• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.213-226
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• 2011

In global supply chain, the scheduling problems of large products such as ships, airplanes, space shuttles, assembled constructions, and/or automobiles are complicated by nature. New scheduling systems are often developed in order to reduce inherent computational complexity. As a result, a problem can be decomposed into small sub-problems, problems that contain independently small scheduling systems integrating into the initial problem. As one of the authors experienced, DAS (Daewoo Shipbuilding Scheduling System) has adopted a two-layered hierarchical architecture. In the hierarchical architecture, individual scheduling systems composed of a high-level dock scheduler, DAS-ERECT and low-level assembly plant schedulers, DAS-PBS, DAS-3DS, DAS-NPS, and DAS-A7 try to search the best schedules under their own constraints. Moreover, the steep growth of communication technology and logistics enables it to introduce distributed multi-nation production plants by which different parts are produced by designated plants. Therefore vertical and lateral coordination among decomposed scheduling systems is necessary. No standard coordination mechanism of multiple scheduling systems exists, even though there are various scheduling systems existing in the area of scheduling research. Previous research regarding the coordination mechanism has mainly focused on external conversation without capacity model. Prior research has heavily focuses on agent-based coordination in the area of agent research. Yet, no scheduling domain has been developed. Previous research regarding the agent-based scheduling has paid its ample attention to internal coordination of scheduling process, a process that has not been efficient. In this study, we suggest a general framework for agent-based coordination of multiple scheduling systems in global supply chain. The purpose of this study was to design a standard coordination mechanism. To do so, we first define an individual scheduling agent responsible for their own plants and a meta-level coordination agent involved with each individual scheduling agent. We then suggest variables and values describing the individual scheduling agent and meta-level coordination agent. These variables and values are represented by Backus-Naur Form. Second, we suggest scheduling agent communication protocols for each scheduling agent topology classified into the system architectures, existence or nonexistence of coordinator, and directions of coordination. If there was a coordinating agent, an individual scheduling agent could communicate with another individual agent indirectly through the coordinator. On the other hand, if there was not any coordinating agent existing, an individual scheduling agent should communicate with another individual agent directly. To apply agent communication language specifically to the scheduling coordination domain, we had to additionally define an inner language, a language that suitably expresses scheduling coordination. A scheduling agent communication language is devised for the communication among agents independent of domain. We adopt three message layers which are ACL layer, scheduling coordination layer, and industry-specific layer. The ACL layer is a domain independent outer language layer. The scheduling coordination layer has terms necessary for scheduling coordination. The industry-specific layer expresses the industry specification. Third, in order to improve the efficiency of communication among scheduling agents and avoid possible infinite loops, we suggest a look-ahead load balancing model which supports to monitor participating agents and to analyze the status of the agents. To build the look-ahead load balancing model, the status of participating agents should be monitored. Most of all, the amount of sharing information should be considered. If complete information is collected, updating and maintenance cost of sharing information will be increasing although the frequency of communication will be decreasing. Therefore the level of detail and updating period of sharing information should be decided contingently. By means of this standard coordination mechanism, we can easily model coordination processes of multiple scheduling systems into supply chain. Finally, we apply this mechanism to shipbuilding domain and develop a prototype system which consists of a dock-scheduling agent, four assembly- plant-scheduling agents, and a meta-level coordination agent. A series of experiments using the real world data are used to empirically examine this mechanism. The results of this study show that the effect of agent-based platform on coordinated scheduling is evident in terms of the number of tardy jobs, tardiness, and makespan.

• Korean Journal of Soil Science and Fertilizer
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• v.45 no.6
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• pp.983-991
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• 2012

These days, agricultural products cultivated in facilities occupy the highest percentage of agricultural output price. Specifically cucumbers have been one of the crops that farmers prefer to growing, because their prices were high. However, cucumber crop is sensitive to the soil and environments and it requires the exact crop management. In order to establish cultivation techniques for cucumbers, the current situation of cucumber cultivation was surveyed from ten cucumber farmlands; five farmlands of cucumber cultivation in forcing and five of semi-forcing practicing systems, respectably. The soil conditions were alluvial or valley in soil topology, moderately or poorly drainage in soil drainage classes, coarse loamy in soil texture family. Soil was managed with deep plowing combined with application of basal fertilizers such as compost, rice straw, oil cake, wood chip and chemical fertilizer. The whole soil was prepared in uniformly with rotary. Three major nutrients ($N-P_2O_5-K_2O$)of basal application were 815-464-529 kg $ha^{-1}$ in forcing and 197-135-151 kg $ha^{-1}$ in semi-forcing cultivation. Top dressing of fertilizer was supplied in fertigation system of macro and micro elements in 2~3 day interval with water irrigation. The average yields of cucumbers were $168t\;ha^{-1}$ with 381,000 thousand won $ha^{-1}$ in average gross profit (AGP) in forcing cultivation and $115t\;ha^{-1}$ with 177,000 thousand won $ha^{-1}$ in AGP in semi-forcing cultivation. Cucumber production during the winter season was considered to increase the gross profit because cucumber price tends to stay in high level during this time. The accumulation of soil chemicals like EC, available $P_2O_5$ and exchangeable cations could be controlled by rice straw application. The rice straw application increased soil temperature during the winter season, in exchange of soil air, and in extension of plant roots. In addition, the rice straw application somewhat affected decrease of salts accumulation.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.159-172
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• 2010

The recommender system is one of the possible solutions to assist customers in finding the items they would like to purchase. To date, a variety of recommendation techniques have been developed. One of the most successful recommendation techniques is Collaborative Filtering (CF) that has been used in a number of different applications such as recommending Web pages, movies, music, articles and products. CF identifies customers whose tastes are similar to those of a given customer, and recommends items those customers have liked in the past. Numerous CF algorithms have been developed to increase the performance of recommender systems. Broadly, there are memory-based CF algorithms, model-based CF algorithms, and hybrid CF algorithms which combine CF with content-based techniques or other recommender systems. While many researchers have focused their efforts in improving CF performance, the theoretical justification of CF algorithms is lacking. That is, we do not know many things about how CF is done. Furthermore, the relative performances of CF algorithms are known to be domain and data dependent. It is very time-consuming and expensive to implement and launce a CF recommender system, and also the system unsuited for the given domain provides customers with poor quality recommendations that make them easily annoyed. Therefore, predicting the performances of CF algorithms in advance is practically important and needed. In this study, we propose an efficient approach to predict the performance of CF. Social Network Analysis (SNA) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) are applied to develop our prediction model. CF can be modeled as a social network in which customers are nodes and purchase relationships between customers are links. SNA facilitates an exploration of the topological properties of the network structure that are implicit in data for CF recommendations. An ANN model is developed through an analysis of network topology, such as network density, inclusiveness, clustering coefficient, network centralization, and Krackhardt's efficiency. While network density, expressed as a proportion of the maximum possible number of links, captures the density of the whole network, the clustering coefficient captures the degree to which the overall network contains localized pockets of dense connectivity. Inclusiveness refers to the number of nodes which are included within the various connected parts of the social network. Centralization reflects the extent to which connections are concentrated in a small number of nodes rather than distributed equally among all nodes. Krackhardt's efficiency characterizes how dense the social network is beyond that barely needed to keep the social group even indirectly connected to one another. We use these social network measures as input variables of the ANN model. As an output variable, we use the recommendation accuracy measured by F1-measure. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the ANN model, sales transaction data from H department store, one of the well-known department stores in Korea, was used. Total 396 experimental samples were gathered, and we used 40%, 40%, and 20% of them, for training, test, and validation, respectively. The 5-fold cross validation was also conducted to enhance the reliability of our experiments. The input variable measuring process consists of following three steps; analysis of customer similarities, construction of a social network, and analysis of social network patterns. We used Net Miner 3 and UCINET 6.0 for SNA, and Clementine 11.1 for ANN modeling. The experiments reported that the ANN model has 92.61% estimated accuracy and 0.0049 RMSE. Thus, we can know that our prediction model helps decide whether CF is useful for a given application with certain data characteristics.

• Clean Technology
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.41-49
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• 2018

Y zeolites with different extra-framework cations, such as $Na^+$, $N^+$, $Ca^{2+}$, and $Cu^{2+}$, with different charge and ionic radius have been investigated to greatly enhance a working capacity (W) of $CO_2$ adsorption at $25^{\circ}C$ and a $CO_2/CO$ selectivity factor (S). A sample of NaY with a very small amount of 0.012% $Ca^{2+}$ was fully reversible for seven times repeated $CO_2$ adsorption/desorption cycles, thereby forming no surface carbonates unlikely earlier reports. Although at pressures above 4 bar, 2.00% CaY, 1.60% CuY and 1.87% LiY all showed a $CO_2$ adsorption very similar to that measured for NaY, they gave a significant decrease in the adsorption at lower pressures, depending on the metal ion. At 0.5 ~ 2.5 bar, the extent of $CO_2$ adsorption was in the order NaY > 1.60% CuY > 2.00% CaY > 1.87% LiY. All the $Na^+-based$ metals-exchanged zeolites have a FAU (faujasite) framework and a Si/Al value near 2.6; thus, there is no discernible difference in the framework topology, framework chemical compositions, effective aperture size, and channel structure between the zeolite samples. Therefore, the distinctive behavior in the adsorption of $CO_2$ with a character as a weak Lewis acid is associated with the site basicity of the zeolites, and the interaction potentials of the cations. Different trend was shown for a CO adsorption due to weaker quadrupole interactions. Adsorption of $CO_2$ and CO on samples of CaY with 0.012 to 5.23% Ca disclosed a significant dependence on the Ca loading. The $CO_2$ adsorption increased when the cation exists up to ca. 0.05%, while it decreased at higher Ca amounts. However, values for both W and S could greatly increase as the bare zeolite is enriched by $Ca^{2+}$ ions. The 5.23% CaY had $W=2.37mmol\;g^{-1}$ and S = 4.37, and the former value was comparable to a benchmark reported in the literature.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.349-392
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• 2019

In the 1960s of Korea, the normalization of diplomatic relations between Korea and Japan led to a sense of a vigorous anxiety and fear that "Japan will once again come to the Korean peninsula". As a reaction to this, the discourse on the criticism of 'Japanese Style' strongly emerged. If the prior discourse of criticism was to express the national antipathy toward the colonial remnants that had not yet been disposed of, the critical discourse of the 1960s was the wariness of the newly created 'Japanese Style' in popular culture, and to grasp it as a symptomatic phenomenon that 'evil-minded Japan' was revealed. Thus, this new logic of criticism of the 'Japanese Style' had a qualitative difference from the existing ones. It was accompanied by a willingness to inspect and censor the 'masses' that grew up as consumers of transnational 'mass culture' that flowed and chained in the geopolitical order under the Cold War system. Therefore, the topology of 'popular things=Japanese things=consuming things' reveals the paradox of moral demands that existed within Korean society in the 1960s. This was to solidify the divisive circulation structure that caused them to avoid direct contact with the other called 'Japan', but at the same time, get as close to it as ever. It is a repetitive obsession that pushes the other to another side through the moral segregation that strictly draws a line of demarcation between oneself and the other, but on the other hand is attracted to the object and pulls it back to its side. This paper intends to listen to the different voices that have arisen in the repetitive obsession to understand the significance of the dissonance that has been repeated in the contemporary era. This will be an examination of the paradoxical object of Japan that has been repeatedly asked to build the internal control principle of Korean society, or to hide the oppressive and violent side of the power, and that can neither be accepted nor destroyed completely as part of oneself.