An intelligent adaptive system for the optimal variable selections of R&D and quality supply chains

The cost of research & development (R&D) and quality management are always regarded as two major parts of total cost. The variable performance of R&D and quality design is an important index that will reflect the effectiveness of the cost reduction. This research has attempted to simultaneously vary all of the variables to achieve the global optimum for the optimal variable selections of R&D and quality design. Genetic algorithm (GA) can treat all of the variables for the global search. In this study, fuzzy refinement with orthogonal arrays was effective in improving the performance of the GA, and also showed the benefits of a good chromosome structure on the behavior of GA. It is also proposed the postponement design with temporal concept, to select the effective variables for the cost reduction of R&D and quality management design. The experimental results showed that tempo-postponement design will increase the flexibility and quick response for supply chain management. Hence, this approach can act as a useful guideline for researchers working on the optimization of the key variable selections for R&D and quality model design.     

R&D project evaluation model based on fuzzy set priority

Most of the conventional concepts used by the R&D project evaluation models do not seem to be appropriate for modeling the imprecision R&D project evaluation. This paper is concerned with the project evaluation by aggregating the multiple rank-ordered sets based on fuzzy set priority. First the rank-ordered priority lists of the R&D projects were determined based on the majority-rule methods, then the aggregate fuzzy set rank order was computed and compared with the others. Finally, we have developed a systemic and practical program suitable for a simple and easy calculation of all the algorithms. It was found that our model was validated by the comparative computations in various R&D project examples.     

OSI implementations in Korea

Research and development on OSI became a key issue in many Korean R&D projects related to computer, telecommunications and services. The Korean computer and communications industry also finds their possible area of expansion through OSI-compatible products. But claiming OSI as the future direction in Korea at the national/government level is not near. This short paper presents various present and future R&D projects on OSI in Korea. These include ISDN, LAN, Videotex, Teletex, protocol testing, mixed mode terminal, network architecture etc.     

Progress on standardizing OSI conformance testing

International standards for Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) services and protocols are well advanced. Complementary standardization work has begun for testing conformance of products to OSI protocol standards. This is drawing on about 7 years R&D work on techniques and tools for testing protocol implementations. This paper presents the major aspects of the testing methodology and framework being standardized by ISO and CCITT. It relates some of the ideas to the work done in the R&D community and identifies the main topics on which further work is needed.     

A heuristic program for reliability and maintainability allocation in complex hierachical systems

A new and computationally efficient heuristic algorithm is developed for reliability and maintainability (R&M) allocation in complex hierarchical systems (CHS). This approach has advantage over other available methods in that mean-time-to repair (MTTR) and other R&M parameters are estimated at the component level before desing. The R&M allocation is achieved by decomposing the system R&M state space into a hierarchy of subsystems and reformulating the problem as a reliability network equivalent.     

Manufacturing technology in Korea

This article describes a general overview of industry development, present status and future perspectives of manufacturing technology in Korea. The Advanced Manufacturing System project, which is one of the national R&D projects in manufacturing technology, is introduced. The problems for the future development of manufacturing technology in Korea is discussed.     

An estimation model for completion times considering the time interval between interdependent R&D events

Cross Impact Analysis(CIA) as a means of technological forecasting has a critical weakness in that it does not reflect the time impact on forecast events.

The objective of this research is to modify the current Cross Impact Analysis and to develop a new model which estimates the impact of time on the completion of R&D events when the interdependency between the events are considered.     

A computer-based model for system level reliability and maintainability allocation

This paper describes computer-based heuristic models for Reliability and Maintainability (R&M) allocation for large systems. The model is an embellishment to the Maintenance Allocation Program (MAP) developed at McDonnell Douglas Corporation. The new version of MAP known as REMAP (Reliability Embellished MAP) is a decision support tool for contractors who are involved in large scale design projects such as aircraft design. The REMAP allows the user to give preliminary R&M information about the system. The REMAP gives “what if” changes on the requirements required to meet the desired design reliability specification.     

Targets and results from phase one and two of the fifth generation computer systems study

This article presents an introduction to the fifth generation computer systems.

Fifth generation computers are under development to meet the knowledge information processing needs for the advanced information-oriented society of the 1990s. This clearly requires overcoming the technical limitations of conventional computers. A fifth generation computer requires problem solving and inference functions for inference of solutions to problems from accumulated knowledge, knowledge base management functions for acquirement and retrieval of knowledge, intelligent interface functions for fluent conversations using natural language, drawings, images, etc., and intelligent programming functions for automatic conversion of problem specifications submitted in natural language, drawing etc., into efficient programs.

Fifth generation computers with these functions will have far-reaching impact finding applications in all areas of industry and society. However, research and development (R&D) of these computers requires an extremely wide variety of leading-edge technology, and the risks are high. Accordingly, a long-term R&D plan was established for this project that extends over ten years with the initial stage lasting from 1982 to 1984, the intermediate stage from 1985 to 1988, and the final stage will begin in 1989 and the project will end in 1991.     

A matrix approach for telecommunications technology selection

Global competitive environment in telecommunications requires that the current R&D project selection process should be changed. This paper argues that quality function deployment(QFD) matrix that has been successfully used for drawing technologies from customer needs can be applied to the selection of telecommunications technologies. It describes the selection process by successive matrix handling. The steps to draw technology priority are detailed. Nominal measures, such as current company rating, competitor's ratings, planned level, improvement ratio, that are used for prioritizing customer needs in QFD matrix, cannot be directly applied to telecommunications. Instead, several new measures are devised to prioritize telecommunications services and to develop competitive benchmarks.     

A life-cycle cost viewpoint of software maintainability

The dynamic and ever-changing characteristics of software requirements make life-cycle costs for today's software very expensive. The cost of post-operational maintenance and modification often exceeds the original development cost. Software which is easily modifiable is not built naturally; it must be carefully contracted for and the development of modifiable software, its support tools and its documentation, must be judiciously managed and tested. However, without resorting to technological innovation of R&D investment, there is much that can be done well within today's state-of-the-art to accommodate significant life-cycle cost savings provided that the acquisition agencies understand the issues and are willing to spend the required time and effort (money) during the software development phase. In this paper we propose a procedure-based approach to software engineering of modifiability by discussing a number of important issues such as contracting for modifiability; techniques for building modifiability into software; planning for post-delivery test facilities and support tools; software maintenance documentation; planning and review to assure that the product evolved support modifiability.     

A cooperative multi-agent platform for invention based on patent document analysis and ontology

We propose a cooperative multi-agent platform to support the invention process based on the patent document analysis. It helps industrial knowledge managers to retrieve and analyze existing patent documents and extract structure information from patents with the aid of ontology and natural language processing techniques. It allows the invention process to be carried out through the cooperation and coordination among software agents delegated by the various domain experts in the complex industrial R&D environment. Furthermore, it integrates the patent document analysis with the inventive problem solving method known as TRIZ method that can suggest invention directions based on the heuristics or principles to resolve the contradictions among design objectives and engineering parameters. We chose the patent invention for chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) as our case study. However, the platform and techniques could be extended to most cooperative invention domains.     

On the application of CAD technology for the synthesis of spatial revolute–revolute dyads

This work presents a method based on Computer Aided Design or CAD for facilitating the synthesis of Revolute–Revolute (R–R) dyads with adjustable moving pivots. The CAD-based method presented in this work ensures that all prescribed rigid-body parameters used to synthesize the R–R dyad satisfy particular kinematic requirements of an R–R dyad. Through the application of this CAD method, five of the six general R–R dyad constraint equations are satisfied and therefore not essential for the synthesis of the R–R dyad. By reducing the number of dyad design constraints from six to one, the user can synthesize R–R links with adjustable moving pivots for multi-phase motion and path generation applications. The example included demonstrates the use of the CAD method in the synthesis of an RRSS path generator with adjustable moving pivots.     

DeNews-A personalized news system

Many commercial systems and much R&D work are aimed at easing the information explosion problem resulting from the advent of the Information Superhighway. One solution is to personalize the information to the specific interests of a user. A personalized news system named DeNews has been developed to track multilingual news sources, filter the relevant news articles, learn about the users's interests, sort news articles into defined classes, deliver them in full or summarized form, and translate them to a specific language. Many advanced text and natural language processing techniques are required to implement these functions and to facilitate the multilingual aspect of DeNews and the overall management of the huge amount of news articles. It is envisaged that the technology developed with DeNews will be especially suitable in a domain-specific corporate business environment, where accurate and timely information is critical.     

Evaluating the user-centredness of development organisations: conclusions and implications from empirical usability capability maturity assessments

Improving the position and effectiveness of user-centred design, UCD, in software and product development is a challenge in many companies. One step towards improvements is to carry out a usability capability maturity, UCM, assessment to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of a development organisation in user-centred design. This article reports the lessons learnt from 11 empirical UCM assessments of R&D groups of Nokia, a software house, an SME, and a research institute in Finland. The first assessments were carried out using a standard process assessment model (a pre-version of ISO 18529); the last assessments were carried out using a new KESSU model that evolved during the research. It was found that the assessment model, its interpretation, and the viewpoints of the assessment team have a critical role in the success of assessments. In addition, it was found that the customers have different purposes for assessments and those purposes have an effect on how one should conduct the assessment—or whether to conduct it at all.     

Applying case-based reasoning for product configuration in mass customization environments

Product variation and customization is a trend in current market-oriented manufacturing environment. Companies produce products in order to satisfy customer's needs. In the customization environment, the R&D sector in an enterprise should be able to offer differentiation in product selection after they take the order. Such product differentiation should meet the requirement of cost and manufacturing procedure. In the light of this, how to generate an accurate bill of material (BOM) that meets the customer's needs and gets ready for the production is an important issue in the intensely competitive market.

The purpose of this study is to reduce effectively the time and cost of design under the premise to manufacture an accurate new product. In this study, the Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) algorithm was used to construct the new BOM. Retrieving previous cases that resemble the current problem can save a lot of time in figuring out the problem and offer a correct direction for designers. When solving a new problem, CBR technique can quickly help generate a right BOM that fits the present situation.     

Structure clustering for Chinese patent documents

This paper aims to cluster Chinese patent documents with the structures. Both the explicit and implicit structures are analyzed to represent by the proposed structure expression. Accordingly, an unsupervised clustering algorithm called structured self-organizing map (SOM) is adopted to cluster Chinese patent documents with both similar content and structure. Structured SOM clusters the similar content of each sub-part structure, and then propagates the similarity to upper level ones. Experimental result showed the maps size and number of patents are proportional to the computing time, which implies the width and depth of structure affects the performance of structured SOM. Structured clustering of patents is helpful in many applications. In the lawsuit of copyright, companies are easy to find claim conflict in the existent patents to contradict the accusation. Moreover, decision-maker of a company can be advised to avoid hot-spot aspects of patents, which can save a lot of R&D effort.     

Invited Paper: Super Hi‐Vision projection display for next‐generation TV

Abstract— For future broadcasting, NHK is studying new video services offering very‐high‐picture quality achieved through Super Hi‐Vision. Toward that aim, a projection display that has a resolution equivalent to 7680 × 4320 pixels by using four 4096 × 2160 D‐ILA? panels has been developed. The display requires precise convergence adjustment because it consists of two projection units, so an automatic adjustment system was developed. Although the pixel number of the digital camera used is less than that of the display, a 0.2‐pixel accuracy was obtained. This report introduces theaters that use this display as an example of applying the Super Hi‐Vision video system.     

Welfare analysis of alternative patent policies for software innovations

We present a duopoly model that extends existing patent policy design models in the economics literature to formalize the links among the patent policy levers set by public policy (patent height and width), the strategic decisions made by firms (R&D investments, product development, product imitation, patent decision, and product pricing), the purchasing decisions made by consumers, and the market parameters. This integrated model enables policymakers to better analyze the impact of alternative patent policies on the level of social welfare and the distribution of that welfare among innovators, imitators, and consumers in a range of industry contexts—specifically targeting issues of software patents. Critical results include (1) an increase in patent width unambiguously increases R&D spending to generate a novel idea; (2) an increase in patent height may increase or decrease R&D spending depending on the efficiency with which an innovator can transform the novel idea into a commercial product; (3) while enforced patents will improve innovator profits they may worsen imitator profits, consumer welfare, or both and may even worsen total social welfare; (4) the optimal (social welfare maximizing) policy design is characterized by a relatively high patent height and moderate patent width.     

A computerized quality function deployment approach for retail services

Product and service quality can only be effectively improved when the most important needs of customers are satisfied. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is an approach used to guide R&D, manufacturing, and management toward the development of products and services that satisfy the needs of consumers. The QFD operations are performed by way of a diagram called the House of Quality (HOQ). The HOQ contains information about the customers' needs (what), mechanisms to address these needs (how), and the criterion for deciding which “what” is the most important and which “how” provides the greatest customer satisfaction. A less familiar application of QFD is for the improvement of retail services. When QFD is applied to retail services, a computerized HOQ approach becomes integral to the process for providing continuous, iterative quality improvement. The objective of this research is to develop a formal QFD methodology for the retail industry and to build a computerized retail QFD system. The system provides a HOQ architecture for specifying and analyzing the customers' needs, deriving improvement strategies, and formalizing records of progress. Furthermore, two ranking methods that apply customer satisfaction theory are used to assist managers improve retail services. This system provides an integrated workbench for building retail HOQs and designing retail service strategies.