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The purpose of this paper is to examine the key outage‐cost‐influencing applications (fault location and network restoration, fault reporting, field crew management, and reconfiguration) of the distribution management system (DMS) and analyzes the benefits provided by them. The objective of the study is an evaluation of their influence on outage costs deriving from the adoption of automatic equipment in managing distribution systems.

Cost and benefit calculations in this paper are made for a typical North European rural medium‐voltage network. The benefits are calculated in terms of outage costs for each of the above‐presented applications and compared with the investment cost, including the annual cost of maintenance, of the DMS. The empirical results and validation of the theoretical calculations are performed by an electric utility, where the DMS benefit evaluation is taking place.

By capitalizing the applications of the DMS, it is possible to acquire considerable benefits in outage costs. It is shown that the greatest cost‐based benefits are obtained from the fault location and field crew management applications. The case study further shows that the DMS can reduce the operation costs of utilities.

The calculations are based on network expert assumptions about System Average Interruption Duration (SAIDI), carried out for a specific overhead‐line network operating in a specific European rural medium‐voltage environment. Sharing of utilities' de facto SAIDI results as a basis for calculations would decrease the need for subjective expert assumptions in the future analyses.

Application of the proposed framework for decision making and lessons learned can support electric utilities when planning for unbundling and strategic target‐setting in the unbundled business model.

There are few reports available on similar actual DMS‐application‐based cost benefits due to the nature of private utility information that is preferably not disclosed.

Infrared simulation plays an important role in small and affordable unmanned aerial vehicles. Its key and main goal is to get the infrared image of a specific target. Infrared physical model is established through a theoretical research, thus the temperature field is available. Then infrared image of a specific target can be simulated properly while taking atmosphere state and effect of infrared imaging system into account. For recent years, some research has been done in this field. Among them, the infrared simulation for large scale is still a key problem to be solved. In this passage, a method of classification based on texture blending is proposed and this method effectively solves the problem of classification of large number of images and increase the frame rate of large infrared scene rendering. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Mosart Atmospheric Tool (MAT) is used first to calculate data of sun radiance, skyshine radiance, path radiance, temperatures of different material which is an offline process. Then, shader in OGRE does final calculation to get simulation result and keeps a high frame rate. Considering this, the authors convert data in MAT file into textures which can be easily handled by shader. In shader responding, radiance can be indexed by information of material, vertex normal, eye and sun. Adding the effect of infrared imaging system, the final radiance distribution is obtained. At last, the authors get infrared scene by converting radiance to grayscale.

In the fragment shader, fake infrared textures are used to look up temperature which can calculate radiance of itself and related radiance.

The radiance is transferred into grayscale image while considering effect of infrared imaging system.

Simulation results show that a high frame rate can be reached while guaranteeing the fidelity.

An innovative system to assemble television tube deflection units has won Philips Components Washington, UK plant the 1990 Queen's Award for Technological Achievement.

THE German Diehl Group has divisions producing: non‐ferrous metal products; clocks and watches; control systems; industrial machinery; ammunition; and track systems. It employs a total of more than 13,000 people.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the marketing‐supply chain management (SCM) interface in new product development (NPD) processes through a contingent approach.

The study endorses Thompson's taxonomy of interfaces – pooled interdependence, sequential interdependence and reciprocal interdependence – to classify the approaches observed through case study research on two innovation processes within the same unit. A number of contingent variables is hypothesized as possible factors impacting on the very interface adopted by the company. Thompson's taxonomy and the contingent variables constitute the conceptual framework of the study.

Results show that the conceptual framework provides encouraging results in interpreting the marketing‐SCM interface design by companies, even if some refinements, especially as far as the interface taxonomy are concerned, appear necessary to provide a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon.

Since the study is based on two cases, outcomes cannot be generalized. Nonetheless, the preliminary results and the rich understanding of the phenomenon provided by the in‐depth case studies suggested a number of research proposition to frame future research on the topic.

The paper observes the marketing‐SCM interface in a contingent way, providing a new interpretive framework for its analysis and design, and showing how the encouraged view in literature towards marketing‐SCM integration may be problematic and counterproductive in specific circumstances.

The most costly part in an open-pit mine is the transportation of material out of the mine. The efficiency of the truck-and-shovel fleet plays a major role in cost control. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The truck dispatching simulation model with consideration of age-based maintenance is proposed.

This paper underlines an impact of truck dispatching decisions and reveals remarkable differences in the total production under different approaches of operational availability. Additionally, the simulated results introduce an effective scheduled maintenance for different truck age levels.

The approach is based on a case study taking into account the stochastic equipment behavior and environment in a real open-pit mine. This approach can be used more generally in situations in which truck fleets are used to transport material.

Data integration is to combine data residing at different sources and to provide the users with a unified interface of these data. An important issue on data integration is the existence of conflicts among the different data sources. Data sources may conflict with each other at data level, which is defined as data inconsistency. The purpose of this paper is to aim at this problem and propose a solution for data inconsistency in data integration.

A relational data model extended with data source quality criteria is first defined. Then based on the proposed data model, a data inconsistency solution strategy is provided. To accomplish the strategy, fuzzy multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) approach based on data source quality criteria is applied to obtain the results. Finally, users feedbacks strategies are proposed to optimize the result of fuzzy MADM approach as the final data inconsistent solution.

To evaluate the proposed method, the data obtained from the sensors are extracted. Some experiments are designed and performed to explain the effectiveness of the proposed strategy. The results substantiate that the solution has a better performance than the other methods on correctness, time cost and stability indicators.

Since the inconsistent data collected from the sensors are pervasive, the proposed method can solve this problem and correct the wrong choice to some extent.

In this paper, for the first time the authors study the effect of users feedbacks on integration results aiming at the inconsistent data.

The Italian company Axis has extended its expertise. It has built a robotic line for a domestic appliance manufacturer, as Brian Rooks reports.

Universities have a new role in the commercialisation of knowledge (Etzkowitz, 1998). The new role began with science parks and increased collaboration in 1980s and, with other forms of commercialisation, broadened to licensing and spin-off creation in 1990s, which also involved students (Rasmussen, Moen, & Guldbransen, 2006). Commercialisation has led to a situation where a complex web of relations exists between higher education, spin-offs created by them and large firms. All together the progress has been important because the ‘commercialisation of knowledge connects the higher education to the users of the knowledge’ (Etzkowitz, 1998). The rise of the knowledge-based society also brings the creation of knowledge-intensive firms into focus. The aim of the chapter is to create more understanding how small technology-based Knowledge Intensive Business Service (KIBS) firms can have a new role in knowledge commercialisation. In this chapter, the innovation chain is considered as a continuum from basic research through applied research to product development and finally commercialisation. There still exists a ‘valley of death’ between research and commercialisation (Markham, 2002). Spin-offs are one means to cross it.

The purpose of the paper is to analyze the impact of coupling on the distribution of the magnetic field and study the characteristics of the magnetic flux density in the transmission process of the magnetic coupling resonant wireless power transmission (MCR-WPT) system, which provides guidance on the design of the WPT system.

In this study, a finite element simulation analysis was conducted and a three-dimensional (3D) electromagnetic field measurement platform was used.

It is shown that the distribution of the magnetic field, as well as the position of maximum magnetic flux density, will change when the coils are coupled. The simulation results of the magnetic field distribution, as well as the transmission performance, are different from those in practice. It cannot describe the actual performance of WPT system.

A 3D electromagnetic field measurement system and the host computer software are designed to help optimize the simulation and carry out more accurate and efficient research. The 3D electromagnetic field measurement system can be used to study the distribution of the spatial electromagnetic field, influencing factor, exposure and interoperability between different coils.