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An Activity-Based Costing (ABC) system generates a significant amount of detailed, complex data for management to evaluate and use, potentially reducing decision-making effectiveness. The purpose of this paper is to show how reducing the magnitude of detailed information that an ABC system provides can increase decision-making effectiveness.

This study develops a theoretical Weighted Average ABC model by taking ABC information and rearranging it to enhance decision-making effectiveness.

Weighted Average ABC provides cost assignments that are approximately the same to those of ABC in most situations. In Weighted Average ABC, the weighted average consumption ratios provide relevant decision-making information to determine which products are costlier. To reduce costs, management can focus on those costlier products or services and can request from the cost accountants additional detailed information concerning those costlier products or services.

This study adds to the ABC literature by developing Weighted Average ABC. However, the limitation of this study is that no actual data could be obtained from a company that uses ABC, and thus, this study develops an analytical model.

Weighted Average ABC may increase decision-making effectiveness in situations when managers need to make fast decisions.

This study develops a theoretical Weighted Average ABC model in which the weighted average activity consumption ratios of the product lines and the total overhead costs are the variables needed, thus skipping Stage 1 of ABC. This, in turn, reduces the amount of information provided to management. Accordingly, weighted Average ABC provides timelier and more manageable information for decision making.

The purpose of this paper is to study the moving consensus of multi‐agent dynamical systems with time delays and directed weighted networks.

The approach used in the study, the topologies of multi‐agent dynamical systems with directed weighted networks is graph theories. The frequency domain is applied to research the movement characteristics of multi‐agent systems with time delays. The generalized Nyquist criterion and curvature theorem are utilized to analyze the consensus algorithm with heterogeneous input delays and heterogeneous communication delays.

It was discovered that the consensus for the delayed multi‐agent systems with asymmetric coupling weights can be achieved with the hypothesis of directed weighted network composed of n agents with a globally reachable node. The convergence condition is a decentralized consensus condition which uses only local information of each agent.

The novelty associated with this work is to present a new approach to study the consensus of delayed multi‐agent dynamical systems with directed weighted networks. The consensus condition obtained in the paper is less conservative than the consensus condition given in references.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the reliability indices such as reliability, mean time to failure and sensitivity analysis.

A non-repairable multi-state complex system with two subsystems, namely, S₁ and S₂, is studied. The subsystems S₁ and S₂ are multi-state weighted r-out-of-n: G and s-out-of-m: G systems, respectively. Every component of the sub-system S₁ consists of linear (f, l, k): G system, and the sub-system S₂ consists of circular (f, l, k): G system. The subsystems are connected in series arrangement and components of these subsystems are arranged in parallel.

Markov stochastic process has been applied to obtain probability of components of the subsystems and various results discuss such as reliability, mean time to failure and sensitivity analysis with the help of the universal generating function.

In this work, reliability measures of the purpose system can be enhanced under the high profit.

To find the reliability characteristics of repairable weighted (u, v)- out-of-(x, y) system using the interval valued universal generating function (IUGF).

In this paper (u, v)-out-of-(x, y) system is an extension of the k-out-of-n system. Here, the interval valued universal generating function (UGF) is present and the corresponding operators are defined.

The present paper proposes a interval valued universal generating function (IUGF) to compute the reliability indices of the considered system. The current study investigates the reliability and sensitivity of the proposed system with respect to system parameters by applying Markov process with the help of the interval valued UGF approach.

In this work, the considered system, i.e. repairable weighted (u, v)-of-the- (x, y) is the extension of k-out-of-n system for the assessment of reliability characteristics using the interval valued UGF.

Most firms select their information technology outsourcing (ITO) vendors based on the two methods of the weighted-criteria evaluation technique – the “qualification score plus the lowest bid price for the highest price score (QS-LBHPS)” and the “qualification score plus the average bid price for the middle price score (QS-ABMPS).” This paper aims to understand whether these two methods provide the same or different results of vendor selection and how the proportional weights of a vendor's qualification and bid price affect the vendor selection results under the two methods.

–In total, 1,000 experimental tests were carried out using the developed spreadsheet template to examine vendor selection results of the two methods (QS-LBHPS and QS-ABMPS) and compare the vendor selection results under three conditions of vendors’ qualification and price weights. A correspondence analysis was also used to determine the proximal relationships among the selection results of the weighted criteria technique under the comparable methods.

The results indicate that, when using the two methods of the weighted criteria technique for a vendor selection, the selection results are significantly correspondent. In addition, the proportions of qualification and price weights affect the selection results under the two methods. The different proportions of qualification and price weights under the two methods yield the same selection results rather than different results.

This study fills the gap in ITO literatures concerning the vendor selection strategy. No empirical studies have been undertaken to compare the results of vendor selection under the two methods of the weighted-criteria evaluation technique. The findings enable a firm's selection team to apply the weighted-criteria evaluation technique effectively and realize that vendor selection results are altered based on the predefined proportions of qualification and price weights.

Briefly reviews previous literature by the author before presenting an original 12 step system integration protocol designed to ensure the success of companies or countries in their efforts to develop and market new products. Looks at the issues from different strategic levels such as corporate, international, military and economic. Presents 31 case studies, including the success of Japan in microchips to the failure of Xerox to sell its invention of the Alto personal computer 3 years before Apple: from the success in DNA and Superconductor research to the success of Sunbeam in inventing and marketing food processors: and from the daring invention and production of atomic energy for survival to the successes of sewing machine inventor Howe in co‐operating on patents to compete in markets. Includes 306 questions and answers in order to qualify concepts introduced.

This paper aims to propose a trust-based ant-colony recommender system. It achieves high accuracy and coverage by integrating the importance level of friends. This paper has two main contributions, namely, selecting higher-quality raters and improving the prediction step. From these two contributions, the proposed trust-based ant-colony recommender system could provide more accurate and wider-coverage prediction than existing systems.

To obtain higher-quality raters, the data set was preprocessed, and then, trust values were calculated. The depth of search was increased to obtain higher coverage levels. This work also focuses on the importance level of friends in the system. Because the levels of influence on the active user of all friends are not equal, the importance level of friends is integrated into the system by transposing rater’s rating to the active user’s perspective and then assigning a weight to each rater.

The experimental evaluation clearly demonstrates that the proposed method achieves better results in terms of both accuracy and coverage than existing trust-based recommender systems. It was found that integrating the importance level of friends into the system, which transposes ratings and assigns weight to each user, can increase accuracy and coverage.

Existing trust-based ant-colony recommender systems do not consider the importance level of friends in the prediction step. Most of them only focus on finding raters and then using the rater’s real ratings in the prediction step. A new method is proposed that integrates the importance level of friends into the system by transposing a rater’s rating to match the active user’s perspective and assigning a weight for each rater. The experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed method achieves better accuracy and coverage than existing systems.