• International conference on construction engineering and project management
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• 2011.02a
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• pp.201-208
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• 2011

Today's highly competitive construction scenario forces all the major players in the field to take up multiple projects which have put an undue pressure on the resources available within the organization. Under such a situation, there are many instances where in the resource requirement exceeds its availability due to multiple activities (with same resource requirement) which are scheduled to start simultaneously and thus results in the constrained resource becoming a bottleneck of the project. As a consequence of sharing resources, this paper studies the impact on the completion date of two similar projects under two different conditions, the first one resulting in a postponed end date and the second without any postponement. The resource utilization, the possibility of substitution of a resource and its subsequent impact on the deadline of the project is analyzed under these two circumstances. The study is done on a Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) platform instead of leaving the schedule with a traditional Critical Path Method (CPM) finish, which gives an added advantage of validating the robustness of the emerging CCPM trend in the field of resource management.

• Journal of the Korean Operations Research and Management Science Society
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• v.40 no.1
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• pp.57-73
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• 2015

While many previous studies investigated the effect of operations performance on financial performance, most studies considered only a few performance indicators and ignored the characteristics of industries. Therefore, this study intends to analyze the effect of operations performance on financial performance, by selecting a rather comprehensive operations performance indicators from firms' financial data. In doing so, we used operating efficiency and supply chain performance indicators for operations performance and a firm's profitability and future value indicators for financial performance. For the analysis, we collected 544 firms' operations and financial performance data belonging to eight key industries from the 'Forbes Global 2000'. We first analysed the differences in operations and financial performance among high, medium and low supply chain performance groups based on the quantitative criteria of Gartner's 'Supply Chain Top 25' ranking procedure. Then we analysed the effect of operations performance indicators on financial performance for both entire industry and individual industries, using multiple regression. Based on the results, we provided practical insights into key operations performance indicators to focus on and manage in order to improve financial performance.

• Korean Management Science Review
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.153-168
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• 2012

Order allocation is one of the most important decision-making problems of firms having significant influences on performances of themselves and the whole supply chain. Existing researches about order allocation have mainly focused on evaluating capabilities of directly connected suppliers so that it is hard to consider effects and interactions from undirected connections over multiple lower-layers. To alleviate the limitation, this paper proposed a novel approach to order allocation using structural hole. By applying the concept of structural hole to the supply network, we could evaluate the structural supplying powers of firms with respect to both of direct and indirect connections. In the proposed approach, we derived a methodology to measure the potential supplying power of each firm by modifying the effective size as one of the measurements of structural hole and then, proposed its application, the structural hole based order allocation strategy. Furthermore, we conducted the agent based modeling of supply chain to perform the decision-making process of order allocation and simulated the proposed strategy. As a results, by coping with the variance of demand more stably, it could improve the performance of supply chain from the aspects of fill rate, inventory level and demand-supply balance.

• Culinary science and hospitality research
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.21-38
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• 2008

This research aimed to analyze the differences in financial variables classifying chain restaurants. A total of 126 samples were drawn from financial statements for $2001{\sim}2006$. As a result of analysis, there was a significant difference in Pillai's Trace, Wilks' Lambda, Hotelling's Trace, and Roy's Largest Root values at the significant probability value(p<0.05) based on F value in terms of stability among chain restaurants. Difference was found only in current rate and liabilities in ANOVA. There was a great difference in current rate among institutional restaurants, fast food restaurants, and cafeterias. There was a significant difference in Pillai's Trace, Wilks' Lambda, Hotelling's Trace, and Roy's Largest Root values at the significant probability value(p<0.05) based on F value in terms of restaurants' profitability. In ANOVA, difference was found only in net profits to net sales. It was revealed that all factors showed no significant differences in multiple comparison. All multi-variant test statistics showed a significant difference in growth and turnover. ANOVA showed a significant difference in net sales growth rate, net profit growth rate, and total assets growth rate.

• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
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• v.31 no.2
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• pp.106-119
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• 2005

Uncertainties inherent in customer demand patterns make it difficult for supply chains to achieve just-in-time inventory replenishment, resulting in loosing sales opportunity or keeping excessive chain wide inventories. In this paper, we propose two intelligent adaptive inventory control models for a supply chain consisting of one supplier and multiple retailers, with the assumption of information sharing. The inventory control parameters of the supplier and retailers are order placement time to an outside source and reorder points in terms of inventory position, respectively. Unlike most extant inventory control approaches, modeling the uncertainty of customer demand as a stationary statistical distribution is not necessary in these models. Instead, using a reinforcement learning technique, the control parameters are designed to adaptively change as customer demand patterns change. A simulation based experiment was performed to compare the performance of the inventory control models.

• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.147-160
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• 2013

Today, the management environments of intelligence firm are changing the way of production planning and logistics management, and are changing the process of supply chain management system. This paper shows the development of information system software for intelligence enterprises is used in supply chain management for robot engineering industry. Specifically, supply chain management system in this paper has been developed to analyze the impact of multi plant and multi distribution environment, showing the process analysis and system development of hierarchical assembly manufacturing industry. In this paper we consider a production planning and distribution management system of intelligence firm in the supply chain. We focus on a capacitated production resource and distribution volume allocation problem, develop a mixed integer programming model, and propose an efficient heuristic procedure using a genetic algorithm to solve it efficiently. This method makes it possible for the population to reach the feasible approximate solution easily. The proposed regeneration procedures, which evaluate each infeasible chromosome, makes the solution converge to the feasible approximate solution quickly.

• IMMUNE NETWORK
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.5.1-5.22
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• 2022

The approval of immunotherapies such as checkpoint inhibitors (CPIs), adoptive cell therapies and cancer vaccines has revolutionized the way cancer treatment is approached. While immunotherapies have improved clinical outcome in a variety of tumor types, some cancers have proven harder to combat using single agents, underscoring the need for multi-targeted immunotherapy approaches. Efficacy of CPIs and cancer vaccines requires patients to have a competent immune system with adequate cell numbers while the efficacy of adoptive cellular therapy is limited by the expansion and persistence of cells after infusion. A promising strategy to overcome these challenges is combination treatment with common gamma-chain cytokines. Gamma-chain cytokines play a critical role in the survival, proliferation, differentiation and function of multiple immune cell types, including CD8 T-cells and NK cells, which are at the center of the anti-tumor response. While the short halflife of recombinant cytokines initially limited their application in the clinic, advancements in protein engineering have led to the development of several next-generation drug candidates with dramatically increased half-life and bioactivity. When combining these cytokines with other immunotherapies, strong evidence of synergy has been observed in preclinical and clinical cancer settings. This promising data has led to the initiation of 70 ongoing clinical trials including IL-2, IL-7, IL-15 and IL-21. This review summarizes the recent advancements of common gamma-chain cytokines and their potential as a cancer immunotherapy.

• Korean Journal of Clinical Laboratory Science
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• v.41 no.4
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• pp.173-179
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• 2009

The analysis of serum free light chains (sFLCs) can improve the diagnosis and monitoring of multiple myeloma and other plasma cell dyscrasias. As with other immunoassays, sFLCstests are subject to potential antigen excess and heterophilic antibody interference. We describe 9 cases of sFLCs antigen excess in patients with multiple myeloma using the FreeliteTM Human Kappa and Lambda Free Kits (The Binding Site ltd., Birmingham, UK) and the Hitachi7600 P module turbidimetric system. A total of 1,247 consecutive samples from 250 patients with multiple myeloma were assayed for sFLCs from April to September, 2009. The samples were assayed using an initial dilution of 1 :5and subsequent dilutions of 1 :50 and 1: 100. The same samples were analyzed for the presence of monoclonal gammopathies using serum protein electrophoresis (SPE) and immunofixation electrophoresis (IFE). There were 9 samples (0.72%) of antigen excess with 3 cases of kappa (0.24%) and 6 cases of lambda (0.48%). These cases represents an example of antigen excess or "hook effect" using the serum free light chain assays and mandates high level of attention to falsely low sFLC levels due to antigen excess, especially when it is disaccordant to other assay results or clinical manifestations.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.15 no.21
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• pp.9291-9293
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• 2014

Background: Patients with refractory or relapsed multiple myeloma are considered to have a very poor prognosis, and new regimens are needed to improve the outcome. Gemcitabine, a nucleoside antimetabolite, is an analog of deoxycytidine which mainly inhibits DNA synthesis through interfering with DNA chain elongation and depleting deoxynucleotide stores, resulting in gemcitabine-induced cell death. Here we performed a systemic analysis to evaluate gemcitabine based chemotherapy as salvage treatment for patients with refractory and relapsed multiple myeloma. Methods: Clinical studies evaluating the impact of gemcitabine based regimens on response and safety for patients with refractory and relapsed multiple myeloma were identified by using a predefined search strategy. Pooled response rate (RR) of treatment were calculated. Results: In gemcitabine based regimens, 3 clinical studies which including 57 patients with refractory and relapsed multiple myeloma were considered eligible for inclusion. Systemic analysis suggested that, in all patients, pooled RR was 15.7% (9/57) in gemcitabine based regimens. Major adverse effects were hematologic toxicity, including grade 3 or 4 anemia, leucopenia and thrombocytopenia i. No treatment related death occurred with gemcitabine based treatment. Conclusion: This systemic analysis suggests that gemcitabine based regimens are associated with mild activity with good tolerability in treating patients with refractory or relapsed multiple myeloma.

• Molecules and Cells
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.97-103
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• 2006

Phosphoinositides are critical regulators of ion channel and transporter activity. There are multiple isomers of biologically active phosphoinositides in the plasma membrane and the different lipid species are non-randomly distributed. However, the mechanism by which cells impose selectivity and directionality on lipid movements and so generate a non-random lipid distribution remains unclear. In the present study we investigated which structural elements of phosphoinositides are responsible for their subcellular location and movement. We incubated phosphatidylinositol (PI), phosphatidylinositol 4-monophosphate (PI(4)P) and phosphatidylinositol 4,5-bisphosphate ($PI(4,5)P_2$) with short or long acyl chains in CHO and HEK cells. We show that phosphate number and acyl chain length determine cellular location and translocation movement. In CHO cells, $PI(4,5)P_2$ with a long acyl chain was released into the cytosol easily because of a low partition coefficient whereas long chain PI was released more slowly because of a high partition coefficient. In HEK cells, the cellular location and translocation movement of PI were similar to those of PI in CHO cells, whereas those of $PI(4,5)P_2$ were different; some mechanism restricted the translocation movement of $PI(4,5)P_2$, and this is in good agreement with the extremely low lateral diffusion of $PI(4,5)P_2$. In contrast to the dependence on the number of phosphates of the phospholipid head group of long acyl chain analogs, short acyl chain phospholipids easily undergo translocation movement regardless of cell type and number of phosphates in the lipid headgroup.