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Article
Publication date: 17 April 2009

Glenn Davidson and Dan Dorner

The purpose of this paper is to discover the criteria upon which selection decisions are made in six mobile libraries in New Zealand.

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to discover the criteria upon which selection decisions are made in six mobile libraries in New Zealand.

Design/methodology/approach

In this qualitative study data were gathered from interviews with six mobile librarians. The study is guided conceptually by the perceived need for a collection development policy and a selection procedures statement to guide selection, and the needs versus wants debate.

Findings

The data suggest that there is no universal approach to the selection of material for mobile library collections; mobile librarians achieve a balance between users' needs and wants to some extent when selecting; and there is no relationship between the nature of mobile library services and the serving of needs and wants. The researchers contend that mobile librarians' selection decisions are influenced by various criteria other than users' needs or users' wants.

Research limitations/implications

This qualitative research is based on the analysis of the selection practices of six mobile librarians in New Zealand. Future research might seek to replicate this study's methodology using a larger population or investigate the lack of emphasis on reference services on some mobile libraries or the management of fixed, floating, and integrated mobile library collections.

Originality/value

Only a slight amount of literature exists about the selection of mobile library collections. This study will be of interest to mobile librarians in New Zealand and elsewhere who wish to obtain a better understanding of current selection practices. It will also act as guiding literature to help mobile librarians to make better informed selection decisions.

Details

Collection Building, vol. 28 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0160-4953

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 1 April 2014

Svetlana Boudko, Wolfgang Leister and Stein Gjessing

Coexistence of various wireless access networks and the ability of mobile terminals to switch between them make an optimal selection of serving networks for multicast groups a…

Abstract

Purpose

Coexistence of various wireless access networks and the ability of mobile terminals to switch between them make an optimal selection of serving networks for multicast groups a challenging problem. Since optimal network selection requires large dimensions of data to be collected from several network locations and sent between several network components, the scalability can easily become a bottleneck in large-scale systems. Therefore, reducing data exchange within heterogeneous wireless networks is important. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors study the decision-making process and the data that need to be sent between different network components. To analyze the operation of the wireless heterogeneous network, the authors built a mathematical model of the network. The objective is defined as a minimization of multicast streams in the system. To evaluate the heuristic solutions, the authors define the upper and lower bounds to their operation.

Findings

The proposed heuristic solutions substantially reduce the usage of bandwidth in mobile networks and exchange of information between the network components.

Originality/value

The authors proposed the approach that allows network selection in a decentralized manner with only limited information shared among the decision makers. The authors studied how different sets of information available to decision makers influenced the performance of the system. The work also investigates the usage of multiple paths for multicast in heterogeneous mobile environments.

Details

International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications, vol. 10 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1742-7371

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 15 March 2013

Adel Alti, Abbdellah Boukerram and Philippe Roose

The purpose of this paper was to design ontology for describing semantic context‐aware quality services, and to present a new web management tool that provides a great flexibility…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper was to design ontology for describing semantic context‐aware quality services, and to present a new web management tool that provides a great flexibility and enables automatic semantic adaptation and customization of mobile client services.

Design/methodology/approach

The tool is developed using ontology‐based approach. This ontology captures a shared conceptual schema common in the tourism domain and maintains semantic quality information in heterogeneous service providers for service model. The results of the tool will be compared to prior works from other quality and distributed based service selection methods for mobile‐based application.

Findings

The tool support is based in the ontology Context‐aware Quality Semantic Web Service called (CxQWS). At the first step, services are defined as a set of semantic metadata, reflecting service requirements and QoS parameters. At the second step, services with a semantic contextual metadata are elaborated. Such a procedure ensures that the selection decisions should be based on the semantic quality representation of the created services. The SELETOR tool results suggest that the level of intelligent method use continue to be high flexibility in World Tourism organisations.

Research limitations/implications

The tourism services in a mobile environment have a critical role in creating tourist satisfaction. They are neither a uniform group, nor able to give consistently high service quality. Indeed they have significantly different platforms and a variety of heterogeneous service providers which make the management of service qualities complex.

Practical implications

A significant proposition is to integrate new tourism quality attributes of mobile‐based application, to provide a dynamic adaptation of selection services based on context metadata parameters (user, environment, device, and service provider context) and the management of the heterogeneity of service needs, of mobile devices capacities and their various communication protocols (GPRS, WIFI, Bluetooth, etc.) as well as the media variety (sound, video, text and image), possibly reflecting the decreased time responses and the increased visibility of standard services management methods.

Originality/value

The paper proposes SELECTOR, a dynamic service selection tool based on CxQWS ontology, defined as set of semantic metadata, which context and QoS parameters. The tool is based on semantic services and offer architecture, with three layers (semantic query, management and web services). The most innovative characteristic of the tool is that it profits from the potential of semantic representation techniques to express high level explicit constraints, while they may be useful to guide the selection and adaptation process. This tool provides low adaptation effort, e.g. takes into account all the heterogeneous services as its various communication protocols (GSM, 3G, Bluetooth, etc.) as consequences of self‐selection for dynamic context evolution guided by the adaptation policies.

Details

Journal of Systems and Information Technology, vol. 15 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1328-7265

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 1 July 2020

Rohit Singh, Shwetank Avikal, Rashmi Rashmi and Mangey Ram

In today's era of a digital world, mobile phones have now become an essential part in everyday life. The selection of the best mobile phone among the available alternatives is a…

Abstract

Purpose

In today's era of a digital world, mobile phones have now become an essential part in everyday life. The selection of the best mobile phone among the available alternatives is a complex decision making it a problem for the customers. Mobile phone manufactures are facing a lot of problems for launching/introducing a mobile phone according to the requirement of customers and it depends on a number of criteria/attributes such as: technical specifications, price, brand etc.

Design/methodology/approach

In the presented work, the above-discussed problem has been considered as a Multi-Criteria Decision Making MCDM problem and an approach based on Kano model with Fuzzy AHP and TOPSIS has been proposed to solve the problem. The Kano model has been used for identifying the different Kano categories of all the features through a customer survey. Fuzzy AHP has been applied to achieve the weights of each feature in order to introduce a best mobile phone for the customers. TOPSIS has been used for ranking of alternatives.

Findings

main features with different other sub-features have been selected for the study. Different features have been considered as categories and their Kano categories have been found out. The importance of these features has also been calculated by Fuzzy-AHP in terms of their evaluated weights. Different mobile phones have been ranked by TOPSIS according to their features calculated by Fuzzy-AHP. The proposed approach seems effective for identifying/classifying different attributes/features of mobile phones according to customer's requirements.

Originality/value

Here, different features of a mobile phone have been considered for designing a suitable mobile phone. Thus, this work can help a designer to design and select a suitable feature for a customer-oriented mobile phone.

Details

International Journal of Quality & Reliability Management, vol. 37 no. 6/7
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0265-671X

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 5 July 2013

Sanjay R. Gangurde and Milind M. Akarte

The purpose of this paper is to propose a multi‐criteria decision making (MCDM) approach to evaluate product design alternatives in respect to the customer requirements.

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to propose a multi‐criteria decision making (MCDM) approach to evaluate product design alternatives in respect to the customer requirements.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper reports a systematic approach developed to concurrently satisfy the product requirements as well as the customer requirements. Mobile phone example has been elected to demonstrate the approach. Mobile product features and customer preferences data have been collected and analyzed to obtain the commonalities from the designer and customer perspective. Regression analysis has been carried out to establish the relationship between the product independent features with the dependent feature (Ex. Cost, Talk time). Based on the equations developed, different product configurations have been defined from the designer's point of view. Modified TOPSIS – a multi attribute decision making (MADM) method – has been employed to facilitate the most suitable product configuration selection based on the customer requirements.

Findings

The method facilitates design of the best product configuration that will maximize customer satisfaction with minimum cost.

Originality/value

The proposed methodology will provide a useful tool to the decision maker, which may help to eliminate the associated risks in the product design configuration that closely satisfy customer's expectations and product launching decision.

Article
Publication date: 22 September 2021

Salman Tariq, Mohamed Hussein, Roy Dong Wang and Tarek Zayed

This study aims to thoroughly examine the trends and developments of crane layout planning (CLP) in the construction field and reveal future research directions for modular…

Abstract

Purpose

This study aims to thoroughly examine the trends and developments of crane layout planning (CLP) in the construction field and reveal future research directions for modular integrated construction (MiC).

Design/methodology/approach

Through a rigorous systematic mixed-review methodology that integrates bibliometric, scientometric and qualitative analysis, this study explored the crane layout research trend; the scientometric analysis of journal sources and keywords occurrence network; the research contributions and links between influential countries; the classification of research articles based on the type of problems and solution approaches; the qualitative analysis of existing findings and research gaps; and the future research direction for CLP in MiC.

Findings

This study found five categories under the CLP domain, namely, crane selection, crane location, integrated crane selection and location, integrated crane location and allocation of supply points and hybrid problems. The major research approaches used to solve CLP is optimization (43%), visualization (23%), decision support systems (16%), simulation (11%) and qualitative techniques (7%). The possible future research directions include artificial intelligence-based models, multi-crane locations, CLP for MiC re-use, dynamic models representing real-life scenarios and building information modeling-based virtual reality models.

Originality/value

Through a mixed-review methodology, this study provides a comprehensive analysis of problem settings and solution methods of CLP while mitigating the subjectivity of traditional review methods. Also, it presents a repertoire on CLP and illuminates future directions for seasoned researchers in the context of MiC.

Article
Publication date: 20 December 2007

Jingshan Huang, Jiangbo Dang, Michael N. Huhns and Yongzhen Shao

The purpose of this paper is to present ontology alignment as a basis for mobile service integration and invocation.

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to present ontology alignment as a basis for mobile service integration and invocation.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper presents an automated schema‐based approach to align the ontologies from interacting devices as a basis for mobile service invocation. When the ontologies are ambiguous about the services provided, compatibility vectors are introduced as a means of maintaining ontology quality and deciding which service to choose to reduce the ambiguity.

Findings

Both precision and recall measurements are applied in the evaluation of the alignment approach, with promising results. In addition, for the compatibility vector system, it is not only proved theoretically that the approach is both precise and efficient, but it also shows promising results experimentally.

Originality/value

In cases where sufficient resources are not available and only a certain number of mobile devices can be chosen for interaction, this approach increases the efficiency by choosing suitable mobile device(s).

Research limitations/implications

This current approach makes use of a center ontology, but introduces the problem of how to handle the vulnerability issue inherent in this centralized solution. To analyze and solve this problem is a potential research direction.

Details

International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications, vol. 3 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1742-7371

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 1 February 2003

Reggie Davidrajuh

The main work in this paper covers a methodology, tools and implementation techniques for automation of supplier selection procedures as an e‐commerce application. The work could…

3062

Abstract

The main work in this paper covers a methodology, tools and implementation techniques for automation of supplier selection procedures as an e‐commerce application. The work could be divided into two main parts. First, the development of a modeling methodology which can be used for automation of supplier selection procedures. By this modeling methodology, supplier selection procedures are divided into pre‐selection, selection and the post‐selection procedures. The selection procedure is further divided into the following stages: bidder selection, partner selection, and performance evaluation. The second part is about realization of automation. Three modules for automation are identified; they are the data collection system for bidder selection stage, the inference engine for partner selection stage, and the performance evaluation engine for the performance evaluation stage.

Details

Industrial Management & Data Systems, vol. 103 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0263-5577

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 26 September 2008

Jing Zhang, Tugrul U. Daim, Byung‐Chul Choi and Kenny Phan

The purpose of this paper is to develop a multiple‐perspective model for technology assessment, apply it to mobile broadband technologies selection in China and give…

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to develop a multiple‐perspective model for technology assessment, apply it to mobile broadband technologies selection in China and give recommendations based on the assessment results.

Design/methodology/approach

A multiple‐perspective model for technology assessment using HDM is developed based on literature review and experts suggestions. Data are collected from a survey on China telecom experts.

Findings

TD‐SCDMA got the highest score because of its potential political and social effects, and WCDMA and CDMA2000 following with close scores. While for WiMAX and 4G, Chinese experts showed relatively lack of confidence.

Originality/value

This paper presents a new multiple‐perspective model that can be generally applied to technology assessment problems at organizational level.

Details

Journal of Technology Management in China, vol. 3 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1746-8779

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 10 December 2021

Zhongjun Tang and Bo He

The study aims to show how several factors interact to promote mobile game download: the number of games released by a publisher, the quality of the games released, the popularity…

Abstract

Purpose

The study aims to show how several factors interact to promote mobile game download: the number of games released by a publisher, the quality of the games released, the popularity of a game's genre, the quality of borrowed intellectual property, the frequency of recommendations, intragenre ranking, consumer rating and review quantity.

Design/methodology/approach

Signaling theory was used to classify the mobile game information displayed on the Apple App Store into four groups. A conceptual model was proposed to illustrate the complex relationship between the information and download. Based on information on 203 mobile games in the seven days following their release, the model was empirically tested to identify the influence of information configuration on game download by combining fuzzy qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and a fuzzy cognitive map (FCM).

Findings

Three solutions were identified for high game download and two for low/medium. The number of previous games released by a publisher, intragenre ranking, consumer rating and review quantity are core conditions that reinforce high game download. The effects of one information type on another and on downloads change as coexisting information types change.

Originality/value

This study enriches existing knowledge about how combinations of multiple types of game information lead to game download and extends previous variance-based research. Combining an FCM with fsQCA can facilitate one’s understanding of the complex causal relationships between game information and download.

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