Design for manufacture and design for ‘X’: concepts,applications, and perspectives

The implementations of design for assembly and design for manufacture (DFM) led to enormous benefits including simplification of products, reduction of assembly and manufacturing costs, improvement of quality, and reduction of time to market. More recently, environmental concerns required that disassembly and recycling issues should be considered during the design stages. The effort to reduce total life-cycle costs for a product through design innovation is becoming an essential part of the current manufacturing industry. Therefore, researchers begin to focus their attention on design for environment, design for recyclability, design for life-cycle (DFLC), etc. These studies are sometimes referred to as Design for X (DFX). Since the late 1990s, hundreds of papers have been published pertaining to DFX applications in manufacturing. Most of them are widely distributed over many different disciplines and publications. This makes it very difficult for one to locate all the information necessary for the application of DFX in manufacturing. A paper that can help researchers and practitioners applying this emerging technology is highly desirable. The objective of this paper is to present the concepts, applications, and perspectives of ‘DFX’ in manufacturing, thus providing some guidelines and references for future research and implementation.     

Phase-variable canonical forms for linear,multi-input,multi-output systems†

Three types of system equivalent relations are introduced to unify existing definitions of system equivalence. Called α-, β- and γ-equivalence, their characteristics are examined mathematically and physically. Based on those definitions, two phase-variable canonical forma are developed for linear, multi-input, multi-output systems, resulting in a canonical form for control and a canonical form for observation. It is shown that a characteristic quantity called a stage sequence can be defined for a given system to uniquely determine its equivalent system in the canonical forms. The compact structures of these canonical forms are convenient representations of the mathematical and physical compositions of systems and for subsequent system analyses.     

Minimal-time,minimal-order observers for discrete systems†

Necessary and sufficient conditions are derived for the existence of observers for discrete-time, multivariable systems with inaccessible disturbance inputs. A design method for minimal-time, minimal-order observers based on realization theory is proposed. Lower and upper bounds for the minimal-order observer are also derived. A simulation study is included to illustrate application of the design method and to evaluate the performance of the observer.     

ERP 2.0, what for and how?

The poor level of adoption of ERP systems is often considered as linked to a loss of social interactions between users of the ERP, together with the poor adaptability of these huge systems to local needs. Web 2.0 tools (including among others social networks, wikis, mashups and tags) aim at allowing a better interaction between a user and an Internet site, or between communities of users by means of a Web site. Using these tools in an industrial context appears now as a possible solution for addressing some of the problems of present information systems, and especially ERPs. Examples of such integration of Web 2.0 technologies in industrial practices are analyzed and the empiricism with which these experiences are usually conducted is underlined. In order to address this problem, we suggest a step-by-step method allowing to identify on which business processes performed by an ERP the Web 2.0 tools could be of interest, and investigate how to integrate the two worlds. This approach is illustrated on the SAP product Business By Design, which new version includes a set of configurable Web 2.0 tools.     

UNDO, An Aid for Explorative Learning?

New users of an application system,especially computer novices,can become confused and frustrated after experiencing the first,perhaps not recoverable error situations during the early stages of exploration and learning.System facilities,which let users UNO and REDO executed commands,are suggested to be and aid for active learning and can be used as a method for systematic exploration through recovering from unknown and newly explored (perhapw wrong)system states by cancelling executed commands with UNDO.An explorative learning experiment on a commercial graphics editor with a modified user interface revealed reasons.why one-step recall UNDO does not guarantee successful explorative learning of a comples connitive skill such as graphics editing on computer.     

Construction of XVCS for (k,n,t)∗ access structure

XOR-based Visual Cryptography System (XVCS) is developed to achieve high contrast and good resolution of the recovered secret image. In general (k,n) VCS, the secret image can be visualized only if k or more than k shares are stacked together. In (k,n,t)^? access structure, t number of participants are considered as the essential participants(t ≤ k ≤ n) whose shares are absolutely necessary to reconstruct the secret image. Several methods have been already proposed for the construction of (k,n)^? VCS for black and white images. The major focus of this work is to design an XVCS for (k,n,t)^? access structure for both black and white images and color images with maximum contrast. The experimental outcome shows that the proposed method has better results than other techniques proposed so far. Also, numerical examples are provided for (k,n,t)^? XVCS for t =?1 and 2. The XVCS designed for (k,n,t)^? access structure can be used for any real time application and is demonstrated with an example of user authentication in banking system.

     

Office for iOS,你该如何抉择?

很久以来,苹果的iOS智能终端虽然受到众多消费者的追捧,但其办公能力却饱受质疑。不过,现在Office for iPad总算是来了,你是否真需要将微软Office移动版装进你的iPad或iPhone,以便外出时也能轻松访问Word、Excel和Powerpoint等文档呢?面向iPad的微软Office移动版在难产许久之后终于在3月27日上线了,为苹果iPad带来了正宗的微软Office程序套件:Word、Excel和Powerpoint。除了微软在2013年就已针对iOS开发的iPad程序套件(如OneNote、Lync之类的),现在主力内容也终于补上了。     

The NIST 2008 Metrics for machine translation challenge—overview, methodology, metrics, and results

This paper discusses the evaluation of automated metrics developed for the purpose of evaluating machine translation (MT) technology. A general discussion of the usefulness of automated metrics is offered. The NIST MetricsMATR evaluation of MT metrology is described, including its objectives, protocols, participants, and test data. The methodology employed to evaluate the submitted metrics is reviewed. A summary is provided for the general classes of evaluated metrics. Overall results of this evaluation are presented, primarily by means of correlation statistics, showing the degree of agreement between the automated metric scores and the scores of human judgments. Metrics are analyzed at the sentence, document, and system level with results conditioned by various properties of the test data. This paper concludes with some perspective on the improvements that should be incorporated into future evaluations of metrics for MT evaluation.     

IT Challenges for the New Millennium – Research, Development, and Deployment Issues

Introduction

IT Challenges for the New Millennium – Research, Development, and Deployment Issues     

Matrix representations,linear transformations,and kernels for disambiguation in natural language

In the application of machine learning methods with natural language inputs, the words and their positions in the input text are some of the most important features. In this article, we introduce a framework based on a word-position matrix representation of text, linear feature transformations of the word-position matrices, and kernel functions constructed from the transformations. We consider two categories of transformations, one based on word similarities and the second on their positions, which can be applied simultaneously in the framework in an elegant way. We show how word and positional similarities obtained by applying previously proposed techniques, such as latent semantic analysis, can be incorporated as transformations in the framework. We also introduce novel ways to determine word and positional similarities. We further present efficient algorithms for computing kernel functions incorporating the transformations on the word-position matrices, and, more importantly, introduce a highly efficient method for prediction. The framework is particularly suitable to natural language disambiguation tasks where the aim is to select for a single word a particular property from a set of candidates based on the context of the word. We demonstrate the applicability of the framework to this type of tasks using context-sensitive spelling error correction on the Reuters News corpus as a model problem.     

Partial Differential Equations for Zooming,Deinterlacing and Dejittering

In this paper, for imaging applications, we introduce partial differential equations (PDEs), which allow for correcting displacement errors, for dejittering, and for deinterlacing, respectively, in multi-channel data. These equations are derived via semi-groups for non-convex energy functionals. As a particular example, for gray valued data, we find the mean curvature equation and the corresponding non-convex energy functional. As a further application for correction of displacement errors we study image interpolation, in particular zooming, of digital color images. For actual image zooming, the solutions of the proposed PDEs are projected onto a space of functions satisfying interpolation constraints. A comparison of the test results with standard and state-of-the-art interpolation algorithms shows the competitiveness of this approach.     

Good for learning,bad for motivation? A meta-analysis on the effects of computer-supported collaboration scripts

International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning - Scripting computer-supported collaborative learning has been shown to greatly enhance learning, but is often criticized for...     

WI – Call for Papers,Heft 5/2010, Konstruktionsforschung in der Wirtschaftsinformatik

Ohne Zusammenfassung This article is also available in English via and : Winter R, Baskerville R (2009) BISE – Call for Papers, Issue 5/2010, Science of Business and Information Systems Engineering. Bus Inf Syst Eng. doi: 10.1007/s12599-009-0047-2.     

Authentication and authorization infrastructure for Grids—issues,technologies, trends and experiences

Authentication and authorization for Grids is a challenging security issue. In this paper, key issues for the establishment of Grid authentication and authorization infrastructures are discussed, and an overview of major Grid authentication and authorization technologies is presented. Related to this, recent developments in Grid authentication and authorization infrastructures suggest adoption of the Shibboleth technology which offers advantages in terms of usability, confidentiality, scalability and manageability. When combined with advanced authorization technologies, Shibboleth-based authentication and authorization infrastructures provide role-based, fine-grained authorization. We share our experience in constructing a Shibboleth-based authentication and authorization infrastructure and believe that such infrastructure provides a promising solution for the security of many application domains.     

Reengineering Assembly, Warehouse and Billing Processes, for Electronic Commerce Using “Merge-in-Transit”

This paper investigates merge-in-transit as an approach to reengineering assembly, warehouse and billing processes for electronic commerce. Merge-in-transit is defined and some examples are given to illustrate its use. Processes necessary to accomplish merge-in-transit are developed, while advantages and disadvantages of merge-in-transit are studied. Additional issues arising from merge-in-transit also are studied: Merge-in-transit software is discussed; new measures necessary for merge-in-transit are examined; the effects of merge-in-transit on others in the current supply chain are also examined.