Real-time co-ordinated resource management in a computational enviroment

Design co-ordination is an emerging engineering design management philosophy with its emphasis on timeliness and appropriateness. Furthermore, a key element of design coordination has been identified as resource management, the aim of which is to facilitate the optimised use of resources throughout a dynamic and changeable process. An approach to operational design co-ordination has been developed, which incorporates the appropriate techniques to ensure that the aim of co-ordinated resource management can be fulfilled. This approach has been realised within an agent-based software system, called the Design Coordination System (DCS), such that a computational design analysis can be managed in a coherent and co-ordinated manner. The DCS is applied to a computational analysis for turbine blade design provided by industry. The application of the DCS involves resources, i.e. workstations within a computer network, being utilised to perform the computational analysis involving the use of a suite of software tools to calculate stress and vibration characteristics of turbine blades. Furthermore, the application of the system shows that the utilisation of resources can be optimised throughout the computational design analysis despite the variable nature of the computer network

Capacity Building in Public Sector Organisations

During the last two decades the world has experienced a major transformation in thinking on the role of government in provision of services and socio-economic development. This change in thinking has come about as a result of the inability of two major philosophies of production—capitalism and socialism—to redistribute resources for the improvement in the living condition of the masses. Both the philosophies have shortcomings. Capitalism encourages entrepreneurship and growth, but it also creates extreme economic disparities leading to poverty. Socialism in its attempt to create an egalitarian society curbs and stifles entrepreneurship, leading to discontentment and economic inefficiencies. Developing countries have followed, by and large, a mix of these philosophies but the result has not been encouraging in most of the cases. Economic distortions and inefficiencies have been the common outcome. In addition, human development indicators and the quality of life in these countries has fallen far below the minimum acceptable standard. Inequitable distribution of resources is attributed to the absence of a participative and democratic political structure on the one hand, and mismanagement of resources and the absence of a facilitative administrative structure on the other. The latter attribute is now commonly termed as poor ‘governance’ of resources.

A DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR COMMODITY MARKETING MANAGEMENT

Marketing,

Entrepreneurial Finance: Insights from English Language Training Market in Vietnam

Entrepreneurship plays an indispensable role in the economic development and poverty reduction of emerging economies like Vietnam. The rapid development of technologies during the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0) has a significant impact on business in every field, especially in the innovation-focused area of entrepreneurship. However, the topic of entrepreneurial activities with technology applications in Vietnam is under-researched. In addition, the body of literature regarding entrepreneurial finance tends to focus on advanced economies, while mostly neglecting the contextual differences in developing nations. Therefore, this research contributes to these topics by investigating the main characteristics of a high potential market for entrepreneurs in Vietnam, which is the English language training market (ELTM). It also aims at indicating the impacts of technology on the entrepreneurial firms within this market, with an emphasis on financing sources. To answer the research questions, this study employs a qualitative analysis and conducts 12 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with entrepreneurs and researchers in the field. The key findings in our study highlight the main contributing factors to the growth of the market, both universally and context-specific for a developing nation like Vietnam. It also lists the leaders in each market segment and the industry’s potential profit margin. The results also show that most entrepreneurs in the ELTM utilized private sources of finance rather than external ones, such as bank loans. It again confirms the idea from previous works that even with the rapid development of the economic and technological landscape, entrepreneurial activities in general barely benefit from additional sources of funding. However, it also points out the distinct characteristics of the ELTM that may influence these financing issues; for example, English training services usually collect revenues from customers before delivering their classes. This is of advantage for entrepreneurs in this area and helps significantly reduce the financial barriers. These findings, which are among the first attempts to contribute to a better understanding of entrepreneurial opportunities in the Industry 4.0 in Vietnam, provide valuable insights for policymakers and entrepreneurs, as well as investors

A survey on subjecting electronic product code and non-ID objects to IP identification

Over the last decade, both research on the Internet of Things (IoT) and real-world IoT applications have grown exponentially. The IoT provides us with smarter cities, intelligent homes, and generally more comfortable lives. However, the introduction of these devices has led to several new challenges that must be addressed. One of the critical challenges facing interacting with IoT devices is to address billions of devices (things) around the world, including computers, tablets, smartphones, wearable devices, sensors, and embedded computers, and so on. This article provides a survey on subjecting Electronic Product Code and non-ID objects to IP identification for IoT devices, including their advantages and disadvantages thereof. Different metrics are here proposed and used for evaluating these methods. In particular, the main methods are evaluated in terms of their: (i) computational overhead, (ii) scalability, (iii) adaptability, (iv) implementation cost, and (v) whether applicable to already ID-based objects and presented in tabular format. Finally, the article proves that this field of research will still be ongoing, but any new technique must favorably offer the mentioned five evaluative parameters.Comment: 112 references, 8 figures, 6 tables, Journal of Engineering Reports, Wiley, 2020 (Open Access

Power Load Management as a Computational Market

Power load management enables energy utilities to reduce peak loads and thereby save money. Due to the large number of different loads, power load management is a complicated optimization problem. We present a new decentralized approach to this problem by modeling direct load management as a computational market. Our simulation results demonstrate that our approach is very efficient with a superlinear rate of convergence to equilibrium and an excellent scalability, requiring few iterations even when the number of agents is in the order of one thousand. Aframework for analysis of this and similar problems is given which shows how nonlinear optimization and numerical mathematics can be exploited to characterize, compare, and tailor problem-solving strategies in market-oriented programming