A simulation approach to innovation deployment readiness assessment in manufacturing

© Copyright 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Manufacturing companies need to continuously innovate in order to remain competitive. Fostering a successful innovative environment should reflect positively on manufacturing performance, with a premise that companies seek to attain appropriate level of readiness when deploying their innovation. This paper presents an approach to assessing innovation deployment readiness in manufacturing. Deployment is conceptualised as a sequential decision process that involves a deployment plan to be executed sequentially in an uncertain environment. The deployment plan is assessed using simulation to account for risks and uncertainties that may characterise the deployment activities in the target environment and the capabilities put forward in the plan for handling the risks and uncertainties. The approach is illustrated using a simulated manufacturing job shop scenario and the results show that deployment readiness can vary over time. Deployment readiness can be improved by identifying the states in which readiness is weak and taking appropriate actions.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Towards Vision-Based Smart Hospitals: A System for Tracking and Monitoring Hand Hygiene Compliance

One in twenty-five patients admitted to a hospital will suffer from a hospital acquired infection. If we can intelligently track healthcare staff, patients, and visitors, we can better understand the sources of such infections. We envision a smart hospital capable of increasing operational efficiency and improving patient care with less spending. In this paper, we propose a non-intrusive vision-based system for tracking people's activity in hospitals. We evaluate our method for the problem of measuring hand hygiene compliance. Empirically, our method outperforms existing solutions such as proximity-based techniques and covert in-person observational studies. We present intuitive, qualitative results that analyze human movement patterns and conduct spatial analytics which convey our method's interpretability. This work is a step towards a computer-vision based smart hospital and demonstrates promising results for reducing hospital acquired infections.Comment: Machine Learning for Healthcare Conference (MLHC

Intelligent evacuation management systems: A review

Crowd and evacuation management have been active areas of research and study in the recent past. Various developments continue to take place in the process of efficient evacuation of crowds in mass gatherings. This article is intended to provide a review of intelligent evacuation management systems covering the aspects of crowd monitoring, crowd disaster prediction, evacuation modelling, and evacuation path guidelines. Soft computing approaches play a vital role in the design and deployment of intelligent evacuation applications pertaining to crowd control management. While the review deals with video and nonvideo based aspects of crowd monitoring and crowd disaster prediction, evacuation techniques are reviewed via the theme of soft computing, along with a brief review on the evacuation navigation path. We believe that this review will assist researchers in developing reliable automated evacuation systems that will help in ensuring the safety of the evacuees especially during emergency evacuation scenarios

Deployment of radio frequency identification technology in healthcare organizations

Helena Carvalho was supported by a PhD fellowship from Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (SFRH/BD/43984/2008).The Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is a wireless technology that uses transmitted radio signals to tag, recognize, track and trace the movement of an item automatically. The study of this technology is actually considered a hot topic in all scientific areas and has been described as a major enabling technology for the automation of many processes. Although it is not a new technology it has only recently come to the awareness of the public and widely used in many sectors and particularly in the Healthcare.This paper aims to illustrate the deployment of RFID technology in Healthcare, more precisely in infant security systems. A case study about the experience of three hospitals and one RFID technology provider is presented to highlight the main architectural characteristics, functionality, and advantages associated to its deployment.After the case studies analysis it is possible to state that the infant security systems, using the RFID technology, are not so different among research case studies: they involve RFID tagging patients, they are easy to use not requiring an extensive training and also they are installed with an interface with others security systems.publishersversionpublishe

Feasibility between Two Models for the Control of Fleet Idleness: RFID Antennas vs Electronic Fences (Telemetry)

Optimizing the use of resources within organizations without decreasing the level of quality of service is a constant and recurring challenge in the daily life of professionals. In Group X, an electricity distribution company located in the Brazilian Northeast, fleet management is one of the priorities. This study compares the use of two tools to measure fleet idleness, RFID Antennas and electronic fences created from the Telemetry system. The process and cost of installation, scope, maintenance costs and results obtained were compared between the two tools. This comparison was used to analyze the feasibility of expanding the tools in Group X for newly acquired companies. Based on the results, it was concluded that the Telemetry system was economically and operationally the best option for Group X

The Long-Term Impact Of RFID Adoption

Most research problems on Radio frequency identification (RFID) focus on effects of RFID implementation on firms, factors affecting RFID adoption, and impact evaluation of RFID implementation. And literature about RFID adoption concentrates on short-term effects or impact evaluation. However, short-term analysis will not identify the impact of RFID adoption adequately. We use monthly data of 86 companies which adopted RFID projects around the world at some point from January 1997 to December 2011 and perform four years calendar portfolio analysis (CPA) and Tobin\u27s Q comparison analysis to gain comprehensive insights into the mechanism of RFID on firm performance. Further, we investigate five contextual factors that moderate the impact of RFID adoption including adoption time, country, industry, and financial health condition of adoption firms. We find that RFID may not demonstrate its value instantly, but it has indeed enhanced firms’ future growth potential in the long run

Methods and Applications of Data Mining in Business Domains

This Special Issue invited researchers to contribute original research in the field of data mining, particularly in its application to diverse domains, like healthcare, software development, logistics, and human resources. We were especially interested in how the data mining method was modified to cater to the specific domain in question. The challenge is that the more complex a domain is the harder it is to make good predictions, as more implicit domain knowledge is required that is not always available [1]. This is especially true in the case of complex domains where there are soft factors, like the interaction of the conflicting and cooperating objectives of the stakeholders [2,3], and system dynamics play a significant role [4]. In a business context, the challenge is that one would like to see (i) how the algorithms can be repeatable in the real world, (ii) how the patterns mined can be utilized by the business, and (iii) how the resulting model can be understood and utilized in the business environment [1]. Furthermore, the idea is to identify the variables that impact the goal variable but to do so with the data, interestingness, deployment, and general domain (business) constraints of the domain [1,5]. One of the methods to analyze a complex domain is using a method called intelligence meta-synthesis [6,7]. Intelligence synthesis is the collection and creation of perceived or understood (i.e., not necessarily objective) information. Meta-synthesis is the collection and creation of knowledge and information from collected intelligences [1]. The goal of this approach is to design and develop predictive models that could eventually be incorporated into a business intelligence dashboard. As a result, one would (i) understand the nature and origin of data that allows the system user to determine the quality of the data to perform the data cleaning; (ii) understand the factors in the domain that influence the predicted variable, leading the developer to determine which variables need to be included in the predictive model; (iii) develop predictive models that are usable and interesting within the domain in terms of predictive power, integrating with existing infrastructure, and integrating with business rules and processes; and finally (iv) use the predicted data to find the optimal business processes in the particular domain. There are also research works that have built on top of intelligence meta-synthesis, such as the study published by the authors of [1]

Smart Manufacturing Technology Adoption for Improving Productivity: A Systematic Literature Review

This paper is to present a review of the Smart manufacturing application as Industry 4.0, specifically on the conceptual approaches to define it. Two conceptual approaches to the application of the concept of smart manufacturing are distinguished. The method using the previous articles of scientific journals from 2017-2022 (thirty-two international paper) were selected based on previous works, with the scope to investigate and analyze in-depth the extent to which literature used to discuss results in the selected studies of applying the Smart Manufacturing Technology in manufacture enterprises. The results of the previous studies are discussed and investigated in a table format

Sea Container Terminals

Due to a rapid growth in world trade and a huge increase in containerized goods, sea container terminals play a vital role in globe-spanning supply chains. Container terminals should be able to handle large ships, with large call sizes within the shortest time possible, and at competitive rates. In response, terminal operators, shipping liners, and port authorities are investing in new technologies to improve container handling infrastructure and operational efficiency. Container terminals face challenging research problems which have received much attention from the academic community. The focus of this paper is to highlight the recent developments in the container terminals, which can be categorized into three areas: (1) innovative container terminal technologies, (2) new OR directions and models for existing research areas, and (3) emerging areas in container terminal research. By choosing this focus, we complement existing reviews on container terminal operations

Inter-organizational Integration of Smart Objects: White Spots in the Solution Landscape

The vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) has sparked considerable efforts in research and development over the past decade.Much of these efforts were driven by applications of RFID technology for monitoring the flow of goods and prominent earlyadopters such as Wal-Mart and Metro Group. Also, the global standards organization GS1 provided a number of wellrecognized specifications that are tailored to monitor objects across organizations.Development of the IoT has certainly benefited from the strong demand for monitoring goods in business applications.However, the dominance of these application scenarios and corresponding standards comes at the risk of neglectingrequirements from other domains. In this paper, we review the focus of existing works. Our contribution is twofold. (1) Usinga systematic literature review, we analyze existing research contributions and identify underrepresented areas. (2) We discussselected approaches in detail and highlight open issues in the covered functionality. The aim of our work is to raise awarenessfor open potentials in the IoT service domain and to direct future research and developments