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The paper aims to provide a theoretical and empirical examination of the relationship between service expectation management, expectation inducing agent and customer satisfaction.

Based on the disconfirmation paradigm in services and the promise-keeping premise in psychology, the hypotheses are developed and empirically tested using three experiments that manipulated expectations, expectation inducing agent and service outcome.

The findings provide reconciliation to the previous studies in services and show that effectiveness of expectation management strategy depends on the individual expectation thresholds and the expectation inducing agent. If customers patronize a firm expecting more, then over-delivering on the service promise results in a significant benefit. However, for those customers whose mental expectation threshold is exceeded, keeping promises is as effective as exceeding promises.

The practical implication of this paper is that services managers should be cognizant of the mental expectation threshold of customers and be wise in utilizing the under-promise, over-deliver strategy.

Using a threshold approach, this paper introduces a new perspective to service practitioners who are trying to manage expectations in a highly variable business environment. It also benefits service researchers who are trying to enhance the understanding of service expectation management.

The authors study the interdisciplinary relation between graph and algebraic structure ring defining a new graph, namely “non-essential sum graph”. The nonessential sum graph, denoted by NES(R), of a commutative ring R with unity is an undirected graph whose vertex set is the collection of all nonessential ideals of R and any two vertices are adjacent if and only if their sum is also a nonessential ideal of R.

The method is theoretical.

The authors obtain some properties of NES(R) related with connectedness, diameter, girth, completeness, cut vertex, r-partition and regular character. The clique number, independence number and domination number of NES(R) are also found.

The paper is original.

Doctors and nurses in three accident & emergency (A&E) departments were interviewed about the feasibility of screening for hazardous drinking as well as the provision of minimal or brief interventions. They were also asked about a more comprehensive approach to alcohol‐related problems that would involve liaising with other services. The feasibility of a comprehensive approach to excessive alcohol consumption is considered. Quantitative data revealed that computerised A&E records did not accurately portray the prevalence of alcohol‐related attendance.

The purpose of this paper is to survey briefly how harmonic analyis started and developed throughout the centuries to reach its modern status and its surprisingly wide range of applications.

The author traces applications of harmonic analysis back to Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt and the Indus Valley, showing how the Greeks have applied trigonometry and influenced its birth, then the important developments in India in the sixth century laying the first brick to modern trigonometry with the definition of the sinus, then medieval India founding modern mathematical analysis. Trigonometry was developed further by the Arabs until the fourteenth century, then by the Europeans. The eighteenth century in France was particularly important when Bernoulli solved, with an infinite trigonometric series, the vibrating string problem, then Fourier, who studied these series extensively. The author goes on to harmonic analysis on locally compact groups, and ends up with a quick personal view on harmonic analysis nowadays. The last section of the paper presents some of the modern applications. Harmonic analysis is, of course, still used for navigation but also has many other very surprising applications such as signal processing, quantum mechanics, neuroscience, tomography, etc.

The power of harmonic analysis lies in giving the solutions to various problems as infinite series of basic functions, so to be able to produce algorithms for FFT boxes, it must be understood how these series came about and the convergence of these series.

The review should be useful to people interested in studying and/or applying harmonic analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to examine a model for conceptualizing the impacts of environmental management strategies on travel and recreation choice making behavior that considers tolerance thresholds in visitor responses to destination change.

A survey involving a sample of 347 regular campers and fishers in the Ningaloo Marine Park, Australia, is analyzed to discern the effect of tolerance thresholds.

Despite widespread dissatisfaction with enlarged sanctuary zones and negative impacts on recreational activities, visitors indicated a high level of satisfaction with their stay. This apparent contradiction is, it is argued, best explained by the threshold of tolerability concept.

It is argued that recreational users, planning authorities and other stakeholders have a threshold of tolerability in terms of decision‐making concerning management changes. These thresholds mean that changes in management policies, modes of activity and destination travel choices are rarely predictable in their effect, but are bounded by minimal and ideal expectations of destination appeal.

The paper introduces an important concept for tourism research that will aid tourism planning and management authorities in the face of growing environmental pressures caused by overpopulation and climate change.

The purpose of this article is to determine necessary and sufficient conditions in order that (D, K) to be an S-accr pair, where D is an integral domain and K is a field which contains D as a subring and S is a multiplicatively closed subset of D.

The methods used are from the topic multiplicative ideal theory from commutative ring theory.

Let S be a strongly multiplicatively closed subset of an integral domain D such that the ring of fractions of D with respect to S is not a field. Then it is shown that (D, K) is an S-accr pair if and only if K is algebraic over D and the integral closure of the ring of fractions of D with respect to S in K is a one-dimensional Prüfer domain. Let D, S, K be as above. If each intermediate domain between D and K satisfies S-strong accr*, then it is shown that K is algebraic over D and the integral closure of the ring of fractions of D with respect to S is a Dedekind domain; the separable degree of K over F is finite and K has finite exponent over F, where F is the quotient field of D.

Motivated by the work of some researchers on S-accr, the concept of S-strong accr* is introduced and we determine some necessary conditions in order that (D, K) to be an S-strong accr* pair. This study helps us to understand the behaviour of the rings between D and K.

Few thoughtful men or women will deny, as we enter the last two decades of the twentieth century, that ours is truly an Age of Anxiety. Even in an America still uniquely stable and prosperous relative to much of the rest of the world, the general mood is no longer an optimistic one. For many of us the future appears clouded at best, perhaps laden with catastrophes. Clearly all of us are witnesses to, and in some cases participants in, a great turning point in human affairs. We thus find ourselves living in the end of one epoch while at the same time the rough outlines of a new civilisation come into view. Such momentous transformations of the social structure, economy and political landscape are invariably accompanied by, and often preceded by, major shifts of intellectual commitment. In other words, as our world has changed drastically in the twentieth century, basic patterns of thought and philosophical orientation have either reflected, or in some cases even helped to initiate, these changes. In the brief space allotted to us, we will attempt to present a sketch of the most important of these shifts in thought, always keeping in mind that because of the fact that we find ourselves in media res, these observations can be little more than fragmentary perceptions of a reality that has itself not yet been finalised.

Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) provides a quantitative metric based on the elements availability, performance and quality for measuring the performance effectiveness of individual equipment or entire processes. Although these elements are important, other performance factors such as the efficient use of raw materials and the production environment (e.g. production system, logistics, labour, etc.) in which the equipment or process operates may also have a significant contribution to process performance. The purpose of this paper is to present an alternative measure derived from OEE, overall resource effectiveness (ORE), which considers these factors.

The paper reviews the OEE’s background and explores its limitations. Then, it shows the conceptual and mathematical development of the ORE measure and the formulas used for its calculation. Empirical and simulation-based investigations and applications of ORE are carried out through two cases study for its validation.

The results derived from both the empirical and simulation-based investigations demonstrate that OEE may not be an appropriate measure for some specific processes and that ORE may offer a more complete perspective on and information of key performance indicators.

ORE can provide production managers with more complete information concerning the performance of their processes. This will allow them to take better decisions regarding the management and actions needed to improve their processes.

This paper presents a novel and alterative approach to measure the performance of manufacturing equipment and processes.

During thermal laser processes, heat transfer and fluid flow in the melt pool are primary driven by complex physical phenomena that take place at liquid/vapor interface. Hence, the choice and setting of front description methods must be done carefully. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate to what extent front description methods may bias physical representativeness of numerical models of laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) process at melt pool scale.

Two multiphysical LPBF models are confronted: a Level-Set (LS) front capturing model based on a C++ code and a front tracking model, developed with COMSOL Multiphysics® and based on Arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian (ALE) method. To do so, two minimal test cases of increasing complexity are defined. They are simplified to the largest degree, but they integrate multiphysics phenomena that are still relevant to LPBF process.

LS and ALE methods provide very similar descriptions of thermo-hydrodynamic phenomena that occur during LPBF, providing LS interface thickness is correctly calibrated and laser heat source is implemented with a modified continuum surface force formulation. With these calibrations, thermal predictions are identical. However, the velocity field in the LS model is systematically underestimated compared to the ALE approach, but the consequences on the predicted melt pool dimensions are minor.

This study fulfils the need for comprehensive methodology bases for modeling and calibrating multiphysical models of LPBF at melt pool scale. This paper also provides with reference data that may be used by any researcher willing to verify their own numerical method.

Library‐world “languages of description” are increasingly being expressed using the resource description framework (RDF) for compatibility with linked data approaches. This article aims to look at how issues around the Dublin Core, a small “metadata element set,” exemplify issues that must be resolved in order to ensure that library data meet traditional standards for quality and consistency while remaining broadly interoperable with other data sources in the linked data environment.

The article focuses on how the Dublin Core – originally seen, in traditional terms, as a simple record format – came increasingly to be seen as an RDF vocabulary for use in metadata based on a “statement” model, and how new approaches to metadata evolved to bridge the gap between these models.

The translation of library standards into RDF involves the separation of languages of description, per se, from the specific data formats into which they have for so long been embedded. When defined with “minimal ontological commitment,” languages of description lend themselves to the sort of adaptation that is inevitably a part of any human linguistic activity. With description set profiles, the quality and consistency of data traditionally required for sharing records among libraries can be ensured by placing precise constraints on the content of data records – without compromising the interoperability of the underlying vocabularies in the wider linked data context.

In today's environment, library data must continue to meet high standards of consistency and quality, yet it must be possible to link or merge the data with sources that follow other standards. Placing constraints on the data created, more than on the underlying vocabularies, allows both requirements to be met.

This paper examines how issues around the Dublin Core exemplify issues that must be resolved to ensure library data meet quality and consistency standards while remaining interoperable with other data sources.