It's very important to make an effective and optimized production schedule for the small-to-medium-sized factory which have high-variety low-volume manufacturing properties. And now people say that MES is very useful to make scheduling more effectively. But for small-to-medium-sized factory, it is very difficult to build MES system because of fewer infrastructures in the factory, and more to keep it's continuous maintenance and improvement. Therefore it is more important to systematize the production scheduling generation using simpler and easier tools like EXCEL sheet. And it will be needed a new method to make simple MES construction for more efficient production scheduling. This paper proposes the method which can build simple MES easily using a tool of EXCEL VBA for a small-to-medium-sized factory, and introduces an applied case by the proposed method and EXCEL VBA.

A questionnaire survey was carried out in order to understand the discomfort when people experience in reading Korean characters of displays. In the survey, 499 respondents (276 males and 223 females), whose ages ranged from 10s to 70s, participated, while 19.6% of the respondents were over 60 years old. The mean visual acuity was 0.93, while it decreased as the age increases from 40s. Approximately 41.4% of the respondents, 98% of them were over 40s, reported that they experienced presbyopia. It was found that the percentage of the respondents who experienced the discomfort much in reading Korean characters significantly increased as the age increases from 40s. The respondents over 40s reported different discomfort experiences according to the type of displays. It was found that the respondents thought that the main reason for the discomfort in reading is related to the character size. The survey results showed that the Korean text in the displays should be designed to be easily readable by the main users.

For a comprehensive understanding of human impact on a change of the global climate, it is necessary to obtain reliable information on man-induced fluxes of greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) guidelines (IPCC 1996, IPCC 2000, IPCC2006) provide the methods and procedures of estimating the national GHG emission inventories. Particularly, IPCC 2006 contains new chapter of key conceptions uncertainties, including the types of uncertainties and assessment methods of uncertainties in GHG emission inventories. In this paper, a compact and clear survey on volume 1 of IPCC 2006, which contains the general information on inventory compilation, uncertainty and guidance on the choice of methods, and QC/QA, is given with emphasis on uncertainty analysis.

Recently, the use of soft-keyboard is widespread and increases, because various handheld devices were developed such as PDA, navigation, mobile phones with enhanced competence of touchscreen. The use of soft-keyboard requires different characteristics compared to traditional hard-keyboard like QWERTY keyboard: no standard character layout, one finger entry, and cognitive processing time. In this study, therefore, the optimal soft-keyboard layout for one finger text entry in touchscreen environment was investigated among 6 keyboard layouts which were developed based on traditional characteristic of Korean text and the usage frequency of both vowels and consonants. As a result, the interface with Korean text invention order like 'ㄱㄴㄷㄹ' or 'ㅏㅑㅓㅕㅕ' was found to be better than the interface with usage frequency-based arrangement. Especially the vowels were most efficient when separated into two parts; located at the right-hand side and at right below the consonants. In conclusion, the keyboard layout with regard to the Korean text characteristic and the invention order was a more effective layout resulted from the minimum cognitive processing time.

One of primary assumptions on DEA is that all DMUs for evaluation should be homogeneous. In comparative analysis among DMUs with relative efficiency measurement, it should be evaluated under identical conditions by ruling out external environmental influences. In this study, a measurement of innovation efficiency using the three-stage approach is performed. The approach employs DEA to measure relative efficiency and Tobit regressions to control external variables affecting innovation activity. The approach applied to firms in Korean Innovation Survey: Service Sector 2003 and 2006. Final efficiency scores of the approach represent net efficiency of the innovation. This study found that there is a increasing on technical efficiency of third stage, and it has difference with first stage significantly. Besides, a decrease on standard deviation of third stage is found. It means DMUs biased lower due to unfavorable condition and ones biased higher due to favorable condition are fallen into an identical operating environment through the approach. A measurement of net efficiency, excluding external effects, ensures the homogeneity of DMUs so that improves the reliability in terms of its analysis results. This study is expected to provide a direction and to be a valuable reference to further evaluation of innovation performance in Korean service sector.

Panning tasks caused by both a small screen and the lower resolution of handheld devices are known to decrease the usability of a mobile internet service. To solve this problem, we proposed FTND, an improved version of Tap-N-Drag widely used in various mobile web browsers. 30 participants performed the panning tasks with FTND embedded in combinations of 2 panning directions of Push Background user interface and Push Viewpoint user interface and 5 panning ratios of 100% (a panning ratio of Tap- N-Drag), 300%, 500%, 700%, and 900%. The usability of FTND was assessed by an objective performance and a subjective preference. The objective performance was measured by a task completion time, the number of clicks, and the number of pixels. The subjective preference was measured by satisfaction, accuracy and ease of use. Push Viewpoint user interface at the panning ratios of 300%, 500%, and 700% proved to be the most efficient way for panning tasks with small handheld devices when performing the task by using the right hand thumb.

The vehicle travel time between the demand points in downtown area is greatly influenced by complex road condition and traffic situation that change real time to various external environments. Most of research in the vehicle routing problems compose vehicle routes only considering travel distance and average vehicle speed between the demand points, however did not consider dynamic external environments such as traffic situation by service time zones. A realistic vehicle routing problem which considers traffic situation of smooth, delaying, and stagnating by three service time zones such as going to work, afternoon, and going home was suggested in this study. A mathematical programming model was suggested and it gives an optimal solution when using ILOG CPLEX. A hybrid genetic algorithm was also suggested to chooses a vehicle route considering traffic situation to minimize the total travel time. By comparing the result considering the traffic situation, the suggested algorithm gives better solution than existing algorithms.

This paper considers a two-stage supply system consisting of two make-to-stock facilities. The facility in the first stage produces a single type of component in anticipation of future demands from the market and the end item production while the facility in the second stage produces the end item in anticipation of future demands from the OEM customers. The facility in the first stage has the option of to accept or reject each incoming demand from the market. In this paper, we address the problem of how to control the exogenous component demand and how to manage the production of the end item and the component so as to maximize the system's profit subject to the system costs. In this paper, we present a heuristic policy that is the base-stock production policy combined with a linear switching curve for component demand control. Numerical study is implemented under different operating conditions of the system and it shows that the performance of the heuristic is very promising compared to that of the optimal policy for the Markov model.