Research Paper
Manufacturing and Logistics
Robert S Keyser
Abstract
Root cause analysis techniques are often applied to problems in the workplace; however, they may also prove very useful when applied to home projects. This research explores the application of root cause analysis techniques in three home projects: (1) Cause-and-Effect diagram to remove Palmetto bugs ...
Read More
Root cause analysis techniques are often applied to problems in the workplace; however, they may also prove very useful when applied to home projects. This research explores the application of root cause analysis techniques in three home projects: (1) Cause-and-Effect diagram to remove Palmetto bugs in a condo dwelling, (2) Five Whys method to repair a sunroof water leak in a car, and (3) Fault Tree Analysis to repair a Toro string trimmer that starts, then dies. The effective use of root cause analysis techniques can have a meaningful impact on resolving home project issues resulting in a restoration of homeowner issues as well as reduced homeowner anxiety, repair time, and repair cost.
Research Paper
Supply chain management
Maryam Dehghanbaghi; Azadeh Dabbaghi
Abstract
After the second-hand products return to the second-hand markets, either goods, parts, or materials are reused or disposed. For optimum sales, these products are under the process of determining the optimal warranty period and warranty policy, so that both the seller's profit and the consumer's profit ...
Read More
After the second-hand products return to the second-hand markets, either goods, parts, or materials are reused or disposed. For optimum sales, these products are under the process of determining the optimal warranty period and warranty policy, so that both the seller's profit and the consumer's profit are met. Therefore, estimating the warranty costs for future claims on second-hand products is very necessary. In this paper, a hybrid stochastic model is presented to improve the reliability of second-hand products under the free repair replacement warranty policy to determine the level of upgrade, with the aim of reducing warranty costs. Using the upgrade actions, the model, based on three approaches, minimal-perfect repair, virtual age, and improvement factor, is developed for estimating the warranty costs of second-hand products. The contribution of this research is the application of three upgrade approaches in the warranty cost model simultaneously to estimate the warranty costs and optimum upgrade level more realistic. Finally, under different product lifetime, a numerical example and sensitivity analysis are provided. Evaluation is presented in four lifetimes for second-hand products ranging from one to four years for which the optimum upgrade level and the warranty period are determined. The results show that the higher the level of second-hand product upgrades to a certain extent, the higher the savings, but the more upgrades are not cost-effective for second-hand products.
Research Paper
Supply chain management
Ali Mansory; Abbas Nasiri; Nabiollah Mohammadi
Abstract
The main purpose of this paper is to identify the traditional, green and effective resilience criteria in the performance of green and resilient suppliers and their ranking with path analysis, SWARA and TOPSIS combined approach in Fanavaran Petrochemical Company. The research method is applied in terms ...
Read More
The main purpose of this paper is to identify the traditional, green and effective resilience criteria in the performance of green and resilient suppliers and their ranking with path analysis, SWARA and TOPSIS combined approach in Fanavaran Petrochemical Company. The research method is applied in terms of goal and descriptive-survey in terms of data collection. By a comprehensive review of the literature, first a set of key performance criteria and sub-criteria (traditional, green, and resilience) were extracted. Then, using the path analysis approach, the effectiveness of these criteria was evaluated in Fanavaran Petrochemical Company. The statistical population included 55 experts of the mentioned company, which due to the limited size of the population, all members were considered as the research sample. The path analysis result showed that all identified criteria affect the company’s supplier’s performance. Then, using new SWARA decision-making technique and also the opinions of 30 experts, the criteria and sub-criteria were evaluated and their weight (importance) was extracted. In the final evaluation of the main criteria, the criterion of “resilience” was in the first rank, the criterion of “green” in the second rank and the criterion of “traditional” in the last rank. Subsequently, due to the sensitivity of the ranking of green and resilient suppliers in the company, using the TOPSIS decision-making technique and based on the extractive weight of the criteria, seven suppliers of the company were evaluated by the experts and the final ranking of the suppliers in terms of performance was determined. Thus, the proposed approach of this research provides a valuable conceptual framework for company’ managers to improve the situation of the suppliers in terms of the environmental issues and resilience. Also, the development and improvement of traditional criteria and selection of suppliers of the company based on green standards and resilience were the main goals of this research.
Research Paper
Human factors, ergonomics, and safety
S. V. S. Raja Prasad
Abstract
Safety audit is a system for evaluating the adherence of an occupational safety and health plan to fulfill statutory requirements with prior planning. Safety audit planning is the predetermining activity of what, how, where, when and by whom the audit will be carried out to achieve its objective. Safety ...
Read More
Safety audit is a system for evaluating the adherence of an occupational safety and health plan to fulfill statutory requirements with prior planning. Safety audit planning is the predetermining activity of what, how, where, when and by whom the audit will be carried out to achieve its objective. Safety audit planning is a complex process and an anticipatory function which will provide audit activity on time with the least audit risk and cost by assigning the auditors with the required ability and skill level to the activities to be audited. In general, the safety audit planning is based on the professional judgment of a lead auditor by considering the qualitative characteristics of the auditors. However, the audit planning is possible by framing a mathematical model with an assumption that the auditors possess similar characteristics. The objective of the study is to optimize the safety audit planning by allocating auditors to activities using a linear programming model so as to minimize the audit cost; which is not possible with statistical tools. The study was conducted in an integrated cement plant located in India and the results of the study show that the number of hours and the activity of the auditors was specified with a minimum cost. Similar studies can be conducted to optimize time and cost of safety audit for industrial units involving more number of activities with large batch size of auditors by planning the audit process in advance.
Research Paper
Facility location, layout, design, and materials handling
Jafar Fathali; Morteza Nazari; Kobra Mahdvar
Abstract
In this paper, we discuss the obnoxious and semi-obnoxious version of the backup 2-median problem on a tree. In the obnoxious case of the 2-median problem, all vertices have negative weights, whereas in the semi-obnoxious model the vertices may have either positive or negative weights. In these two problems, ...
Read More
In this paper, we discuss the obnoxious and semi-obnoxious version of the backup 2-median problem on a tree. In the obnoxious case of the 2-median problem, all vertices have negative weights, whereas in the semi-obnoxious model the vertices may have either positive or negative weights. In these two problems, we should find the location of two facility servers on the tree so that the sum of minimum weighted distances from vertices in the tree to the set of functioning servers is minimized. In the backup model, each facility server may probably fail. If a facility server fails, the remaining server should serve the clients. Vertex optimality is an important property for the 2-median problem. This property indicates that the set of vertices involves an optimal solution of the 2-median problem. We verify that the vertex optimality holds for the semi-obnoxious backup 2-median problem on a tree network. In the obnoxious 2-median problem, the set of leaves contains an optimal solution, we show that this property does not hold for the obnoxious backup 2-median problem.
Review Paper
Computational Intelligence
Vishakha Arora; Afnas T
Abstract
Face Recognition has received a great deal of attention over the past few years and has become one of the most researched and spoken topics. It is a kind of automated biometric distinguishing approach that recognizes an individual based on their facial characteristics. The main aim of face reorganization ...
Read More
Face Recognition has received a great deal of attention over the past few years and has become one of the most researched and spoken topics. It is a kind of automated biometric distinguishing approach that recognizes an individual based on their facial characteristics. The main aim of face reorganization is to implement the system for a particular face and distinguish it from a large number of stored faces with some real-time variations as well. Face recognition is in trend these days, the main reason being its efficiency and vast applications in day to day life. *Most* all the Telecom companies provide an option to unlock the phones by recognizing the face, which is a time saver and gives protection from theft as well. There are many more such applications of this technique that will be discussed in this paper along with the methods used for face recognition.
Research Paper
Engineering Modeling
Laith O. Mazahreh; Ibrahim Mousa Abu-Alshaikh
Abstract
In this paper, layerwise finite element analysis for the bending behavior of two-dimensional functionally graded layered plates with different boundary conditions is presented. The plates consist of three layers; a functionally graded layer embedded between ceramic and metal isotropic layers. The layerwise ...
Read More
In this paper, layerwise finite element analysis for the bending behavior of two-dimensional functionally graded layered plates with different boundary conditions is presented. The plates consist of three layers; a functionally graded layer embedded between ceramic and metal isotropic layers. The layerwise approach is based on the third-order shear deformation theory for the middle layer, while the first-order shear deformation theory is used for both the upper and lower isotropic layers. A quadrilateral 8-noded element with 13-degrees of freedom per node is used for this purpose. The present results show very good agreements with the published results for similar problems in literature solved by other methods of plates consist of either single or layered functionally graded plates.
