Implementing enterprise resource planning systems: organizational performance and the duration of the implementation

This paper examines the impact of the duration of ERP implementation on firm performance both during and after implementation. Organizations choose either an accelerated implementation approach or a traditional (longer) implementation approach. The former approach gives the organization the advantage of speed, but the disadvantage of fitting its processes to that of a packaged (thus, undifferentiated from competitors) ERP. The latter approach allows the organization to redesign strategy and processes, and thus, search for ways to be unique from its competition. The study uses a regression model to capture the changes in various performance measures during and after implementation between firms that implemented the ERP, using the performance measure of a matched group of firms that did not implement an ERP as a benchmark/control sample, on the basis of the duration of the implementation. Financial data from Compustat, and data on start date and end date of ERP implementation between 1990 and 2005 for firms in the Oil and Gas industry was collected from an ERP vendor. Results show that measures such as return on sales improved after implementation. However, measures such as inventory turnover, which reflect operational benefits, improve during implementation. We find that accelerated implementation confers both operational and strategic benefits. This study highlights the strategic consequences of the different choices of implementation.     

Rendezvous based routing protocol for wireless sensor networks with mobile sink

In wireless sensor networks, the sensor nodes find the route towards the sink to transmit data. Data transmission happens either directly to the sink node or through the intermediate nodes. As the sensor node has limited energy, it is very important to develop efficient routing technique to prolong network life time. In this paper we proposed rendezvous-based routing protocol, which creates a rendezvous region in the middle of the network and constructs a tree within that region. There are two different modes of data transmission in the proposed protocol. In Method 1, the tree is directed towards the sink and the source node transmits the data to the sink via this tree, whereas in Method 2, the sink transmits its location to the tree, and the source node gets the sink’s location from the tree and transmits the data directly to the sink. The proposed protocol is validated through experiment and compared with the existing protocols using some metrics such as packet delivery ratio, energy consumption, end-to-end latency, network life time.     

Hybrid NSCT domain multiple watermarking for medical images

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Medical image watermarking is a challenging area of research. High bandwidth, secure transmission of patient’s data among hospitals and hiding capacity are...     

Fuzzy modeling of system behavior for risk and reliability analysis

The main objective of the article is to permit the reliability analyst's/engineers/managers/practitioners to analyze the failure behavior of a system in a more consistent and logical manner. To this effect, the authors propose a methodological and structured framework, which makes use of both qualitative and quantitative techniques for risk and reliability analysis of the system. The framework has been applied to model and analyze a complex industrial system from a paper mill. In the quantitative framework, after developing the Petrinet model of the system, the fuzzy synthesis of failure and repair data (using fuzzy arithmetic operations) has been done. Various system parameters of managerial importance such as repair time, failure rate, mean time between failures, availability, and expected number of failures are computed to quantify the behavior in terms of fuzzy, crisp and defuzzified values. Further, to improve upon the reliability and maintainability characteristics of the system, in depth qualitative analysis of systems is carried out using failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) by listing out all possible failure modes, their causes and effect on system performance. To address the limitations of traditional FMEA method based on risky priority number score, a risk ranking approach based on fuzzy and Grey relational analysis is proposed to prioritize failure causes.     

TESLA: an extended study of an energy-saving agent that leverages schedule flexibility

This paper presents transformative energy-saving schedule-leveraging agent (TESLA), an agent for optimizing energy usage in commercial buildings. TESLA’s key insight is that adding flexibility to event/meeting schedules can lead to significant energy savings. This paper provides four key contributions: (i) online scheduling algorithms, which are at the heart of TESLA, to solve a stochastic mixed integer linear program for energy-efficient scheduling of incrementally/dynamically arriving meetings and events; (ii) an algorithm to effectively identify key meetings that lead to significant energy savings by adjusting their flexibility; (iii) an extensive analysis on energy savings achieved by TESLA; and (iv) surveys of real users which indicate that TESLA’s assumptions of user flexibility hold in practice. TESLA was evaluated on data gathered from over 110,000 meetings held at nine campus buildings during an 8-month period in 2011–2012 at the University of Southern California and Singapore Management University. These results and analysis show that, compared to the current systems, TESLA can substantially reduce overall energy consumption.     

Collision-free spatial hash functions for structural analysis of billion-vertex chemical bond networks

State-of-the-art molecular dynamics (MD) simulations generate massive datasets involving billion-vertex chemical bond networks, which makes data mining based on graph algorithms such as K-ring analysis a challenge. This paper proposes an algorithm to improve the efficiency of ring analysis of large graphs, exploiting properties of K-rings and spatial correlations of vertices in the graph. The algorithm uses dual-tree expansion (DTE) and spatial hash-function tagging (SHAFT) to optimize computation and memory access. Numerical tests show nearly perfect linear scaling of the algorithm. Also a parallel implementation of the DTE + SHAFT algorithm achieves high scalability. The algorithm has been successfully employed to analyze large MD simulations involving up to 500 million atoms.     

PSO-DS: a scheduling engine for scientific workflow managers

Cloud computing, an important source of computing power for the scientific community, requires enhanced tools for an efficient use of resources. Current solutions for workflows execution lack frameworks to deeply analyze applications and consider realistic execution times as well as computation costs. In this study, we propose cloud user–provider affiliation (CUPA) to guide workflow’s owners in identifying the required tools to have his/her application running. Additionally, we develop PSO-DS, a specialized scheduling algorithm based on particle swarm optimization. CUPA encompasses the interaction of cloud resources, workflow manager system and scheduling algorithm. Its featured scheduler PSO-DS is capable of converging strategic tasks distribution among resources to efficiently optimize makespan and monetary cost. We compared PSO-DS performance against four well-known scientific workflow schedulers. In a test bed based on VMware vSphere, schedulers mapped five up-to-date benchmarks representing different scientific areas. PSO-DS proved its efficiency by reducing makespan and monetary cost of tested workflows by 75 and 78%, respectively, when compared with other algorithms. CUPA, with the featured PSO-DS, opens the path to develop a full system in which scientific cloud users can run their computationally expensive experiments.     

不同无线技术能否共存?

新建工厂的无线技术应用已逐步获得认可,然而,还有一些过程工业对采用这项新技术或其它新的解决方案存有疑虑,主要担心多种无线技术互相之间可能存在射频干扰而影响主要通讯的可靠性,例如使用IEEE 802.11b/g和IEEE 802.15.4协议的无线电。因为两种无线电通讯采用的也是用于工业、科技和医疗的2.4GHz波段,业内人士曾     

A proof system for distributed processes

Summary A partial correctness proof system for Brinch Hansen's Distributed Processes (DP) is presented. Two important aspects of the system are: Proofs of individual processes of a DP program are completely isolated from each other; in particular, no assumptions are allowed in the proof of one process about the behavior of the other processes. Secondly a process is characterized by its externally visible behavior, i.e. the sequence of interactions between this process and the other processes of the program. An example demonstrates the use of the system.This paper is an extended version of a paper presented at the Workshop on Logics of Programs, Brooklyn, New York, June 17–19, 1985 and was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant ECS-8404725