Service quality and ERP implementation: A conceptual and empirical study of semiconductor-related industries in Taiwan

This paper examines the effectiveness of the implementation of enterprise resource planning (ERP) in improving service quality in the Taiwanese semiconductor industry by assessing the expectations and the perceptions of service quality from the perspectives of both upstream manufacturers and downstream customers. The study first establishes a modified service quality gap model incorporating: (i) the downstream customers’ expectations and perceptions, and (ii) the upstream manufacturers’ perceptions of the customers’ expectations and perceptions. An empirical study by questionnaire survey is then undertaken to investigate the gaps proposed in the research model. The results show that service quality gaps do exist in the Taiwanese semiconductor industry between upstream manufacturers that are implementing ERP and their downstream customers. The study shows that the proposed model provides valuable guidance to manufacturers with respect to the prevention, detection, and elimination of the demonstrated service quality gaps. The model thus helps manufacturers to evaluate the contribution of various ERP modules to improved customer satisfaction with service quality and also provides guidance on improvement strategies to enhance service quality by eliminating quality gaps.     

Performance evaluation of anti-radiation based on the gamma degradation process

In the environment of space radiation, the high-energy charged particles or high-energy photons acting on a spacecraft can cause either temporary device degradation or permanent failure. The traditional probability model is difficult to obtain reliable estimation of unit radiation resistance performance with small samples. Considering that different products will change differently after high-energy particle radiation, we construct a model based on the gamma degradation process. This model can efficiently describe the law of unit radiation resistance variation with the total radiation dose levels under the effect of the total dose and displacement damage. Finally, the proposed model is used to assess the anti-radiation performance of the N-channel power MOSFET device STRH60N20FSY3 produced by STM to obtain average unit radiation resistance, survival probability, survival function, etc.     

Effects of electrical discharge surface modification of superalloy Haynes 230 with aluminum and molybdenum on oxidation behavior

The effects of the electrical discharge alloying (EDA) process on improving the high temperature oxidation resistance of the Ni-based superalloy Haynes 230 have been investigated. The 85 at.% Al and 15 at.% Mo composite electrode provided the surface alloying materials. An Al-rich layer is produced on the surface of the EDA specimen alloyed with positive electrode polarity, whereas, many discontinuous piled layers are attached to the surface of the EDA superalloy when negative electrode polarity is selected. The oxidation resistance of the specimen alloyed with positive electrode polarity is better than that of the unalloyed superalloy, and the effective temperature of oxidation resistance of the alloyed layer can be achieved to 1100 °C. Conversely, the oxidation resistance of the other EDA specimen alloyed with negative electrode polarity is even worse than that of the unalloyed superalloy.     

Polarization discrimination between repeater false-target and radar target

High fidelity repeater false-target badly affects a radar system’s detecting, tracking, and data processing. It is an available approach of confronting false-target for radar that discriminates firstly and then eliminates. Whereas for the technique progress about the repeater false-target jam, it is more and more difficult to discriminate this jam in the time-domain, frequency-domain, or space-domain. The technique using polarization information to discriminate the target and false-target is discussed in th...     

Direct raycasting of unstructured cell-centered data by discontinuity Roe-average computation

In the field of computational fluid dynamics (CFD), the upwind finite volume method (FVM) is widely applied to solve 3D flows with discontinuity phenomena (e.g., shock waves). It produces unstructured data at the center of each cell (cell-centered data) with the flow discontinuity constraint on the inner-face between face-neighboring cells. For visualization, existing approaches with interpolation usually pre-extrapolate cell-centered data into cell-vertexed data (data values given at cell vertices) and only handle cell-vertexed data during actual rendering, which unconsciously depress the rendering accuracy and violate the discontinuity constraint. In this paper, we propose a novel method to visualize cell-centered data directly avoiding extrapolation and keep the discontinuity in the rendering data on the framework of multi-pass raycasting. During resampling, the field is reconstructed using the original cell-centered data value and the cell-gradient estimated by Green–Gauss theorem. To keep the discontinuity, we reconstruct the field at an inner-face resampled point using both the face-adjacencies and get two discontinuous field values. Then the field is obtained by computing Roe-average of the two. The analysis and experiments demonstrate that our approach gains a high-accuracy reconstruction and leads to a high-quality image.     

An observer-based approach for the projection onto a 2d-curve under movement

Standard path control laws of autonomous vehicles use the shortest distance between the vehicle’s position and the path as a control error. In order to determine this distance, the projection point onto the path needs to be determined continuously. This requires fast algorithms that feature high numerical reliability in the field of vehicle application.This paper presents two different observer-based approaches for the projection problem. The identity observer reconstructs all states of interest for path control. The second one, a reduced observer, only possesses the curve parameter as a state and calculates the other values by algebraic formulas. Both algorithms consider the continuous movement of the vehicle, the run of the curve, and work without any approximation of the curve. Furthermore, they are applicable for arbitrary parameterized smooth curves, guarantee the required numerical stability, have short calculating time, and show good statistical properties. The performance is shown in several simulations as well as under real conditions.     

Stable local dimensionality reduction approaches

Dimensionality reduction is a big challenge in many areas. A large number of local approaches, stemming from statistics or geometry, have been developed. However, in practice these local approaches are often in lack of robustness, since in contrast to maximum variance unfolding (MVU), which explicitly unfolds the manifold, they merely characterize local geometry structure. Moreover, the eigenproblems that they encounter, are hard to solve. We propose a unified framework that explicitly unfolds the manifold and reformulate local approaches as the semi-definite programs instead of the above-mentioned eigenproblems. Three well-known algorithms, locally linear embedding (LLE), laplacian eigenmaps (LE) and local tangent space alignment (LTSA) are reinterpreted and improved within this framework. Several experiments are presented to demonstrate the potential of our framework and the improvements of these local algorithms.     

Multidisciplinary design optimization of adaptive wing leading edge

Adaptive wing can significantly enhance aircraft aerodynamic performance, which refers to aerodynamic and structural opti-mization designs. This paper introduces a two-step approach to solve the interrelated problems of the adaptive leading edge. In the first step, the procedure of airfoil optimization is carried out with an initial configuration of NACA 0006. On the basis of the combination of design of experiment (DOE), response surface method (RSM) and genetic algorithm (GA), an adaptive air-foil can be obtained whose lift-to-drag ratio is larger than the baseline airfoil’s at the given angle of attack and subsonic speed.The next step is to design a compliant structure to achieve the target airfoil shape, which is the optimization result of the previous step. In order to minimize the deviation of the deformed shape from the target shape, the load path representation topology method is presented. This method is developed by way of GA, with size and shape optimization incorporated in it simul-taneously. Finally, a comparison study with the Solid Isotropic Material with Penalization (SIMP) method in Altair OptiStruct is conducted, and the results demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the proposed approach.     

Cytoplasm and nucleus segmentation in cervical smear images using Radiating GVF Snake

A Radiating Gradient Vector Flow (RGVF) Snake aiming at accurate extraction of both the nucleus and cytoplasm from a single-cell cervical smear image is proposed. After preprocessing, the areas in the image are roughly clustered into nucleus, cytoplasm and the background by a spatial K-means clustering algorithm. After initial contours are extracted, the image is segmented using RGVF. RGVF involves a new edge map computation method and a stack-based refinement, and is thus robust to contaminations and can effectively locate the obscure boundaries. The boundaries can also be correctly traced even if there are interferences near the cytoplasm and nucleus regions. Experiments performed on the Herlev dataset, which contains 917 images show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.