Coordinated ordering decisions for products with short lifecycle and variable selling price

The supplier–buyer coordination is an important policy in the supply chain management. The buyer in the two-echelon inventory system with regular selling season has to face the uncertainty of customer demand, supplier’s delivery time and variable price change. At the same time, the supplier has to consider the inventory holding and delay cost. The objective of this study is to develop an integrated supply chain strategy for products with short lifecycle and variable selling price to entice cooperation. The strategy must provide a win–win situation for both the supplier and the buyer. A numerical case example, sensitivity analysis and compensation mechanism are given to illustrate the model.     

Design of BOM configuration for reducing spare parts logistic costs

This paper proposes an approach to reduce the total operational cost of a spare part logistic system by appropriately designing the BOM (bill of material) configuration. A spare part may have several vendors. Parts supplied by different vendors may vary in failure rates and prices – the higher the failure rate, the lower the price. Selecting vendors for spare parts is therefore a trade-off decision. Consider a machine where the BOM is composed of s critical parts and each part has k vendors. The number of possible BOM configurations for the machine is then k^s. For each BOM configuration, we can use OPUS10 (proprietary software) to calculate an optimum inventory policy and its associated total logistic cost. Exhaustively searching the solution space by OPUS10 can yield an optimal BOM configuration; however, it may be formidably time-consuming. To remedy the time-consuming problem, this research proposes a GA-neural network approach to solve the BOM configuration design problem. A neural network is developed to efficiently emulate the function of OPUS10 and a GA (genetic algorithm) is developed to quickly find a near-optimal BOM configuration. Experiment results indicate that the approach can obtain an effective BOM configuration efficiently.     

A Fuzzy Ontological Knowledge Document Clustering Methodology

This correspondence presents a novel hierarchical clustering approach for knowledge document self-organization, particularly for patent analysis. Current keyword-based methodologies for document content management tend to be inconsistent and ineffective when partial meanings of the technical content are used for cluster analysis. Thus, a new methodology to automatically interpret and cluster knowledge documents using an ontology schema is presented. Moreover, a fuzzy logic control approach is used to match suitable document cluster(s) for given patents based on their derived ontological semantic webs. Finally, three case studies are used to test the approach. The first test case analyzed and clustered 100 patents for chemical and mechanical polishing retrieved from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The second test case analyzed and clustered 100 patent news articles retrieved from online Web sites. The third case analyzed and clustered 100 patents for radio-frequency identification retrieved from WIPO. The results show that the fuzzy ontology-based document clustering approach outperforms the K-means approach in precision, recall, F-measure, and Shannon's entropy.     

Tennessee's failed managed care program for mental health and substance abuse services

In July 1996, Tennessee initiated a managed mental health and substance abuse program called TennCare Partners. This publicly funded "carve-out" experiment started chaotically and soon deteriorated into a crisis. Many patients did not receive care or lost continuity of care, and the traditional "safety net" mental health system nearly disintegrated. This qualitative case study sought to ascertain the impact of the TennCare Partners program. It points out that the program's difficulties stemmed directly from a flawed design that spread funds previously earmarked for severely mentally ill patients across the entire Medicaid population. States contemplating similar reforms should strive to protect vulnerable patients by risk-adjusting capitation payments and by focusing resources on care for severely mentally ill persons. States should also minimize program complexity and ensure the accountability of managed care networks for their patients' behavioral health care needs.     

Protein kinase C modulates estrogen receptors in differentiated osteoblastic cells in vitro

Ventriculo-peritoneal shunts (VPS) are the most frequent operative procedures used to treat hydrocephalic children. Abdominal complications of VPS are now a rare event; however, their frequency varies from 5% to 47% according to reports. Anything that causes an obstruction or impediment of the VP derivation system will lead to intracranial hypertension, which requires immediate surgery. From 1985 to 1995 at the Division of Pediatric Surgery of the Federico II University of Naples, ten laparoscopies were performed in ten children with VPS complications. Cerebrospinal fluid pseudocysts were found in four infants. There was one case of abdominal wall perforation by the tip of the catheter at the umbilical level, two bowel obstructions, and one catheter was lost in the abdominal cavity. Finally, two children had malfunctioning of the peritoneal limb of the catheter. The laparoscopic technique was curative in all ten cases, thus avoiding a conventional laparotomy and the consequent risk of adhesions, which could cause further complications.     

Polarization-Dependent Periodic Pulse Oscillation in a Diode-Laser-Pumped and Intracavity Frequency-Doubled Nd:YVO 4 Laser

We demonstrate that two cross-polarized longitudinal modes can have 50% higher conversion efficiency than two parallel-polarized longitudinal modes in a diode-laser-pumped and intracavity frequency-doubled Nd:YVO(4) laser when operated under periodic pulse oscillation. Through simulations of the rate equations for primary frequency intensities and gains, we also verify that this effect can be attributed to gain competition and complementary conversion coefficient between second-harmonic and sum-frequency generations.     

Single- and dual-ion-beam sputter deposition of titanium oxide films

The optical properties and the surface morphologies of single-ion-beam sputtering (SIBS) and dual-ion-beam sputtering (DIBS) depositions of titanium oxide films are investigated and compared. In the DIBS process, the ion-assisted deposition by the voltage of a low ion beam ranged from 50 to 300 V at a 0% and 44% oxygen percentage. Cosputtering with materials of Si, SiO(2) (fused silica), and Al is also utilized in SIBS to improve amorphous-structure film. For the low-absorption and surface-roughness film, the optimum deposition condition of DIBS and postdeposition baking temperature for SIBS and DIBS are essential to the process.     

Independent spanning trees vs. edge-disjoint spanning trees in locally twisted cubes

Fault-tolerant broadcasting and secure message distribution are important issues for numerous applications in networks. It is a common idea to design multiple spanning trees with a specific property in the underlying graph of a network to serve as a broadcasting scheme or a distribution protocol for receiving high levels of fault-tolerance and of security. A set of spanning trees in a graph is said to be edge-disjoint if these trees are rooted at the same node without sharing any common edge. Hsieh and Tu [S.-Y. Hsieh, C.-J. Tu, Constructing edge-disjoint spanning trees in locally twisted cubes, Theoretical Computer Science 410 (2009) 926-932] recently presented an algorithm for constructing n edge-disjoint spanning trees in an n-dimensional locally twisted cube. In this paper, we prove that indeed all spanning trees constructed by their algorithm are independent, i.e., any two spanning trees are rooted at the same node, say r, and for any other node v≠r, the two different paths from v to r, one path in each tree, are internally node-disjoint.     

Local contrast enhancement and adaptive feature extraction for illumination-invariant face recognition

Recognizing human faces in various lighting conditions is quite a difficult problem. The problem becomes more difficult when face images are taken in extremely high dynamic range scenes. Most of the automatic face recognition systems assume that images are taken under well-controlled illumination. The face segmentation as well as recognition becomes much simpler under such a constrained condition. However, illumination control is not feasible when a surveillance system is installed in any location at will. Without compensating for uneven illumination, it is impossible to get a satisfactory recognition rate. In this paper, we propose an integrated system that first compensates uneven illumination through local contrast enhancement. Then the enhanced images are fed into a robust face recognition system which adaptively selects the most important features among all candidate features and performs classification by support vector machines (SVMs). The dimension of feature space as well as the selected types of features is customized for each hyperplane. Three face image databases, namely Yale, Yale Group B, and Extended Yale Group B, are used to evaluate performance. The experimental result shows that the proposed recognition system give superior results compared to recently published literatures.