Search results

This paper aims to propose a framework for building a flexible supply chain business model using an object‐oriented approach.

The proposed modeling framework has used the de facto object‐oriented modeling standard, Unified Modeling Language (UML), for building a supply chain model. To compensate for the potential weakness of the pure object‐oriented model and UML, the framework integrates business rules with its model.

This paper provides information about several sources, which are the bases of modeling a supply chain. The paper regards a supply chain as five view models with four business domains and each domain consists of functions, resources, processes, interactions and business rules.

A typical manufacturing supply chain is considered as a target system to apply this design methodology. The paper does not handle a real case study as an application example.

This paper newly added the category of “Business Process Reengineering (BPR)‐driven” models to the traditional taxonomy of supply chain models and proposed an object‐oriented business model (OOBM) for a supply chain as one of the BPR‐driven models. It is hoped that this modeling approach is highly usable and adds value to an analyst, practitioner, and designer in the field of supply chain.

The objective of this paper is to develop an actuation system utilizing smart materials such as shape memory alloys (SMA) to control the position of an aircraft's flaps.

The proposed smart wing consisted of SMA springs that were fixed at one end to the wing box toward the leading edge of the airfoil. The other end of each spring was attached tangentially to a rotating cylinder fixed to the flap. The springs were arranged in an upper and a lower layer to cause rotation of the flap in both the upward and downward directions. The spring actuators were controlled by the introduction of heat resulting from the applied current. A prototype of the smart wing was developed and tested to demonstrate the design concept.

A prototype of a smart actuation system for controlling the flaps of an aircraft was successfully developed. Through the experimental and theoretical analyses conducted, the design was validated and showed strong potential for future application.

The proposed concept can be applied to other aircraft systems such as ailerons, slats, rudders and elevators.

The prototype of a smart wing is unique. It utilizes smart materials for aircraft flap actuation. The concept can be applied on ailerons, slats, rudders and elevators.

In this interview with Harvard innovation expert Stefan H.Thomke about his latest book, Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments, he pays tribute to the scientific method and “the engine that has powered” it over the centuries, the “humble experiment.”

Professor Thomke anticipates a burgeoning role for business experimentation, one that it is already playing across the value chain, particularly in leading online companies.

Digital experimentation tools have the potential to revolutionize a company’s R&D, but they can also transform entire industries by shifting experimentation–and thus product innovation–to users and customers.

The ability to access large customer samples, to automatically collect huge amounts of data about user interactions on websites and apps, and to run concurrent experiments gives companies an unprecedented opportunity to evaluate many ideas quickly, with great precision, and at a negligible cost per additional experiment.

Product development is being transformed by rapid experimentation: all aspects of software–including user interfaces, security applications and back-end changes–can now be subjected to A/B tests.

The purpose of this paper is to classify the given image as indoor or outdoor with higher success rate by mixing various features like brightness, number of straight lines, number of Euclidean shapes and recursive shapes.

For annotating an image, it is very easy, if the image is categorized as indoor or outdoor. Many methods are proposed to classify the given image in these criteria but still the rate of uncategorized images occupies considerable area. This proposed work is the extension of the existing works already proposed by experts in this field. Some of the parameters mainly focused to classify are color histogram, orientation of edges, straightness of edges, discrete cosine transform coefficients, etc. In addition to that, this work includes finding of Euclidean shapes i.e. closed contours and recursive shapes in the given image. When the Euclidean shaped object dominates the recursive shapes then it is classified as indoor object and if the recursive shapes dominates, it is categorized as outdoor object.

This work is carried out on the standard image data sets. The data sets are Microsoft Research Cambridge (MRC) object recognition image database 1.0. and Kodak and Coral image data set. Totally 540 images are taken into account and the images are classified 95.4 percent correctly.

Many methods are proposed to classify the given image in these criteria but still the rate of uncategorized images occupies considerable area. This proposed work is the extension of the existing works already proposed by experts in this field. Some of the parameters mainly focused to classify are color histogram, orientation of edges, straightness of edges, discrete cosine transform coefficients, etc. In addition to that, this work includes finding of Euclidean shapes i.e. closed contours and recursive shapes in the given image. When the Euclidean shaped object dominates the recursive shapes then it is classified as indoor object and if the recursive shapes dominates, it is categorized as outdoor object. This work is carried out on the standard image data sets. The data sets are MRC object recognition image database 1.0. and Kodak and Coral image data set. Totally 540 images are taken into account and the images are classified 95.4 percent correctly.

The purposes of this study are to prove that the content of floor flexibility can be designed objectively with the use of margins, which are an architectural vocabulary visualizing the possibility of formal change, and to conduct a case study on how the existing typical floor plans of South Korean apartments change with the extension of flexibility: the usability of margins and the results.

This study reviews two housing projects with different methods of flexible housing design: one is the flexibility to change the sizes of spaces and the other is the flexibility to change the topology of spaces. In this paper, the architectural term “area margin” is used for the former and “linear margin” for the latter. These were applied to the case of current apartments in South Korea to transform them into floor plans with the two types of flexibility and investigated whether the proposed floor plans satisfy the required efficacy structurally and functionally.

This case study shows that margins can be used as architectural vocabularies representing flexible sizes of rooms and flexible boundaries with neighbors. The final form of the structural framework became homogeneous, even though it conserved its indigenous spatial characteristics of abundant natural sunlight and airflow. In addition, the transformed structural framework has higher rigidity than the original one, even though the transversal wall was cut off with a margin, as shown by the schematic representations in this paper.

The alternative plan, designed as a modification process, is not representative as a flexible floor plan. Rather, it is thought more important to make a range of variations rather than prototyping a model. This study starts from the premise that it is desirable for apartment house plans to share and encourage variations rather than aiming at typical sizes and shapes. Furthermore, this study exemplified the process to modify the existing typical floor plan into a flexible one using margins. Through this modification, it is thought that the typology of the South Korean apartment, which has succeeded in gaining social consensus for half a century, can be preserved while accommodating social changes in the future.

The control of future variations of floor plans will extend the socioeconomic and physical life of a building, enabling a reasonable reinvestment of resources.

This paper deals with a design method applying distinct visual symbols to different contexts of flexibility and using those as architectural vocabularies.

Green demarketing, which promotes anti-consumption as a more extreme sustainability tactic, could help consumers and societies move toward healthier consumption patterns while building strong, long-lasting relationships with consumers. As even the most committed brands find the need to oscillate between demarketing and conventional marketing for survival, this research tests how the congruency of the campaign shown on a brand's home page (owned media) and a following retargeting ad (paid media) could impact perceived congruency and further downstream effects. In doing so, this research proposes that the media context (i.e. news or shopping browsing context) in which the retargeting ad is embedded could determine how much congruency of the demarketing campaign across owned and paid media matters.

An experiment with a 2 (home page content: green vs. demarketing) × 2 (retargeting ad content: product vs. demarketing) × 2 (browsing context: shopping vs. news) between-subjects factorial design was employed with an online panel of 430 participants. The participants first saw the brand's home page content, then were assigned to a website browsing context where the retargeting ad of the brand was embedded.

In a news browsing context, users perceived higher congruency when product retargeting ads (vs. demarketing) were shown after a green home page exposure and when demarketing retargeting ads (vs. products) were delivered after a demarketing home page. The elevated perceived congruency successfully led to higher ad argument and ad attitude. These differences were not present in a shopping browsing context. These results showed that the congruency between the home page and the retargeting ad for demarketing campaigns mattered more in certain media contexts (i.e. news browsing context).

The study closes the empirical gap in demarketing brand activism campaigns by demonstrating when and how congruency between multiple owned and paid channels for demarketing campaigns impacts consumer responses. This study provides evidence of how the match of the demarketing campaign shown on a brand's home page and a following retargeting ad could impact perceived congruency and further downstream effects of ad argument and ad attitude while considering different browsing context effects.

The foreign direct investment (FDI) motivations of emerging market multinational enterprises (EMNEs) are mainly twofold: acquisition of strategic assets in foreign markets, and foreign market penetration. While prior studies have delivered valuable insights, findings regarding the performance of those two types of FDI remain somewhat inconsistent or inconclusive. This study aims to develop complementary perspectives that can motivate scholars to explore the internal mechanisms of achieving goals for these two FDI types by providing a review of prior literature on EMNEs’ knowledge- and market-seeking FDI.

Indexed to the EBSCO database and Google Scholar from 2000 to 2020, 73 articles from 13 journals were selected and reviewed to identify the main research future research agendas.

Our findings show that the purpose of EMNEs’ FDI can be divided into value creation and value capturing, with the former pursuing knowledge-seeking and the latter pursuing market-seeking, according to our study, which draws on insights from innovation-focused literature.

International business (IB) scholars have extensively studied both knowledge-seeking and market-seeking outward FDI of EMNEs for decades. Our study contributes to the literature by providing the potential for integrating IB and innovation studies to extend the scope of EMNEs studies.

Although the business model field of study has been a focus of attention for both researchers and practitioners within the past two decades, it still suffers from concern about its identity. Accordingly, this paper aims to clarify the intellectual structure of business model through identifying the research clusters and their sub-clusters, the prominent relations and the dominant research trends.

This paper uses some common text mining methods including co-word analysis, burst analysis, timeline analysis and topic modeling to analyze and mine the title, abstract and keywords of 14,081 research documents related to the domain of business model.

The results revealed that the business model field of study consists of three main research areas including electronic business model, business model innovation and sustainable business model, each of which has some sub-areas and has been more evident in some particular industries. Additionally, from the time perspective, research issues in the domain of sustainable development are considered as the hot and emerging topics in this field. In addition, the results confirmed that information technology has been one of the most important drivers, influencing the appearance of different study topics in the various periods.

The contribution of this study is to quantitatively uncover the dominant knowledge structure and prominent research trends in the business model field of study, considering a broad range of scholarly publications and using some promising and reliable text mining techniques.

Finding the optimal maintenance schedules is the primitive aim of preventive maintenance scheduling (PMS) problem dealing with the objectives of reliability, risk and cost. Most of the earlier works in the literature have focused on PMS with the objectives of leveling reserves/risk/cost independently. Nevertheless, very few publications in the current literature tackle the multi-objective PMS model with simultaneous optimization of reliability, and economic perspectives. Since, the PMS problem is highly nonlinear and complex in nature, an appropriate optimization technique is necessary to solve the problem in hand. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The complexity of the PMS problem in power systems necessitates a simple and robust optimization tool. This paper employs the modern meta-heuristic algorithm, namely, Ant Lion Optimizer (ALO) to obtain the optimal maintenance schedules for the PMS problem. In order to extract best compromise solution in the multi-objective solution space (reliability, risk and cost), a fuzzy decision-making mechanism is incorporated with ALO (FDMALO) for solving PMS.

As a first attempt, the best feasible maintenance schedules are obtained for PMS problem using FDMALO in the multi-objective solution space. The statistical measures are computed for the test systems which are compared with various meta-heuristic algorithms. The applicability of the algorithm for PMS problem is validated through statistical t-test. The statistical comparison and the t-test results reveal the superiority of ALO in achieving improved solution quality. The numerical and statistical results are encouraging and indicate the viability of the proposed ALO technique.

As a maiden attempt, FDMALO is used to solve the multi-objective PMS problem. This paper fills the gap in the literature by solving the PMS problem in the multi-objective framework, with the improved quality of the statistical indices.

This research aims to investigate the effectiveness of integrated marketing communication (IMC) messages in demarketing campaigns, particularly considering the consumer’s background in corporate social responsibility orientation (CSRO).

A 2 (publicity type: green, demarketing) × 2 (ad type: green, demarketing) between-subjects experiment assessed the impact of green marketing and demarketing strategies on consumers with varying levels of CSRO. The study utilized a mix of green and demarketing publicity and advertisements to explore their effects on the perception of the brand’s honesty. Additionally, the research investigated the mediating role of “brand as honest” in shaping purchase intention and anticipated product satisfaction.

Results revealed that for individuals with lower CSRO, the combination of green or demarketing strategies had no significant impact on the perception of the brand’s honesty. However, for those with higher CSRO, the brand was perceived as more honest when demarketing publicity was followed by a demarketing (vs green) advertisement. These effects on purchase intention (if one needed to buy a product of this type) and anticipated product satisfaction (which could help lower repeat and follow-up purchases) occurred through the mediating role of “brand as honest.”

Based on the belief congruence theory, this research contributes to the existing literature by specifically focusing on the effectiveness of IMC messages in demarketing campaigns, considering consumers’ CSRO backgrounds. The study offers original insights into the interplay between demarketing strategies, brand perception and consumer behavior.