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The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which managers’ perceptions of cultural distance – one of the most important explanatory factors in the field of international business – are congruent with objective reality.

By subjecting a sample of 242 export ventures to correlation and confirmatory factor analyses, managers’ perceptions of the cultural distance (i.e. perceived cultural distance) between 29 international markets and Sweden (the home market) were compared, with “objective” cultural distance gauged using Hofstede's (1980) scores for dimensions of national culture.

A statistically significant correlation was found between managers’ perceptions of cultural distance and “objective” cultural distance.

Despite the importance of perceptual data in many theoretical and practical domains, few studies analyze the validity of such data. The present findings validate the congruence of perceptual data regarding cultural distance with “objective” cultural distance.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between cultural distance (both perceived and objective), innovation and firm export performance.

Hypotheses were tested here by structural equation modeling using data from 186 export ventures into 23 international markets by Swedish companies.

The results indicate that managers’ perceptions of substantial cultural differences as well as objective cultural differences (gauged using Hofstede’s (1980, 2001) scores for dimensions of national culture) and subsequent environmental uncertainty when expanding into culturally distant markets triggers strategies for interacting and integrating with the market environment. These include producing and adopting innovations to processes and products and to organizational strategy, structure and administrative procedures to cope with the new environment and overcome uncertainties. These innovations and the associated competitive advantages improve firm export performance.

Despite much research into the relationship between firm internationalization and innovation, little attention has been paid to the effect of the characteristics of the foreign markets (specifically cultural differences) on firm innovation strategies. Moreover, much research has been devoted to the effect of innovation on firm export performance, but such research has mainly focused on one type of innovation, i.e. technological innovation, while the influence of organizational innovation on firm export performance has been basically ignored. The present study validates the explanatory of cultural distance (both perceived and objective) in relation to innovation strategies (technological and organizational) and export performance.

The purpose of this chapter is to solve multi-objective formulation for traveling salesman and transportation problems. Computations are based on real data for the road freight transportation of a Spanish company. The company was selected because of its importance in Spanish economy and market. This company is important in the whole country; however, it has its higher importance in the northern part of Spain. The requirements for these models are the minimization of total distance and the CO₂ emissions. To achieve this, it is required to know and carry out the minimization of the total distance traveled by the trucks during the deliveries. The deliveries are going to be executed between the different locations, nodes, in the region, and Elorrio, where the depot is situated. The data have been used to decide the best route in order to obtain a minimization of cost for the company. As it was mentioned earlier, the problems are focused on the reduction of the amount of CO₂ emissions and minimization of total distance; by studying different parameters, the best solutions of route transportation have been obtained. The software used to solve these models is CPLEX solver with AMPL programming language.

This paper aims to propose an innovative building information modelling (BIM)-based framework for multi-objective and dynamic temporary construction site layout design (SLD), which uses a hybrid approach of systematic layout planning (SLP) and mathematical modelling.

The hybrid approach, which follows a step-by-step process for site layout planning, is designed to facilitate both qualitative and quantitative data collection and processing. BIM platform is usedto facilitate the determination of the required quantitative data, while the qualitative data are generated through knowledge-based rules.

The multi-objective layout model represents two important aspects: layout cost and adjacency score. The result shows that the model meets construction managers’ requirements in not only saving cost but also assuring the preferences of temporary facility relationships. This implies that the integration of SLP and mathematical layout modelling is an appropriate approach to deliver practical multi-objective SLD solutions.

The proposed framework is expected to serve as a solution, for practical application, which takes the advantage of technologies in data collection and processing. Besides, this paper demonstrates, by using numerical experimentation and applying Microsoft Excel Solver for site layout optimisation, how to reduce the complexity in mathematical programming for construction managers.

The original contribution of this paper is the attempt of developing a framework in which all data used for the site layout modelling are collected and processed using a systematic approach, instead of being predetermined, as in many previous studies.

This chapter deals with the issue of distance between leaders and followers. I claim that distance from a leader is not only a reflection of time and space (i.e., objective distance) but also connected to followers’ emotions toward the leader manifested in their construal of their leaders. I report the findings of initial investigations that demonstrate how the patterns of construal of leaders as close or distant can be explained by construal level theory as well as through psychological theories of emotions. Finally, I discuss implications to theories of leadership and followership.

The purpose of this paper is to review, evaluate and classify the academic research that has been published in facility layout problems (FLPs) and to analyse how researches and practices on FLPs are.

The review is based on 166 papers published from 1953 to 2021 in international peer-reviewed journals. The literature review on FLPs is presented under broader headings of discrete space and continuous space FLPs. The important formulations of FLPs under static and dynamic environments represented in the discrete and continuous space are presented. The articles reported in the literature on various representations of facilities for the continuous space Unequal Area Facility Layout Problems (UA-FLPs) are summarized. Discussed and commented on adaptive and robust approaches for dynamic environment FLPs. Highlighted the application of meta-heuristic solution methods for FLPs of a larger size.

It is found that most of the earlier research adopted the discrete space for the formulation of FLPs. This type of space representation for FLPs mostly assumes an equal area for all facilities. UA-FLPs represented in discrete space yield irregular shape facilities. It is also observed that the recent works consider the UA-FLPs in continuous space. The solution of continuous space UA-FLPs is more accurate and realistic. Some of the recent works on UA-FLPs consider the flexible bay structure (FBS) due to its advantages over the other representations. FBS helps the proper design of aisle structure in the detailed layout plan. Further, the recent articles reported in the literature consider the dynamic environment for both equal and unequal area FLPs to cope with the changing market environment. It is also found that FLPs are Non-deterministic Polynomial-complete problems, and hence, they set the challenges to researchers to develop efficient meta-heuristic methods to solve the bigger size FLPs in a reasonable time.

Due to the extremely large number of papers on FLPs, a few papers may have inadvertently been missed. The facility layout design research domain is extremely vast which covers other areas such as cellular layouts, pick and drop points and aisle structure design. This research review on FLPs did not consider the papers published on cellular layouts, pick and drop points and aisle structure design. Despite the possibility of not being all-inclusive, the authors firmly believe that most of the papers published on FLPs are covered and the general picture presented on various approaches and parameters of FLPs in this paper are precise and trustworthy.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper reviews and classifies the literature on FLPs for the first time under the broader headings of discrete space and continuous space representations. Many important formulations of FLPs under static and dynamic environments represented in the discrete and continuous space are presented. This paper also provides the observations from the literature review and identifies the prospective future directions.

Stochastic simulation is a popular tool among practitioners and researchers alike for quantitative analysis of systems. Recent advancement in research on formulating production systems improvement problems into multi-objective optimizations has provided the possibility to predict the optimal trade-offs between improvement costs and system performance, before making the final decision for implementation. However, the fact that stochastic simulations rely on running a large number of replications to cope with the randomness and obtain some accurate statistical estimates of the system outputs, has posed a serious issue for using this kind of multi-objective optimization in practice, especially with complex models. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the performance enhancements of a reference point based evolutionary multi-objective optimization algorithm in practical production systems improvement problems, when combined with various dynamic re-sampling mechanisms.

Many algorithms consider the preferences of decision makers to converge to optimal trade-off solutions faster. There also exist advanced dynamic resampling procedures to avoid wasting a multitude of simulation replications to non-optimal solutions. However, very few attempts have been made to study the advantages of combining these two approaches to further enhance the performance of computationally expensive optimizations for complex production systems. Therefore, this paper proposes some combinations of preference-based guided search with dynamic resampling mechanisms into an evolutionary multi-objective optimization algorithm to lower both the computational cost in re-sampling and the total number of simulation evaluations.

This paper shows the performance enhancements of the reference-point based algorithm, R-NSGA-II, when augmented with three different dynamic resampling mechanisms with increasing degrees of statistical sophistication, namely, time-based, distance-rank and optimal computing buffer allocation, when applied to two real-world production system improvement studies. The results have shown that the more stochasticity that the simulation models exert, the more the statistically advanced dynamic resampling mechanisms could significantly enhance the performance of the optimization process.

Contributions of this paper include combining decision makers’ preferences and dynamic resampling procedures; performance evaluations on two real-world production system improvement studies and illustrating statistically advanced dynamic resampling mechanism is needed for noisy models.

Our study explores the performance implications of deviations in managers’ perceptions of “cultural distance” – one of the most important concepts in International Business research – when expanding into foreign markets. Despite much research on “cultural distance,” few researchers have paid attention to the effect of deviations in managers’ perceptions of cultural distance on firm performance. This is important since managers formulate strategies for responding to the environment based on their perceptions of the firm’s environment. These perceptions, however, do not always coincide with actual environmental characteristics. Therefore, formulating strategies based on inaccurate data may result in erroneous forecasts, missed opportunities and, ultimately, business failure. We explore this empirically by comparing managers’ perceptions of cultural distance to export markets of Swedish SMEs to cultural distance measures based on secondary data and relate deviations of perceptions to the performance of these SMEs. Our results show that the larger the deviations of managers’ perceptions of cultural differences from “actual differences” as expressed in Hofstede scores on cultural dimensions, the lower the performance expressed in firms’ sales. The implications of the study are discussed.

This paper seeks to propose a new non‐intrusive method for the assessment of speech quality of voice communication systems and evaluate its performance.

The method is based on measuring perception‐based objective auditory distances between the voiced parts of the output speech to appropriately matching references extracted from a pre‐formulated codebook. The codebook is formed by optimally clustering a large number of parametric speech vectors extracted from a database of clean speech records. The auditory distances are then mapped into equivalent subjective mean opinion scores (MOSs). The required clustering and matching processes are achieved by an efficient data‐mining tool known as the self‐organizing map (SOM). The proposed method was examined using a wide range of distortion including speech compression, wireless channel impairments, VoIP channel impairments, and modifications to the signal from features such as AGC.

The experimental results reported indicate that the proposed method provides a high level of accuracy in predicting the actual subjective quality of the speech. Specifically, the second version of the method, which is based on the use of bark spectrum (BS) analysis, is more accurate in predicting the MOS scores compared with its first and third versions (which are based on BS analysis and mel frequency cepstrum coefficients (MFCC), respectively), and outperforms the ITU‐T PESQ in a large number of test cases, particularly those related to distortion caused by channel impairments and signal level modifications.

It is believed that the prototype developed of the proposed objective speech quality measure is sufficiently accurate and robust against speaker, utterance and distortion type variations. Nevertheless, there are still possible directions for further improvements and enhancement. In general there are three areas that could be pursued for further improvements: widening the coverage of speaker variations of the system's codebook; formulating and using a perceptual speech model that provides true speaker‐independent representation of speech; and implementing the proposed measure as a stand‐alone system, preferably for real‐time applications.

Being an output‐based method, the proposed method can be employed for monitoring and assessing telecommunications networks under both live traffic conditions and off‐line evaluation.

The main contribution of this paper is the introduction of a new output‐based, non‐intrusive method for the assessment of speech quality that is sufficiently accurate and robust. To the best of the author's knowledge, no reliable output‐based objective speech quality assessment method has to date been reported or formally recognised.