Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The purpose of this paper is to propose a decision making model for the Taiwanese shipping logistics company in China to select the best container distribution center location. The representation of multiplication operation on fuzzy numbers is useful for the decision makers to solve the fuzzy multiple criteria decision making problems of container distribution center location selection. In the past, few papers discussed the representation of multiplication operation on multiple fuzzy numbers. Thus this paper first compute and obtain the representation of multiplication operation on multiple fuzzy numbers. Based on this representation, the decision maker can rank quickly the ordering of each alternative location and then select easily the best one. Finally, the representation of multiplication operation on multiple fuzzy numbers is applied to solve the fuzzy multiple criteria decision making problem of container distribution center location selection in China.

The article explores how mobile, nomadic and distributed workers develop a sense of to counter the lack of spatial determinants which increasingly characterize contemporary work and lifestyles. When developing collaborative technologies, designing for a sense of place becomes especially problematic when spatial realities and empirical coordinates are absent or no longer take precedence. What is lacking in the current knowledge is a coherent workplace approach that can offer an overview of placeness, delineating not only the core understandings of place but more importantly where these overlap and at times conflict. The intention of this article, therefore, is to present an approach that captures how key features of place as opposed to space, can be used as a motivation for the design of collaborative technologies. Most importantly, this approach must explain how the concept of place and its distinction from space can provide new understandings of the public, private and permanent places of work that help us to sustain productivity in the workplace. These at once discrete and overlapping concepts help to frame the key research questions: where is work? What constitutes a place of work? Who works there?

A routine work requires few skills, so employees can be skilled easily. Therefore, the productivity and the quality of work greatly depend on employees’ work motivation. However, as a routine work is often not interesting to almost all employees originally, a method for promoting and keeping employees’ work motivation is required for keeping or increasing the productivity and the quality of work. Therefore, the objective of this study is to develop the method for promoting employees’ work motivation in a routine work especially with an affective interface and applying the persuasion technique.

This paper presents a case study on developing a smart user interface for supporting the adjustment works on automated weighing machines of computer-controlled multihead weighers. Based upon the theoretical and practical framework of Vicente and Rasmussen’s Ecological Interface Design (EID), we clarified the functional structure of the work domain in terms of the means-end relations, and visualized it on the screen displays to encourage the human operator’s “direct perception” of the meanings or values of his practicable actions to those automated processes. Comparative experiments using test subjects with a variety of skill levels confirmed the effectiveness of the redesigned user interface that can facilitate unskilled operators appropriately evaluating and effectively responding to their immediate work situations, and that will take the place of the experts’ knowledge and insights on the works as one of the distributed resources for cognition.

Experts have issued directives for snow clearance in snowy regions.These directives are implemented in accordance with the experience of the director in charge, and snowplow drivers are reliant on directors to carry out their tasks efficiently. However, many experienced directors will be retiring when they reach retirement age in the next few years and their successors will be faced with difficult circumstances because of a lack of training and experience. In order to provide support to such neophyte directors, we propose a case-based directive support system, which reuses past directive cases. Each such case stores data on weather, snow, number of snowplows available, the time taken to complete a snow clearance task and an evaluation of the tasks carried out by the director. When a neophyte director specifies current task conditions, the system searches and presents cases similar to the current conditions. When the director selects the most similar case, the system estimates the time required to complete the snow clearance task, based on the snow and road conditions. The director can also manage the progress of snow clearance tasks with the system.

This research investigates the relationship between working conditions and musculoskeletal disorders in an assembly facility. I believe that the physical and psychosocial aspects of work have a significant influence on the individual worker’s health and well-being. The work organization at which I evaluated the employee’s health and well-being was at a large manufacturing assembly facility. This research is based upon the Balance Theory Model of Smith & Carayon-Sainfort [5, 6].The overall aim of this research is to improve the long term health and well being of worker’s in a manufacturing assembly facility. The overall purpose of this research is to try to identify the stressful working condition and attempt to control it. By trying to control the various musculoskeletal disorders in the work environment, you should also attempt to reduce or eliminate the level of stress, and to try to reduce or eliminate the level of strain.

Sales at retail stores in Japan have been declining for various reasons. One important factor has been a steady diversification in the lifestyles and needs of customers. If a retail store is to sustain itself and continue developing, it must search for the latent demands of customers and adapt itself to accommodate those demands. A support system for store improvement capable of viewing specific improvement plans will prove useful as a tool for improving stores on a sustainable basis. In this research we develop a method for generating effective store-improvement plans to accommodate actual customer demands. The method employs both Text Mining and Conjoint Analysis techniques. We also demonstrate a sequence and a test run of a prototype.

Process control in control rooms is currently in a state of technological flux driven by recent developments in information technology. The continual integration of new control devices carries with it the risk of overburdening the human operators, with a major source of danger here being information input overload. This article addresses this phenomenon and the implications for user-centered process control.

In this study, we discuss a brick-and-mortar sales (the existing sales method through the sales channel 1) and an online sales under an e-commerce environment (the sales channel 2). We focus on each differences of goods return ratios and delivery lead-times to a customer through both sales channels for a selling period. Concretely, we consider a parallel sales method that the sales channel 2 is newly incorporated into the sales channel 1. In the parallel sales method, a manufacturer incurs returns processing costs and fixed system operational costs for both the sales channels. For an appropriate selection ratio to the sales channel 2, the additional system operational costs in the parallel sale method could be retrieved, and it could lead to improving the profit to the manufacturer. Utility of the parallel sales method is investigated from each difference of goods return rates and delivery lead-times between both the sales channels by comparing the expected profit of the manufacturer adopting the existing sales method with that adopting the parallel sales method.

A lighting control method has been proposed which adjusts the circadian rhythms of office workers and eliminates a decrease in the arousal level in the afternoon by exposing a high intensity of light in the morning in order to improve their productivity. As a result, it was found that the task performance of the CPTOP test under 2,100 lx was significantly higher than that under 700 lx and more than a 9% improvement of task performance was achieved. Furthermore, a demonstration experiment has been conducted in order to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed lighting control method in actual office rooms. As a result, it was confirmed that the performance of their accounting work was over 10% higher than under normal conditions.