Search results

More than 33 million passenger cars were produced worldwide in 1987, 4.3 million of which were ‘Made in Germany’. In Germany the industry has taken the lead in recognising the importance of logistics for future competitiveness. Stefan Schmidt of BMW reviews the development of JIT in Japan and discusses its application in the automotive industry in the USA. He also presents the concept of materials supply at BMW and future developments in logistics.

This chapter utilizes German tax data to present evidence about the direct and indirect effects of new firm formation. Cohort analysis is applied to investigate survival, sales, inputs, and value added of start-up firms. Most dropouts occur in the early years. We show that start-up microenterprises increase economic vitality directly. Sales and value added are in an approximate proportion of 3:1. With respect to the indirect effects of new firms, we find that one Euro of sales induces considerable indirect effects because 66 Cents are used to buy products and services from incumbents. For this reason, new firms substantially promote economic prosperity of incumbents. Sectoral differences are also indicated, with the manufacturing industry generating highest sales and relying most heavily on inputs in the early periods.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new arc-length control method for physically non-linear problems based on the rates of the internal and the dissipated energy.

In this paper, the authors derive from the second law of thermodynamics the arc-length method based on the rate of the dissipated energy and from the time derivative of the energy density the arc-length method based on the rate of the internal energy.

The method requires only two parameters and can automatically trace equilibrium paths which display multiple snap-through and/or snap-back phenomena.

A fully energy-based control procedure is developed, which facilitates switching between dissipative and non-dissipative arc-length control equations in a natural way. The method is applied to a plate with an eccentric hole using the phase field model for brittle fracture and to a perforated beam using interface elements with decohesion.

The purpose of this paper is to understand determinants of food waste through analysing patterns of practices including shopping, planning, consumption of leftovers and attitudes around best-before dates.

A survey and waste composition analysis of 142 households was conducted in the City of Toronto. Bivariate analyses and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) using a structural equation model were used to identify relationships between per capita food waste, household socio-demographic characteristics and household food practices.

Constructs related to planning practices and best-before date practices were identified through the CFA. Household size and the best-before construct were negatively correlated with per capita food waste. The planning construct had no correlation, which may be attributed to the influence of the retail environment in encouraging unplanned purchases. The best-before construct was significantly correlated with the presence of children in the home, an indicator of the compromises that parents make in domestic provisioning to ensure healthy foods for their children, such as more caution in handling items after their best-before dates.

This is the first study of its kind that uses directly measured per capita food waste from a waste composition study in a structural equation model with a construct related to best-before dates to determine drivers of food waste. It is also the first to find that children in the home can have an indirect influence on food waste through the household's best-before practices.

The trend in the automotive industry is towards highly differentiated production of small lots. The authors discuss (optimising the supply and positioning of material for car assembly.)

The use of explicit finite difference schemes for low Stefan number problems with moving interface was largely abandoned because they require small time intervals (large CPU time) to obtain accurate non‐oscillatory solutions. This paper uses these type of schemes for better estimations of the dynamics of the solid—liquid interface. The scheme in which time and radial intervals are constant, uses a local, continuous, time‐dependent radial coordinate to define the instantaneous location of the interface. Taylor series expansions which result in a polynomial fit are used for forward and backward interpolation of temperatures of nodal points in the vicinity of the interface. A distinction is made between the left and right position of the interface relative to the closest nodal point. The algorithm handles accurately and effectively the non‐linearities near the interface thus producing accurate stable solutions with relatively low CPU time. The scheme which obviously may be applied to large Stefan number problems, is also suitable for time dependent boundary conditions as well as temperature dependent physical properties. The results obtained by the scheme were in excellent agreement with ones derived from an approximate analytical solution which is applicable in the low Stefan number range.