• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.247-262
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• 2024

Domestic sewage can greatly affect the macro-micro physical-mechanical properties of building foundation soils. In order to investigate the effect of domestic sewage on physical and mechanical properties of soils, the physicochemical properties of three groups of different concentrations of domestic sewage contaminated soil were tested through indoor experiments. Combined with scanning electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction experiments, and grey relational analysis, the degree of influence of different concentrations of domestic sewage on the physicochemical properties of soil was compared and analyzed from multiple perspectives such as microstructure and mineral composition, revealing the influencing mechanism of soil pollution by domestic sewage. The results showed that under the immersion of contaminated water, the color of the soaking water turned black first and then yellow, and brownish yellow secretions appeared on the surface of the soil samples. The moisture content, specific gravity, density, and pore ratio index of the soil samples immersed in 50% and 100% domestic sewage decreased with the increase of sewage concentration, while the liquid limit of the soil samples changed in the opposite direction. The immersion time had little effect on the slope of the compression curve of the soil samples soaked in tap water. For the soil samples immersed in domestic sewage, the slope of the compression curve and the compression coefficient increased with the increase of domestic sewage concentration and immersion time, while the compression modulus showed the opposite trend. In the soil samples immersed in tap water, there were a large number of small particles and cementitious substances, and the structure was relatively dense. With the increase of domestic sewage concentration, the microstructure of the soil changed significantly, with the appearance of sigle particle structure, loose and disorderly arrangement of particles, increased and enlarged pores, gradual reduction of small particle substances and cementitious substances, and the soil structure transformed from compact to loose. The research findings can provide theoretical reference for contaminated geotechnical engineering.

• Journal of Distribution Research
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.29-57
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• 2008

Empirical model was developed to test the building mechanism of trust dimensions and loyalty with the suppliers' bonding tactics to service firms. And interactive effects between suppliers' bonding tactics and service firms' store age was hypothesized in the trust-loyalty building processes. The model was tested in the context of animal clinics which belong to Korean Animal Hospital Association (KAHA). The data was analysed using structural equation model (SEM). The findings are as follows. First, two different relational bonding tactics play different roles in their effects on building trust dimensions toward suppliers. While supplier's social bonding tactic significantly influences on both the affective and cognitive trust of service firms, suppliers' structural bonding tactic only influences significantly on affective trust of service firms. Second, while suppliers' social bonding tactic influences on building service firms' loyalty significantly, suppliers' structural bonding tactic doesn't influence on building their loyalty. Suppliers' structural bonding tactic influences on building their loyalty indirectly through affective trust. Third, while service firms' affective trust influences on building loyalty significantly, cognitive trust doesn't. Their cognitive trust influences on building loyalty indirectly through affective trust. Fourth, the higher the firms' store age is, the more suppliers use social bonding tactics to build trust and loyalty directly. While the shorter the firms' store age is, the more suppliers partially use both the social and structural bonding tactics to build trust and loyalty. In conclusion, in the context of animal clinics' distribution channels, suppliers' relational bonding tactics with service firms differently influence to build trust sub-dimensions and loyalty. And, suppliers should take note of the interactive role of service firms' store age in the utilization of the different bonding tactics to build service firms' trust and loyalty toward suppliers. At the end of the paper, managerial implications, limitations, and future research directions are suggested.

• Journal of Distribution Research
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.1-31
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• 2007

While trust and commitment are core mediating variables for the purpose of maintaining the long-term relationship, in the context of the characteristics of company and the relationship performance of its members, there have been limited studies which explore as to how each of the dimensions has affects differently. The basic purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between an automobile manufacturer and its agencies. The main purpose of this study is to examine how each different dimension of trust and commitment on the automobile manufacturer has different mediating effects between the characteristics of company(organization characteristics, relationship characteristics) and relationship performance perceived by its agents. Another purpose is to investigate the mechanism by which the relationship performance of the agencies is improved. An empirical study surveying 115 sales office managers at a leading automobile manufacturer in Korea was conducted. An analysis of the collected data indicates that while the characteristics of company have a positive influence on the agencies' relational performance through the mediating role of both trust of benevolence and commitment, agencies' trust of their headquarter's benevolence has a different influence on the dimensions of commitment. Finally, the authors discussed some theoretical contributions and managerial implications. And then, they presented limitations of this study and the future research directions.

• Journal of Physiology & Pathology in Korean Medicine
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.765-772
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• 2011

Knowledge which is represented by formal logic are widely used in many domains such like artificial intelligence, information retrieval, e-commerce and so on. And for medical field, medical documentary records retrieval, information systems in hospitals, medical data sharing, remote treatment and expert systems need knowledge representation technology. To retrieve information intellectually and provide advanced information services, systematically controlled mechanism is needed to represent and share knowledge. Importantly, medical expert's knowledge should be represented in a form that is understandable to computers and also to humans to be applied to the medical information system supporting decision making. And it should have a suitable and efficient structure for its own purposes including reasoning, extendability of knowledge, management of data, accuracy of expressions, diversity, and so on. we call it ontology which can be processed with machines. We can use the ontology to represent traditional medicine knowledge in structured and systematic way with visualization, then also it can also be used education materials. Hence, the authors developed an Shanghanlun ontology by way of showing an example, so that we suggested a methodology for ontology development and also a model to structure the traditional medical knowledge. And this result can be used for student to learn Shanghanlun by graphical representation of it's knowledge. We analyzed the text of Shanghanlun to construct relational database including it's original text, symptoms and herb formulars. And then we classified the terms following some criterion, confirmed the structure of the ontology to describe semantic relations between the terms, especially we developed the ontology considering visual representation. The ontology developed in this study provides database showing fomulas, herbs, symptoms, the name of diseases and the text written in Shanghanlun. It's easy to retrieve contents by their semantic relations so that it is convenient to search knowledge of Shanghanlun and to learn it. It can display the related concepts by searching terms and provides expanded information with a simple click. It has some limitations such as standardization problems, short coverage of pattern(證), and error in chinese characters input. But we believe this research can be used for basic foundation to make traditional medicine more structural and systematic, to develop application softwares, and also to applied it in Shanghanlun educations.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.65-76
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• 2015

Purpose - This article aims to present and test a model regarding franchisors' supporting activities that may positively influence franchisees' attitude toward the franchising headquarter and their own business performance. Moreover, the authors examine the moderating effect of competitive intensity between franchisee attitude and business performance. Most previous research focused on behavioral performance measurements such as satisfaction, trust, and commitment. There are few empirical studies that focus on financial performance data because it is difficult to determine a relational mechanism between behavioral and financial performance. Moreover, financial data is confidential and difficult to collect in many cases. However, this study measures financial performance (e.g., sales revenue per square meter) differently than most previous research, which is mostly focused on the behavioral performance measurements. Research design, data, and methodology - To test our hypotheses, we selected 137 franchisee managers who are running chains of one of the foremost bakery franchise brands in South Korea. This study carefully investigated the reliability, content validity, convergent validity, and discriminant validity of the proposed instrument by analyzing the data obtained from the samples. The data was analyzed using the AMOS structural equation modeling program. Results - The results indicated that: non-financial support activities (e.g., information exchange and communication) had a positive impact on the franchisee attitude toward the franchising headquarter. The franchisee attitude in turn had a positive effect on the headquarters' business performance. Furthermore, competitive intensity could enhance the relationship between franchisee attitude toward franchising headquarter and business performance in a local franchise market. However, financial support activities (e.g., rewards and promotional support) and training had no relationship with either franchisee attitude or business performance. Conclusions - This study provides some practical implications to franchisors in terms of franchise operation and store opening strategies. With respect to the franchise operation strategy, franchisors need to focus on non-financial rather than financial support. Most franchisees consider the necessity of financial support activities and not their sufficiency because these activities are specified in their franchise contract. In addition, it is important for franchisees to maintain a positive attitude for the franchise headquarters. The franchisees with a positive attitude for the franchisor can show a high degree of solidarity for various support activities, and it consequently determines franchisees' sales performance. In terms of franchise store opening strategy, this study suggests an additional criterion that can be considered in determining the location of direct and non-direct management stores (e.g., franchisees' stores). In this research, franchise stores located within high level of competitive intensity are shown to have a high relationship between franchisee attitudes of franchisor support activities and business performance compared to the franchisees located within low competitive intensity level. This result shows that opening non-direct franchise stores is more effective than direct stores in higher competitive market situations. Research contribution, implications, and further research directions are discussed at the end of the paper.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartD
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• v.16D no.4
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• pp.463-474
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• 2009

To analyze multidimensional data conveniently and efficiently, OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) systems or e-business are widely using views in a horizontal form to represent measurement values over multiple dimensions. These views can be stored as materialized views derived from several sources in order to support accesses to the integrated data. The horizontal views can provide effective accesses to complex queries of OLAP or e-business. However, we have a problem of occurring maintenance of the horizontal views since data sources are distributed over remote sites. We need a method that propagates the changes of source tables to the corresponding horizontal views. In this paper, we address incremental maintenance of horizontal views that makes it possible to reflect the changes of source tables efficiently. We first propose an overall framework that processes queries over horizontal views transformed from source tables in a vertical form. Under the proposed framework, we propagate the change of vertical tables to the corresponding horizontal views. In order to execute this view maintenance process efficiently, we keep every change of vertical tables in a differential file and then modify the horizontal views with the differential file. Because the differential file is represented as a vertical form, its tuples should be converted to those in a horizontal form to apply them to the out-of-date horizontal view. With this mechanism, horizontal views can be efficiently refreshed with the changes in a differential file without accessing source tables. Experimental results show that the proposed method improves average performance by 1.2$\sim$5.0 times over the existing methods.

• Journal of Distribution Research
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.55-80
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• 2012

I. Introduction Developing the relationships between companies is very important issue to ensure a competitive advantage in today's business environment (Bleeke & Ernst 1991; Mohr & Spekman 1994; Powell 1990). Partnerships between companies are based on having same goals, pursuing mutual understanding, and having a professional level of interdependence. By having such a partnerships and cooperative efforts between companies, they will achieve efficiency and effectiveness of their business (Mohr and Spekman, 1994). However, it is difficult to expect these ideal results only in the B2B corporate transaction. According to agency theory which is the well-accepted theory in various fields of business strategy, organization, and marketing, the two independent companies have fundamentally different corporate purposes. Also there is a higher chance of developing opportunism and conflict due to natures of human(organization), such as self-interest, bounded rationality, risk aversion, and environment factor as imbalance of information (Eisenhardt 1989). That is, especially partnerships between principal(or buyer) and agent(or supplier) of companies within supply chain, the business contract itself will not provide competitive advantage. But managing partnership between companies is the key to success. Therefore, managing partnership between manufacturer and supplier, and finding causes of conflict are essential to improve B2B performance. In conclusion, based on prior researches and Agency theory, this study will clarify how business hazards cause conflicts on supply chain and then identify how developed conflicts have been managed by two control mechanisms. II. Research model III. Method In order to validate our research model, this study gathered questionnaires from small and medium sized enterprises(SMEs). In Korea, SMEs mean the firms whose employee is under 300 and capital is under 8 billion won(about 7.2 million dollar). We asked the manufacturer's perception about the relationship with the biggest supplier, and our key informants are denied to a person responsible for buying(ex)CEO, executives, managers of purchasing department, and so on). In detail, we contact by telephone to our initial sample(about 1,200 firms) and introduce our research motivation and send our questionnaires by e-mail, mail, and direct survey. Finally we received 361 data and eliminate 32 inappropriate questionnaires. We use 329 manufactures' data on analysis. The purpose of this study is to identify the anticipant role of business hazard (environmental dynamism, asset specificity) and investigate the moderating effect of control mechanism(formal control, social control) on conflict-performance relationship. To find out moderating effect of control methods, we need to compare the regression weight between low versus. high group(about level of exercised control methods). Therefore we choose the structural equation modeling method that is proper to do multi-group analysis. The data analysis is performed by AMOS 17.0 software, and model fits are good statically (CMIN/DF=1.982, p<.000, CFI=.936, IFI=.937, RMSEA=.056). IV. Result V. Discussion Results show that the higher environmental dynamism and asset specificity(on particular supplier) buyer(manufacturer) has, the more B2B conflict exists. And this conflict affect relationship quality and financial outcomes negatively. In addition, social control and formal control could weaken the negative effect of conflict on relationship quality significantly. However, unlikely to assure conflict resolution effect of control mechanisms on relationship quality, financial outcomes are changed by neither social control nor formal control. We could explain this results with the characteristics of our sample, SMEs(Small and Medium sized Enterprises). Financial outcomes of these SMEs(manufacturer or principal) are affected by their customer(usually major company) more easily than their supplier(or agent). And, in recent few years, most of companies have suffered from financial problems because of global economic recession. It means that it is hard to evaluate the contribution of supplier(agent). Therefore we also support the suggestion of Gladstein(1984), Poppo & Zenger(2002) that relational performance variable can capture the focal outcomes of relationship(exchange) better than financial performance variable. This study has some implications that it tests the sources of conflict and investigates the effect of resolution methods of B2B conflict empirically. And, especially, it finds out the significant moderating effect of formal control which past B2B management studies have ignored in Korea.