Workshop on dimensional analysis for design, development, and research executives

The proceedings of a conference of research and development executives are presented. The purpose of the meeting was to develop an understanding of the conditions which are appropriate for the use of certain general management tools and those conditions which render these tools inappropriate. The verbatim statements of the participants are included to show the direction taken initially by the conference. Formal presentations of management techniques for research and development are developed

Road User Charging – Pricing Structures.

This project considers the extent to which the public could cope with complex price or tariff structures such as those that might be considered in the context of a national congestion pricing scheme. The key elements of the brief were: • to review existing studies of road pricing schemes to assess what information and evidence already exists on the key issues; • to identify what can be learned about pricing structures from other transport modes and other industries and in particular what issues and conclusions might be transferable; • to improve the general understanding of the relationship between information and people’s ability to respond; and • to recommend what further research would be most valuable to fill evidence gaps and enable conclusions to be drawn about an effective structure

Belief rule-base expert system with multilayer tree structure for complex problems modeling

Belief rule-base (BRB) expert system is one of recognized and fast-growing approaches in the areas of complex problems modeling. However, the conventional BRB has to suffer from the combinatorial explosion problem since the number of rules in BRB expands exponentially with the number of attributes in complex problems, although many alternative techniques have been looked at with the purpose of downsizing BRB. Motivated by this challenge, in this paper, multilayer tree structure (MTS) is introduced for the first time to define hierarchical BRB, also known as MTS-BRB. MTS- BRB is able to overcome the combinatorial explosion problem of the conventional BRB. Thereafter, the additional modeling, inferencing, and learning procedures are proposed to create a self-organized MTS-BRB expert system. To demonstrate the development process and benefits of the MTS-BRB expert system, case studies including benchmark classification datasets and research and development (R&D) project risk assessment have been done. The comparative results showed that, in terms of modelling effectiveness and/or prediction accuracy, MTS-BRB expert system surpasses various existing, as well as traditional fuzzy system-related and machine learning-related methodologie

Consideration of the relevance of standard quality techniques in Mass Customisation

The business philosophy of Mass Customisation (MC) implies rapid response to customer requests, high efficiency and limited cost overheads of customisation. Furthermore, it also implies the quality benefits of the mass production paradigm are guaranteed. However, traditional quality science in manufacturing is premised on volume production of uniform products rather than of differentiated products associated with MC. This creates quality challenges and raises questions over the suitability of standard quality engineering techniques. From an analysis of relevant MC and quality literature it is argued the aims of MC are aligned with contemporary thinking on quality and that quality concepts provide insights into MC. Quality issues are considered along three dimensions - product development, order fulfilment and customer interaction. The applicability and effectiveness of conventional quality engineering techniques are discussed and a framework is presented which identifies key issues with respect to quality for a spectrum of MC strategies

Investigations of Factors that Affect Consumers' Online Word Of Mouth Behavior

This dissertation includes two essays investigating factors that affect consumers' online word of mouth (WOM) behavior. The first essay studies how consumers as online posters make an online forum choice decision when they are motivated to influence other consumers. We propose that consumers have theories about effective word of mouth persuasion, acting as intuitive media planners in making online forum choices. Specifically, consumers possess audience beliefs (i.e. how loyal to the brand) and beliefs about effective persuasion (i.e. surprising and novel things are more impactful). Across three studies, we demonstrate that posters prefer posing positive messages on a brand-neutral forum (e.g., Digital Camera Forum) to a brand-specific (e.g., Nikon Forum) because positive brand information is not surprising to the later audience. However, when posting negative brand information, posters are equally likely to choose either forum since negative brand information is perceived as diagnostic and surprising to all audience. We further offer a boundary condition in which the poster's primary motive is not to persuade and affect others but to affiliate with others. Under affiliation motive, message valence does not affect forum choice since posters are not considering message valence as a way to being impactful. The second essay investigates the role of product rating scale in a product rating task, and how it can drive WOM behavior. We argue that rating scale can affect a rater's likelihood of engaging subsequent WOM behavior. Specifically, conducting three experiments, we show that participants' WOM intention are higher after evaluating their consumption experience on a 5-point rating scale than on a 2-point rating scale. We suggest that rating scales can affect a rater's certainty belief regarding the rating score assigned (i.e., high rating certainty leads to higher WOM intention). We further provide evidence that rating certainty mediates the impact of rating scale on WOM intention