Simulation in manufacturing and business: A review

Copyright @ 2009 Elsevier B.V.This paper reports the results of a review of simulation applications published within peer-reviewed literature between 1997 and 2006 to provide an up-to-date picture of the role of simulation techniques within manufacturing and business. The review is characterised by three factors: wide coverage, broad scope of the simulation techniques, and a focus on real-world applications. A structured methodology was followed to narrow down the search from around 20,000 papers to 281. Results include interesting trends and patterns. For instance, although discrete event simulation is the most popular technique, it has lower stakeholder engagement than other techniques, such as system dynamics or gaming. This is highly correlated with modelling lead time and purpose. Considering application areas, modelling is mostly used in scheduling. Finally, this review shows an increasing interest in hybrid modelling as an approach to cope with complex enterprise-wide systems

Comparative Analysis of Web of Science and Scopus on the Energy Efficiency and Climate Impact of Buildings

Although the body of scientific publications on energy efficiency and climate mitigation from buildings has been growing quickly in recent years, very few previous bibliometric analysis studies exist that analyze the literature in terms of specific content (trends or options for zero‐energy buildings) or coverage of different scientific databases. We evaluate the scientific literature published since January 2013 concerning alternative methods for improving the energy efficiency and mitigating climate impacts from buildings. We quantify and describe the literature through a bibliometric approach, comparing the databases Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. A total of 19,416 (Scopus) and 17,468 (WoS) publications are analyzed, with only 11% common documents. The literature has grown steadily during this time period, with a peak in the year 2017. Most of the publications are in English, in the area of Engineering and Energy Fuels, and from institutions from China and the USA. Strong links are observed between the most published authors and institutions worldwide. An analysis of keywords reveals that most of research focuses on technologies for heating, ventilation, and air‐conditioning, phase change materials, as well as information and communication technologies. A significantly smaller segment of the literature takes a broader perspective (greenhouse gas emissions, life cycle, and sustainable development), investigating implementation issues (policies and costs) or renewable energy (solar). Knowledge gaps are detected in the areas of behavioral changes, the circular economy, and some renewable energy sources (geothermal, biomass, small wind). We conclude that i) the contents of WoS and Scopus are radically different in the studied fields; ii) research seems to focus on technological aspects; and iii) there are weak links between research on energy and on climate mitigation and sustainability, the latter themes being misrepresented in the literature. These conclusions should be validated with further analyses of the documents identified in this study. We recommend that future research focuses on filling the above identified gaps, assessing the contents of several scientific databases, and extending energy analyses to their effects in terms of mitigation potentials.This work was funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades de España (RTI2018‐ 093849‐B‐C31), by ICREA under the ICREA Academia programme, and by the foundation SIVL

Research Directions, Challenges and Issues in Opinion Mining

Rapid growth of Internet and availability of user reviews on the web for any product has provided a need for an effective system to analyze the web reviews. Such reviews are useful to some extent, promising both the customers and product manufacturers. For any popular product, the number of reviews can be in hundreds or even thousands. This creates difficulty for a customer to analyze them and make important decisions on whether to purchase the product or to not. Mining such product reviews or opinions is termed as opinion mining which is broadly classified into two main categories namely facts and opinions. Though there are several approaches for opinion mining, there remains a challenge to decide on the recommendation provided by the system. In this paper, we analyze the basics of opinion mining, challenges, pros & cons of past opinion mining systems and provide some directions for the future research work, focusing on the challenges and issues

Forecasting the Spreading of Technologies in Research Communities

Technologies such as algorithms, applications and formats are an important part of the knowledge produced and reused in the research process. Typically, a technology is expected to originate in the context of a research area and then spread and contribute to several other fields. For example, Semantic Web technologies have been successfully adopted by a variety of fields, e.g., Information Retrieval, Human Computer Interaction, Biology, and many others. Unfortunately, the spreading of technologies across research areas may be a slow and inefficient process, since it is easy for researchers to be unaware of potentially relevant solutions produced by other research communities. In this paper, we hypothesise that it is possible to learn typical technology propagation patterns from historical data and to exploit this knowledge i) to anticipate where a technology may be adopted next and ii) to alert relevant stakeholders about emerging and relevant technologies in other fields. To do so, we propose the Technology-Topic Framework, a novel approach which uses a semantically enhanced technology-topic model to forecast the propagation of technologies to research areas. A formal evaluation of the approach on a set of technologies in the Semantic Web and Artificial Intelligence areas has produced excellent results, confirming the validity of our solution

A comparative study of teaching forensics at a university degree level

Computer forensics is a relatively young University discipline which has developed strongly in the United States and the United Kingdom but is still in its infancy in continental Europe. The national programmes and courses offered therefore differ in many ways. We report on two recently established degree programmes from two European countries: Great Britain and Germany. We present and compare the design of both programmes and conclude that they cover two complementary and orthogonal aspects of computer forensics education: (a) rigorous practical skills and (b) competence for fundamental research discoveries

The Research Space: using the career paths of scholars to predict the evolution of the research output of individuals, institutions, and nations

In recent years scholars have built maps of science by connecting the academic fields that cite each other, are cited together, or that cite a similar literature. But since scholars cannot always publish in the fields they cite, or that cite them, these science maps are only rough proxies for the potential of a scholar, organization, or country, to enter a new academic field. Here we use a large dataset of scholarly publications disambiguated at the individual level to create a map of science-or research space-where links connect pairs of fields based on the probability that an individual has published in both of them. We find that the research space is a significantly more accurate predictor of the fields that individuals and organizations will enter in the future than citation based science maps. At the country level, however, the research space and citations based science maps are equally accurate. These findings show that data on career trajectories-the set of fields that individuals have previously published in-provide more accurate predictors of future research output for more focalized units-such as individuals or organizations-than citation based science maps