Recently, the fast development of communication technologies has brought a great convince for human beings' life. Lots of commercial services and transactions can be done by using mobile communication equipments such as smart phones. Consequently, smart phones have attracted lots of companies to invest them for their potential growth of market. Compared with basic feature phone, a smart phone can offer more advanced computing ability and connectivity. However, based on the responses of customers, there still are many defectives such as not friendly and smooth operation, short standby time of batteries, threat of virus infected and so on needed to be improved. Therefore, this study will propose a product innovative function development procedure into TRIZ (theory of inventive problem solving) to transform voice of customers into product design and to create novel functions, respectively. A case study of smart phones will be provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

A driver interacts directly with the car seat at all times. There are ergonomic characteristics that have to be followed to produce comfortable seats. However, most of previous researches focused on either static or dynamic condition only. In addition, research on car seat development is critically lacking although Malaysia herself manufactures its own car. Hence, this paper integrates objective measurements and subjective evaluation to predict seat discomfort. The objective measurements consider both static and dynamic conditions. Steven's psychophysics power law has been used in which after expansion; ${\psi}\;=\;a+b{\varphi}_s^{\alpha}+c{\varphi}_v^{\beta}$ where ${\psi}$ is discomfort sensation, ${\varphi}_s^{\alpha}$ is static modality with exponent ${\alpha}$ and ${\varphi}_v^{\beta}$ is dynamic modality with exponent ${\beta}$. The subjects in this study were local and the cars used were Malaysian made compact car. Static objective measurement was the seat pressure distribution measurement. The experiment was carried out on the driver's seat in a real car with the engine turned off. Meanwhile, the dynamic objective measurement was carried out in a moving car on real roads. During pressure distribution and vibration transmissibility experiments, subjects were requested to evaluate their discomfort levels using vehicle seat discomfort survey questionnaire together with body map diagram. From subjective evaluations, seat pressure and vibration dose values exponent for static modality ${\alpha}$ = 1.51 and exponent for dynamic modality ${\beta}$ = 1.24 were produced. The curves produced from the $E_{q.s}$ showed better $R_{-sq}$ values (99%) when both static and dynamic modalities were considered together as compared to Eq. with single modality only (static or dynamic only R-Sq = 95%). In conclusion, car seat discomfort prediction gives better result when seat development considered both static and dynamic modalities; and using ergonomic approach.

The purpose of this paper is to study user's involvement in new product development (NPD). It seeks to identify the factors involving user and design practices in the design process of new product development. A survey was conducted on 20 respondents consisting of designers involved in product development from various industries. The study focused on the early activities of the product design process which is called product specification. The analysis performed considers the importance of involving users in design decision. The outcome of this research is the significance of involving users and its effect on product development activities. The research also provides a model for an integrated user, designer and product knowledge activity in the product development process.

In traditional production lines, such as assembly lines, each worker is usually assigned to a particular fixed work, and decreasing the task to master the assigned work is valuated. However, when an imbalance exists between workers' speeds, if a worker delays the overall work in the production line, the production rate of the particular line will also decrease. To avoid this problem, the "Self-Balancing Production Line" was introduced. In this type of production line, each worker is assigned work dynamically, and when specific conditions are satisfied, production remains balanced. Characteristics of these lines that can be preempted at any place have already been analyzed by some researchers. A previous paper examined the situation in which only a single worker can process one machine and cannot preempt processing, and the improved policy of an ordinary selfbalancing production line, which specifies which stations workers can process and how workers can behave. This policy achieveda high production rate with only four stations and two workers (Buzacott, 2002). In that paper, worker processing stations and the behavior of a specific worker were limited, andthe paper focused only on specific stations and workers. Therefore, it is not applicable to any worker sequence. In this paper, we focus on other ways to decrease cycle time. In this kind of line, a worker processes at his or her speed. Therefore, if a worker is assigned stations according to his or her speed, the line can decrease cycle time. To do so, we relax the assumptions of this type of line and set a new condition. Under these conditions, we compare our results to the results of previous papers.

Job shop scheduling is well-known as one of the hardest combinatorial optimization problems and has been demonstrated to be NP-hard problem. In the past decades, several researchers have devoted their effort to develop evolutionary algorithms such as Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for job shop scheduling problem. Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm is a more recent evolutionary algorithm which has been widely applied and shown its strength in many application areas. However, the applications of DE on scheduling problems are still limited. This paper proposes a one-stage differential evolution algorithm (1ST-DE) for job shop scheduling problem. The proposed algorithm employs random key representation and permutation of m-job repetition to generate active schedules. The performance of proposed method is evaluated on a set of benchmark problems and compared with results from an existing PSO algorithm. The numerical results demonstrated that the proposed algorithm is able to provide good solutions especially for the large size problems with relatively fast computing time.

Self-tapping screws have some operational peculiarities. In spite of their economical advantage that requires no prior tapping operation, a weakness of self-tapping screw-tightening operations is that screws can easily be tightened at a non-right angle, thus resulting in an improper tightening strength. Increases in outsourced workers have reduced labor costs, but the accompanying high worker fluidity means that new workers are more frequently introduced into factories. It is necessary to train new workers for self-tapping screw-tightening operations, which occupies a considerable portion of ordinary assembly works. The purpose of this study is to develop and implement a skill transfer system for the operation. This study (1) proposes a set of characteristic values for evaluating the quality of the operation and develops a device that can measure these values; (2) proposes criteria for evaluating the resultant quality of the tightening; and (3) develops a skill training system for better work performance. Firstly, sets of characteristic values for evaluating the quality of the operation, namely, torque, vertical pressure forces and horizontal vibration forces, are proposed. A device that can measure these values is developed. Secondly, criteria for evaluating the resultant quality of the tightening are identified, involving tightening torque, maximum vertical pressure and timing, vibration area during the processing and tightening period, and work angle. By using such parameters, workers with the proper aptitude can be identified. Thirdly, a skill training system for the operation is developed. It consists of screwdriver operation training and screw-tightening training with feedback information about the results of the operation. Finally, the validity of the training system is experimentally verified using new operators and actual workers.

One of the critical issues in wireless sensor network is the design of a proper routing protocol. One possible approach is utilizing a virtual infrastructure, which is a subset of sensors to connect all the sensors in the network. Among the many virtual infrastructures, the connected dominating set is widely used. Since a small connected dominating set can help to decrease the protocol overhead and energy consumption, it is preferable to find a small sized connected dominating set. Although many algorithms have been suggested to construct a minimum connected dominating set, there have been few exact approaches. In this paper, we suggest an improved optimal algorithm for the minimum connected dominating set problem, and extensive computational results showed that our algorithm outperformed the previous exact algorithms. Also, we suggest a new heuristic algorithm to find the connected dominating set and computational results show that our algorithm is capable of finding good quality solutions quite fast.

Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) has been implemented in many companies to enhance their business performance and customer satisfaction. However, DFSS has not been widely applied to the aircraft industry which operates large, complex development programs. In this paper, the characteristics of an aeronautical product development program are analyzed to figure out the limitations of current DFSS methodology and the prerequisite to deployment of DFSS at the program level is suggested.