considering disassembly process is also used to determine weight of each process. On the base of the above sequence, qualitative score of disassemblability of each process that is enabled to compare different disassembly processes can be acquired. Ultimately the score helps to decide the priority of design guide for disassembly process.

This research discusses knowledge contents needed to build an OLAP system for medical sector, OLAP functionalities from past studies, and a medical intelligence system which is a kind of OLAP. The knowledge requirements which consist of nine contents and OLAP fundamental functionalities are applied to the system. Most past studies have focused on developing a medical data warehouse rather than OLAP. The medical intelligence system supplies health care providers (i.e., doctors, clinicians, researchers and nurses) and non-providers (i.e., managers and business analysts) with multidimensional OLAP functionalities. The system can be used to gain a deeper understanding of specific medical issues. In this research, we focus not on medical data warehouse, but on the technical challenges of designing and implementing an effective medical intelligence system for health care information. An architecture is applied to developing the medical intelligence system for a medical center in order to illustrate its practical usage. Six packages in the developed system are discussed in this research: Explorer, Analyzer, Reporter, Statistician, Visualizer, and Meta Administrator packages. Evaluation of the system and ongoing research directions conclude the research.

The OERA(Offensive Earned-Run Average) is a methodology for the performance evaluation of baseball players, which is based on a well- known Markov chain model. The DEA(Data Envelopment Analysis) is an LP-based evaluation technique for performance analysis of DMUs (Decision Making Units), whose production activities are characterized by multiple inputs and outputs. In this paper, the performances of Korean professional baseball players are analytically evaluated using both OERA and DEA methods. We discuss methodological strengths and drawbacks of two kinds of baseball evaluation techniques, by comparing both results. Finally to overcome the shortcomings of both methods, we develop a new analytical approach for baseball evaluation by combining OERA with DEA.

S-Distribution Center supplies parts to three plants of K-automobile manufacturing company. Since the three plants employ the JIT production system, it is important for S-Distribution Center to deliver small quantities of parts frequently and quickly on time. This paper presents a case study on the improvement of order-picking operation in S-Distribution Center. The study is focused on the reductions of move time and waiting time by redesigning the parts storage location, picking-order terminal location, retrieval policy, and equipment operation policy. The proposed operation system for S-Distribution Center is evaluated through a simple computation analysis and computer simulation. Furthermore, the reducible numbers of equipment and order pickers are investigated by performing a sensitivity analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether there are relationships of substitutability or complementarity between the call demand of fixed telecommunication and mobile telecommunication services. In order to clarify the relationships, we suggest a model of call demand of fixed telecommunication service which incorporates the variables representing the diffusion of mobile telecommunications subscription and estimate it with relevant time series data. Finally it is shown that there is complementary relationship between the call demand of fixed telecommunication and mobile paging services, and it is also found that there is substitutable relationship between the long distance call demand of fixed telecommunication and mobile phone services.

In this paper, I develop a simple dynamic resource allocation algorithm that reduces the call blocking rate by improving the resource utilization of the WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access) systems under multimedia service environment. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm significantly reduces the blocking rate of high speed multimedia calls. The algorithm developed in this paper is currently working in the commercial WCDMA IMT-2000 system.

In this paper, we propose a linear programming model of supply planning process for the supply chain collaboration strategy of a company. The amount of its supplying quantity relies on outsourcing suppliers heavily. Conversely, the revenues of those suppliers are highly dependent on the supplying quota from the supply network planning of the company. In order to keep the supply stable through collaboration, the company builds such a policy to guarantee the fairness on revenue between the supplies. For this, the supply network plan should keep the capacity utilization ratio even for all the suppliers. But the production capacities are different and the distribution of molds is disproportional through suppliers, so the supply network plan is not easily established with simple arithmetic processes. Therefore, we developed the linear programming model with those target function and constraints minimizing the costs for holding inventory and penalty of delayed delivery, simultaneously guaranteeing the even capacity utilization through suppliers. The proposed model has been applied to real case and the evaluation for the planning result from the model would be followed in order to make sure that our model guarantee on extracting the supply network plan subordinated to the policy. Also we mention about further studies for improvement of the model.

As the functional characteristics of passenger cars have reached to a satisfactory level, customers place more concerns with the aesthetic aspects of interior designs. The present study developed satisfaction models of passenger car interior materials for six parts including crash pad, steering wheel, transmission gearshift knob, audio panel, metal grain, and wooden grain. Eight to fifteen material design variables such as color, embossing, and smoothness were defined for the six interior parts based on literature survey, customer reviews, and expert opinions. A satisfaction survey was conducted for 30 vehicles with 30 participants ($mean{\pm}SD$ of age = $28.7{\pm}6.6$) by using a modified magnitude estimation scale. Based on the survey results, the material design variables were screened from statistical, technical, and practical aspects. With the screened variables, satisfaction models were developed by using the quantification I method for the six interior parts, indicating the importance of material design variables and preferred material properties.

This paper reports results of a recent survey of 184 Information Technology (IT) development practitioners and 90 User Interface (UI)/usability practitioners. This survey covered a broad range of issues including the respondents' profile, current development environment, usability and user-centered design (UCD) adoption issues in IT development practice, overall assessment of usability/UCD, and the most widely used usability/UCD methods and techniques. The results of this study are expected to provide an empirical basis for usability and UCD planning, training, adoption and execution in IT industry.