Competitive performance improvement by operational budget allocation using ANFIS and fuzzy quality function deployment: a case study

A budget is a detailed and comprehensive plan estimated to use a company’s resources over a specific period, and a primary purpose of budget allocation is to drive all activities towards organizational goals. But it seems, often, there is no logical and coherent relationship between overall objectives and action plans. This paper has drawn a consistent relationship between an organization's strategic plans to operational budgeting in a competitive environment. According to the step-by-step model proposed in this article, a strategic plan’s importance considers the main competitors of the market as an external environment factor and a balanced scorecard factors as an internal environment. Both are calculated by an artificial neuro-fuzzy inference systems approach to outshine competing companies. Then, sub-progress must be hierarchically determined in specific plans. In passing, a fuzzy quality function deployment method translates a strategic plan’s weight to detailed task importance (as the smallest component of an operational program) at the mercy of four houses of a quality matrix. An operational budget is allocated to programs for propagating strategic plans in a competitive environment. Finally, a case study in an automobile industry is presented and discussed to illustrate the application of the developed pattern.     

Identifying cylinder liner wear using precise coordinate measurements

This paper aims at exploiting the accurate precise measurements of CMM machine in exploring and investigating the wear happening between contacting solid surfaces. For instance, excessive wear, if detected by the CMM measurements, in a cylinder bore of an internal combustion engine can dramatically affect its performance quality, sealing function, scheme of lubrication, and eventually its service life span. In such case, the finger print would be the original design GD&T tolerances. Widely spread availability of CMM machines at a reasonable cost may make the applicability of this novel technique of wear detection feasible. In this work, precise and accurate measurements of deviations in roundness, straightness, and concentricity in a cylinder bore of an air cooled Automotive Diesel Engine dismantled for an overhaul using a CMM machine have been executed and analyzed to validate this technique. Thus, the results have been presented, discussed, analyzed and interpreted in order to evaluate the status of the engine during operation. Locations of remarkable deviations representing aggressive wear happenings in the cylinder bore are detected and investigated. The measurements, within the limits of uncertainty attributes, could reflect the performance quality of the engine, the suitability of the applied scheduled maintenance plan, and may also point at possible adverse operating conditions contributed to this wear. In the light of the findings, recommendations may thus be drawn and offered to the engine designer to improve his design. For instance, surface treatments and coatings could be preferably changed, or an innovative constructional modification may be suggested to homogenize the wear occurrence in the cylinder bore during operation. This may extend the operating life span of the cylinder and in turn reduces the maintenance expenses. This novel technique for the wear development recalling proved to be successful and reliable tool to diagnose the root causes of the wear aggression occurrence.     

Fleet management models and algorithms for an oil-tanker routing and scheduling problem

This paper explores models and algorithms for routing and scheduling ships in a maritime transportation system. The principal thrust of this research effort is focused on the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC) Problem. This problem is of great economic significance to the State of Kuwait, whose economy has been traditionally dominated to a large extent by the oil sector, and any enhancement in the existing ad-hoc scheduling procedure has the potential for significant savings. A mixed-integer programming model for the KPC problem is constructed in this paper. The resulting mathematical formulation is rather complex to solve due to the integrality conditions and the overwhelming size of the problem for a typical demand contract scenario. Consequently, an alternate aggregate model that retains the principal features of the KPC problem is formulated. The latter model is computationally far more tractable than the initial model, and a specialized rolling horizon heuristic is developed no solve it. The proposed heuristic procedure enables us to derive solutions for practical sized problems that could not be handled by directly solving even the aggregate model. The initial formulation is solved using CPLEX-4.0-MIP capabilities for a number of relatively small-sized test cases, whereas for larger problem instances, the aggregate formulation is solved using CPLEX-4.0-MIP in concert with the developed rolling horizon heuristic, and related results are reported. An ad-hoc routing procedure that is intended to simulate the current KPC scheduling practice is also described and implemented. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach substantially improves upon the results obtained using the current scheduling practice at KPC.     

A new fuzzy adaptive particle swarm optimization for non-smooth economic dispatch

This paper proposes a novel method for solving the Non-convex Economic Dispatch (NED) problems, by the Fuzzy Adaptive Modified Particle Swarm Optimization (FAMPSO). Practical ED problems have non-smooth cost functions with equality and inequality constraints when generator valve-point loading effects are taken into account. Modern heuristic optimization techniques have been given much attention by many researchers due to their ability to find an almost global optimal solution for ED problems. PSO is one of modern heuristic algorithms, in which particles change place to get close to the best position and find the global minimum point. However, the classic PSO may converge to a local optimum solution and the performance of the PSO highly depends on the internal parameters. To overcome these drawbacks, in this paper, a new mutation is proposed to improve the global searching capability and prevent the convergence to local minima. Also, a fuzzy system is used to tune its parameters such as inertia weight and learning factors.     

Microwave synthesis and spectroscopic studies of some complex compounds as pigments and their applications in paints

Metal complex pigments have been widely used for various applications such as pigments in coatings. This work presents the use of microwave technique (Green chemistry) for the synthesis of new copper(II), nickel(II), iron(III), and chromium(III) Schiff base complexes derived from metal salts and Schiff base ligand. Also, the microwave technique was used in the synthesis of Schiff base ligand which is derived from selected amine, namely methoxy-tolidine, and selected aldehyde, namely 2-hydroxynaphthaldehyde. The prepared ligand and metal complex pigments were characterized by elemental analysis, NMR, spectral UV–Vis, infrared, and thermal gravimetric analysis. The physical and mechanical properties and corrosion resistance of dry paint films were also examined. The obtained results revealed that the prepared metal complex pigments showed excellent mechanical and corrosion resistance.     

Computation of surface radiation and natural convection in a heated horticultural greenhouse

This study analyses the effects of the radiation exchange inside a horticultural greenhouse, under winter climatic conditions, according to the number of squared heating tubes used. These ones, hot and isothermal, are equidistant inside the greenhouse volume. The governing differential equations are discretized using a finite volume method and the coupling pressure–velocity problem is carried out by the SIMPLER algorithm. The algebraic systems obtained are solved by a conjugate gradient method. Results are reported in terms of isotherms, streamlines and average Nusselt number for Rayleigh number of 10³–10⁶. The contour lines show that the radiative effects are noted near the solid surfaces, and become increasingly important when the Rayleigh number increases. As a result, the rise in the value of Rayleigh number leads to an increase of the overall heat transfer within the greenhouse.     

Rain attenuation model for south east asia countries

A model for predicting rain attenuation on Earth-to-space is developed by using the measured data obtained from tropical and equatorial regions that was revised from the ITU model. The proposed rain attenuation model uses the complete rainfall rate cumulative distribution as input data. It is shown that significant improvements in terms of prediction error over existing attenuation models are obtained     

Effect of wax inhibitors on pour point and rheological properties of Iranian waxy crude oil

A variety of techniques have been employed in order to reduce problems caused by the crystallization of paraffin during the production and/or transportation of waxy crude oil. Flow improvers are used extensively to increase the mobility of crude oil. In this study, the influence of the ethylene-vinyl acetate copolymer (EVA), as flow improver, with different ranges of molecular weight on the viscosity and pour point of five Iranian waxy crude oils was evaluated. Five types of Iranian waxy crude oil were selected based on their similar wax (> 10%) but different asphaltene contents. Also, the effect of asphaltene content on the performance of this flow improver was studied. The rheological behavior of these crude oils, with middle range API gravity, in the absence/presence of flow improver was studied. The rheological data cover the temperature range of 5 to 40 °C. The results indicated that the performance of flow improver was dependent on the molecular weight and the asphaltene content. For crude oil with low asphaltene, higher molecular weight flow improvers are the best additive and lower molecular weight flow improvers showed good efficiency for crude oil with high asphaltene content. Addition of small quantities of asphaltene solvents such as xylene (1 wt.%), alone or in combination with flow improver, can improve viscosity of crude oil with high asphaltene content.