Achieving A Competitive Advantage Supply Chain Management Practices and Responsiveness

Today's business environment is highly competitive and globalized, characterized by shorter product life cycles and demanding customers. As a result, supply chains must be responsive to changes in the marketplace to maintain and create a competitive advantage. While previous studies have acknowledged the advantages of effective supply chain management (SCM) in gaining a competitive edge, there remains a limited understanding of the implications of adopting various SCM practices. To address this gap, this conceptual study focuses on examining the relationship between SCM practices (strategic supplier partnership, customer relationship, information sharing, and postponement) and both supply chain responsiveness and competitive advantage within the Malaysian timber industry. The study integrates the Resources Based View (RBV), Dynamic Capabilities theory, and Natural Resource-Based View (NRBV) theory

Queuing analysis and optimization of public vehicle transport stations: A case of South West Ethiopia region vehicle stations

Modern urban environments present a dynamically growing field where, notwithstanding shared goals, several mutually conflicting interests frequently collide. However, it has a big impact on the city's socioeconomic standing, waiting lines and queues are common occurrences. This results in extremely long lines for vehicles and people on incongruous routes, service coagulation, customer murmuring, unhappiness, complaints, and looking for other options, sometimes illegally. The root cause is corruption, which leads to traffic jams, stops and packs vehicles beyond their safe carrying capacity, and violates passengers' human rights and freedoms. This study focused on optimizing the time passengers had to wait in public vehicle stations. This applied research employed both data-gathering sources and mixed approaches. Then, 166 samples of key informants of transport stations were taken using the Slovin sampling formula. The time vehicles, including the drivers and auxiliary drivers ‘Weyala', had to wait was also studied. To maximize the service level at vehicle stations, a queuing model was subsequently devised ‘Menaharya’. Time, cost, and quality encompass performance, scope, and suitability for the intended purposes. The study also focused on determining the minimal response time required for passengers and vehicles queuing to reach their ultimate destinations within the transportation stations in Tepi, Mizan, and Bonga. A new bus station system was modeled and simulated by Arena simulation software in the chosen study area. 84% improvement on cost reduced by 56.25%, time 4 hours to 1.5 hours, quality, safety and designed load performance calculations employed. Stakeholders are asked to implement the model and monitor the results obtained

Evaluating Resilience of Cyber-Physical-Social Systems

Nowadays, protecting the network is not the only security concern. Still, in cyber security, websites and servers are becoming more popular as targets due to the ease with which they can be accessed when compared to communication networks. Another threat in cyber physical social systems with human interactions is that they can be attacked and manipulated not only by technical hacking through networks, but also by manipulating people and stealing users’ credentials. Therefore, systems should be evaluated beyond cy- ber security, which means measuring their resilience as a piece of evidence that a system works properly under cyber-attacks or incidents. In that way, cyber resilience is increas- ingly discussed and described as the capacity of a system to maintain state awareness for detecting cyber-attacks. All the tasks for making a system resilient should proactively maintain a safe level of operational normalcy through rapid system reconfiguration to detect attacks that would impact system performance. In this work, we broadly studied a new paradigm of cyber physical social systems and defined a uniform definition of it. To overcome the complexity of evaluating cyber resilience, especially in these inhomo- geneous systems, we proposed a framework including applying Attack Tree refinements and Hierarchical Timed Coloured Petri Nets to model intruder and defender behaviors and evaluate the impact of each action on the behavior and performance of the system.Hoje em dia, proteger a rede não é a única preocupação de segurança. Ainda assim, na segurança cibernética, sites e servidores estão se tornando mais populares como alvos devido à facilidade com que podem ser acessados quando comparados às redes de comu- nicação. Outra ameaça em sistemas sociais ciberfisicos com interações humanas é que eles podem ser atacados e manipulados não apenas por hackers técnicos através de redes, mas também pela manipulação de pessoas e roubo de credenciais de utilizadores. Portanto, os sistemas devem ser avaliados para além da segurança cibernética, o que significa medir sua resiliência como uma evidência de que um sistema funciona adequadamente sob ataques ou incidentes cibernéticos. Dessa forma, a resiliência cibernética é cada vez mais discutida e descrita como a capacidade de um sistema manter a consciência do estado para detectar ataques cibernéticos. Todas as tarefas para tornar um sistema resiliente devem manter proativamente um nível seguro de normalidade operacional por meio da reconfi- guração rápida do sistema para detectar ataques que afetariam o desempenho do sistema. Neste trabalho, um novo paradigma de sistemas sociais ciberfisicos é amplamente estu- dado e uma definição uniforme é proposta. Para superar a complexidade de avaliar a resiliência cibernética, especialmente nesses sistemas não homogéneos, é proposta uma estrutura que inclui a aplicação de refinamentos de Árvores de Ataque e Redes de Petri Coloridas Temporizadas Hierárquicas para modelar comportamentos de invasores e de- fensores e avaliar o impacto de cada ação no comportamento e desempenho do sistema

Scientific Research Review on Dependability of Complex Automotive Systems Developed towards Autonomous Driving

This brief scientific research review is related to EFOP project titled Dynamics and Control of Autonomous Vehicles meeting the Synergy Demands of Automated Transport Systems (EFOP-3.6.2-16-2017-00016), in which the following scientific consortium is taking part: Széchenyi István University, John von Neumann University, University of Dunaújváros and Óbudai University. The goal of the project is to improve mathematical techniques and processes that assist the increasingly complex design of technical structures and constituents implemented in self-driven automobiles and transport systems, focusing on safety and risk factor maintenance. This means examining the reliability of vehicle sensor networks and developing common risk assessment methods

DEPEND: A Simulation-Based Environment for System Level Dependability Analysis

Coordinated Science Laboratory was formerly known as Control Systems LaboratoryNational Aeronautics and Space Administration / NASA NAG-1-613 and NASA NGT-5083

A comparison of resource allocation process in grid and cloud technologies

Grid Computing and Cloud Computing are two different technologies that have emerged to validate the long-held dream of computing as utilities which led to an important revolution in IT industry. These technologies came with several challenges in terms of middleware, programming model, resources management and business models. These challenges are seriously considered by Distributed System research. Resources allocation is a key challenge in both technologies as it causes the possible resource wastage and service degradation. This paper is addressing a comprehensive study of the resources allocation processes in both technologies. It provides the researchers with an in-depth understanding of all resources allocation related aspects and associative challenges, including: load balancing, performance, energy consumption, scheduling algorithms, resources consolidation and migration. The comparison also contributes an informal definition of the Cloud resource allocation process. Resources in the Cloud are being shared by all users in a time and space sharing manner, in contrast to dedicated resources that governed by a queuing system in Grid resource management. Cloud Resource allocation suffers from extra challenges abbreviated by achieving good load balancing and making right consolidation decision

Prediction System for Problem Students using k-Nearest Neighbor and Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire

The student counseling process is the spearhead of character development proclaimed by the government through education regulation number 20 of 2018 concerning strengthening character education. Counseling at the secondary school level carries out to attend to these problems that might resolve with a decision support system. So that makes research challenging to measure completion on target because it is not doing based on data. The counseling teacher does not know about student's mental and emotional health conditions, so it is often wrong to handle them. Therefore, we need a system that can recognize conditions and provide recommendations for managing problems and predicting students who have potential issues. The Algorithm used to predict problem students is K-Nearest Neighbor with a dataset of 100 students. The stages of predictive calculation are data collection, data cleaning, simulation, and accuracy evaluation. Meanwhile, building the system is done using the rapid application development methodology where the instrument used to map the student's condition is the Strenght and Difficulties Questionaire instrument. This research is a system to predict problem students with an accuracy rate of 83%. The level of user experience based on the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) results in the conclusion that the system reaches "Above Average.". This system is expecting to help counseling teachers implement an early warning system, help students know learning modalities, and help parents recognize the child's personality better

Design of Dependable Systems on Android

In this thesis we analyze the concepts of dependability and dependable systems. We investigate methods of designing and implementing dependable systems, in general, and on the Android operating system. A literature review was carried out with two main goals. Firstly, to gain and be able to spread knowledge of dependability according to both its qualitative and quantitative definitions. Secondly, to prove our theory that there is a lack of information regarding dependable systems on Android, establishing a need for this thesis. We then attempt to apply our newly acquired knowledge in a case study, where we design and implement a dependable system, in the form of a security camera application, on Android. This gives further insight into the challenges of designing dependable systems, and through our experience we learn how to overcome these challenges. While the scope was too large to fully cover every aspect of dependability, we gained valuable knowledge that is presented in this thesis