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The purpose of this paper is to propose a three-staged approach to configuration change management that uses a combination of complexity analysis, data visualization, and algorithmic validation to assist in validating configuration changes.

In order to accomplish the above purpose, the authors conducted a review of existing configuration management practices. This was followed by an in-depth case study of the configuration management practices of a major automotive OEM. The primary means of data collection for the case study were interviews, ethnographic study, and document analysis. Based on the results of the case study, a set of support tools is proposed to assist in the configuration management process.

Through the case study, the authors identified that the OEM used a configuration management method that largely represented the rule-based reasoning methods identified in the literature review. In addition, many of the associated challenges are present, primarily, the difficulty in making changes to the rule system and evaluating the changes.

The primary limitation is that the case study was based on a single OEM. However, the results are in line with other practices identified in the literature review. Therefore, it is expected that the findings and recommendations should hold true in other applications.

A set of configuration management tools and associated requirements are identified and defined that could be used to assist companies in the automotive industry, and perhaps others, in managing their option changes as they continue to move towards full mass customization of products.

The proposed approach for configuration management has not been seen in any other organization. The value of this paper is in the effectiveness of the proposed approach in assisting in the configuration change management process.

Because much human knowledge consists of elementary fragments of know‐how, applying a significant amount of knowledge requires new ways to organize decision‐making fragments into competent wholes. Knowledge systems collect these fragments in a knowledge base and then access the knowledge base to reason about each specific problem. As a consequence, knowledge systems differ from conventional programs in the way they're organized, the way they incorporate knowledge, the way they execute, and the impression they create through their interactions. Knowledge systems simulate expert human performance, and they present a humanlike facade to the user.

Examines the product design and manufacturing literature to understand why consumer products of daily use often fail to provide the intended function to users’ satisfaction. The review shows that the bulk of published literature addressing functionality and functional representation deals with mechanical systems design, and there are issues that directly affect the consumer that are yet to be accommodated in current research in functional representation. The literature also reveals that very few of the product design support systems have been tested on real design cases, or have been developed and tested using real designers in manufacturing environments – this issue needs serious consideration if efficient designer aids are to be developed in the future. Also, there is relatively little that has been done to develop tools to evaluate alternative design solutions. It is also apparent from this review that the main research focus has been on providing function, rather than on ensuring function in a product that is eventually manufactured.

Three-dimensional digital design and manufacturing technology are changing the current manufacturing pattern and have become the core of enterprise competition. However, the research and application of three-dimensional digital technology in the present phase have a strong bias toward the design of three-dimensional model and focus little on process planning. It restricts the development of manufacturing industry. Therefore, this paper aims to present a design scheme of three-dimensional digital process planning.

A three-dimensional digital process design method is developed by combining model-based definition technology and knowledge engineering technology. Model-based definition technology is used to display the process information. And knowledge engineering technology is used for process decision; meanwhile, ontology technology is introduced to describe process knowledge. And taking shaft part as an example, this paper establishes the general ontology of manufacturing process and the special ontology of shaft. This research provides an available method for the three-dimensional digital process planning.

Traditional process planning mainly is based on two-dimensional engineering drawing, which leads to the low efficiency and quality of process planning. Moreover, it cannot achieve effective mining and management of knowledge. Thus, applying an effective knowledge management technology into a three-dimensional process system is necessary.

This paper contributes to an available method for three-dimensional digital process planning.

The introduction of model-based definition technology makes process information display in three-dimensional environment. And ontology technology achieves sematic reference and efficient management of process knowledge.

Online shopping cart abandonment presents a major problem for online fashion apparel retailers today. This exploratory research aims to validate scales that measure antecedents of online shopping cart abandonment (OSCA) and examine how these reasons contribute to OSCA behaviour. The findings indicated that the eight different reasons (financial reasons, organisational tool, time pressure, intangibility, privacy issues, aesthetic design, social influences and entertainment factors) that drive OSCA are distinct and account for unique variance in the model, validating the measures. Also, the findings revealed that financial reasons and using the cart as an organisational tool are the top two reasons why consumers abandon their carts. This study provides researchers with a better theoretical understanding of the reasons why consumers abandon their online shopping carts. It validates the various reasons why consumers abandon their shopping carts and provides valuable managerial insights on how online marketers may enhance the translation of online browsing behaviour into actual purchases.

As the number of citation management tools including Refworks and EndNote increased in recent years, academic libraries struggle to remain on top of new developments and support all of the tools used by their users. This paper seeks to address these issues.

A librarian at the University of Illinois surveyed graduate students and faculty about which tools they use, reasons for tool adoption, features that influence adoption, and support they expect from their library.

The results highlight that many users still use older tools including EndNote and RefWorks, but do have interests for and reasons to use new tools including Zotero and Mendeley and may not need as much library support as librarians believe.

This is the first research paper on citation management use and can influence what products libraries use and the support they offer.

This study, by critically analyzing material from multiple sources, aims to provide an overview of what is available on evaluation tools for educational apps for children. To realize this objective, a systematic literature review was conducted to search all English literature published after January 2010 in multiple electronic databases and internet sources. Various combinations of search strings were used due to database construction differences, while the results were cross-referenced to discard repeated references, obtaining those that met the criteria for inclusion.

The present study was conducted according to the methods provided by Khan et al. (2003) and Thomé et al. (2016). The whole procedure included four stages: planning the review, identifying relevant studies in the literature, critical analysis of the literature, summarizing and interpreting the findings (Figure 1). Furthermore, in this analysis, a well-known checklist, PRISMA, was also used as a recommendation (Moher et al., 2015).

These review results reveal that, although there are several evaluation tools, in their majority they are not considered adequate to help teachers and parents to evaluate the pedagogical affordances of educational apps correctly and easily. Indeed, most of these tools are considered outdated. With the emergence of new issues such as General Data Protection Regulation, the quality criteria and methods for assessing children's products need to be continuously updated and adapted (Stoyanov et al., 2015). Some of these tools might be considered as good beginnings, but their “limited dimensions make generalizable considerations about the worth of apps” (Cherner, Dix and Lee, 2014, p. 179). Thus, there is a strong need for effective evaluation tools to help parents and teachers when choosing educational apps (Callaghan and Reich, 2018).

Even though this work is performed by following the systematic mapping guideline, threats to the validity of the results presented still exist. Although custom strings that contained a rich collection of data were used to search for papers, potentially relevant publications that would have been missed by the advanced search might exist. It is recommended that at least two different reviewers should independently review titles, abstracts and later full papers for exclusion (Thomé et al., 2016). In this study, only one reviewer – the author – selected the papers and did the review. In the case of a single researcher, Kitchenham (2004) recommends that the single reviewer should consider discussing included and excluded papers with an expert panel. The researcher, following this recommendation, discussed the inclusion and exclusion procedure with an expert panel of two professionals with research experience from the Department of (removed for blind review). To deal with publication bias, the researcher in conjunction with the expert panel used the search strategies identified by Kitchenham (2004) including: Grey literature, conference proceedings, communicating with experts working in the field for any unpublished literature.

The purpose of this study was not to advocate any evaluation tool. Instead, the study aims to make parents, educators and software developers aware of the various evaluation tools available and to focus on their strengths, weaknesses and credibility. This study also highlights the need for a standardized app evaluation (Green et al., 2014) via reliable tools, which will allow anyone interested to evaluate apps with relative ease (Lubniewski et al., 2018). Parents and educators need a reliable, fast and easy-to-use tool for the evaluation of educational apps that is more than a general guideline (Lee and Kim, 2015). A new generation of evaluation tools would also be used as a reference among the software developers, designers to create educational apps with real educational value.

The results of this study point to the necessity of creating new evaluation tools based on research, either in the form of rubrics or checklists to help educators and parents to choose apps with real educational value.

However, to date, no systematic review has been published summarizing the available app evaluation tools. This study, by critically analyzing material from multiple sources, aims to provide an overview of what is available on evaluation tools for educational apps for children.

The goal of this paper is to provide contributions aimed at illustrating how the autonomic computing concept may be applied within a multi‐path transport protocol called multi‐path TCP (MPTCP) with the aim of providing as high as possible a quality of service (QoS) for mobile and multimedia applications.

The paper's general vision is to define how to use the general IBM Autonomic framework for the design of a new and generic autonomous transport layer aimed at fitting as best as possible both QoS requirements and network constraints.

Several QoS‐aware mechanisms are proposed and evaluated and an ontology‐based semantic model for the dynamic discovery of MPTCP mechanisms is also presented. This work was done within the A2NETS project funded by the ITEA 2 program, a strategic pan‐European program for advanced pre‐competitive research and development (R&D). A2NETS aims at developing a set of common services for M2M devices communicating within heterogeneous networks.

The originality of this paper is the study of the QoS benefits induced by the implementation of the “partial reliability” concept in MPTCP for interactive video applications based on the codec H.264. The second contribution of the paper is that it deals with the decision process that has to be enforced to provide such an adaptable MPTCP with self‐autonomic capabilities. Towards this goal, a semantic ontology‐based model has been proposed allowing to classify and to define clearly the semantic of the different QoS‐oriented mechanisms that have been proposed for MPTCP. This ontology is aimed at being used by the autonomic manager during the decision process step.

In recent times, the idea of taking advantage of the benefits of simulation techniques and Six Sigma discipline altogether has led various organizations towards implementation of simulation tools within Six Sigma methodology. The purpose of this study is to provide a more comprehensive literature review on the topic exploring how this amalgamation could work both in theory and practice. This precisely entailed finding dependable studies that shows how Six Sigma (DMAIC) Methodology can be enhanced by the three prevalent simulation techniques; Agent-Based (AB), Discrete-Events (DE), System Dynamics (SD).

A systematic literature review was considered more fitting in research because it involves rigorous and well-defined approach compared to other forms of literature review. In this case, the literature was comprehensive, well-encompassing and involved finding Six Sigma and Simulations literatures from reputable scholarly databases. The outcome of these reviews was the identification of a set of key finding compiled and classified by topics. The study follows an inductive approach and utilises a meta-synthesis review technique.

As numerous studies assert, simulation techniques including AB, DE and SD are applicable tools in almost every stage of DMAIC, especially the Analyse, Improve and Control phases, because of their capability to test and identify potential bottlenecks and improvement areas. Findings show that the simulation tools such as CLDs, Group Model Building, Dynamic Balance Scorecards and Cost of poor quality all have the potential to add value to a Six Sigma methodology.

The findings of this study highlight the importance of further inquiry in this area of study. The finding of this study suggests that although the study on the integration of Six Sigma and simulations is increasing, empirical evidence on its effectiveness is still limited. Therefore, this study suggests more roadmaps and investigations aimed at merging Six Sigma methodology and various simulation technique. Moreover, studies that centre on hybrid or multi-method simulations within Six Sigma are also urgently necessitated.

The purpose of this paper is to present a method for assisting micro and small companies of the industrial sector with the adoption of Lean practices.

The paper outlines the method construction steps, which used a design science research approach.

This research led to the structuring of a method for implementing Lean Manufacturing tools in micro and small companies of the industrial sector. The developed method contributed to the knowledge in Lean Manufacturing by systematizing its tools in a heuristic approach that can be applied to an operation using overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) as a guiding indicator.

This method can be used to guide the implementation of Lean tools in SMEs industries.

The originality of this paper lies in the adoption of an operation-focused approach only (rather than an approach that begins with the mapping of an entire process) and the use of OEE as the basis for prioritization of improvements to be performed and operational control.