Production lot sizing with rework and fixed quantity deliveries

This paper is concerned with determination of the optimal lot size for an economic production quantity (EPQ) model with the reworking of random defective items and fixed quantity multiple deliveries. Classic EPQ model assumes continuous issuing policy for satisfying product demand and perfect quality production for all items produced. However, in real life vendor-buyer integrated production-inventory system, multi-delivery policy is used practically in lieu of the continuous issuing policy and generation of defective items during production run is inevitable. In this study, all nonconforming items produced are considered to be repairable and are reworked in each cycle when regular production ends. The finished items can only be delivered to customers if the whole lot is quality assured at the end of the rework. Fixed quantity multiple installments of the finished batch are delivered to customers at a fixed interval of time. The long-run average integrated cost function per unit time is derived. A closed-form optimal batch size solution to the problem is obtained. A numerical example demonstrates its practical usage

Probiotic actions on diseases: implications for therapeutic treatments

The ecology of gut microflora, which colonizes all body surfaces, has long coevolved with its hosts in a complicated fashion. Health benefits conferred by gut microflora include defense against invading pathogens, improvement of nutritional bioavailability, and development of the regional and systemic immune systems. The past decade has witnessed growing interest in the fact that the gut microflora affects the host's energy homeostasis by means of various mechanisms, including supplying nourishment from indigestible compounds, producing small biomolecules responsible for lipid profiles, and participating in the absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion of nutrition. Much in vitro and in vivo research has indicated that aberrant gut microflora plays an important role in the pathogenesis of a wide spectrum of diseases. This is accomplished by a shift in focus, from laying an emphasis on pharmacotherapy to placing more effort on gut microflora normalization. The objectives of this review include illustrating trends in the clinical application of probiotics on diseases, as well as discussing current methodology limitations on probiotic selection. Furthermore, it is expected to shed light on the nature of probiotics, with the aim of giving greater insight into the implications for clinical use of probiotics in the treatment of diseases

A Study of Online Customer Loyalty Based on the Theory of Planned Behavior

The Internet has introduced major changes in the way companies conduct business. Practically, rising numbers of customers are using the Internet for Electronic Commerce (EC). In the respect of customer relationship, Business-to-Consumer (B2C) EC provides ongoing information, service, and support that have changed the approaches of communication and interaction with customers. The nature of online customer behavior in the EC transaction is therefore different from the one in a traditional retailing channel. This research focuses on the online customer behavior through examining the relationship between the behavior intention and the online behavior itself. Based on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), a base model of Online Customer Loyalty is developed. The research also proposes an alternative model in which Satisfaction is adopted as a mediated variable. Four hundred and twenty-three questionnaires are collected for the empirical experiment. The method of Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) is used to evaluate the measurement and structural models. The result indicates that TPB can be used to explain the behavior of Online Customer Loyalty. The structure relationship between Behavior Intention and Online Customer Loyalty is significant. The three constructs influencing Behavior Intention including Attitude toward Behavior, Subjective Norm and Perceived Behavioral Control also have indirectly positive effects on the behavior of Online Customer Loyalty. The two competing models are compared. Both models are acceptable when judged by the criteria of goodness-of-fit measures. However, the alternative model has a higher explained proportion of variance in Online Customer Loyalty

Atomized Deep Learning Models

Deep learning models often tackle the intra-sample structure, such as the order of words in a sentence and pixels in an image, but have not pay much attention to the inter-sample relationship. In this paper, we show that explicitly modeling the inter-sample structure to be more discretized can potentially help model's expressivity. We propose a novel method, Atom Modeling, that can discretize a continuous latent space by drawing an analogy between a data point and an atom, which is naturally spaced away from other atoms with distances depending on their intra structures. Specifically, we model each data point as an atom composed of electrons, protons, and neutrons and minimize the potential energy caused by the interatomic force among data points. Through experiments with qualitative analysis in our proposed Atom Modeling on synthetic and real datasets, we find that Atom Modeling can improve the performance by maintaining the inter-sample relation and can capture an interpretable intra-sample relation by mapping each component in a data point to electron/proton/neutron

Coprescription of Chinese Herbal Medicine and Western Medications among Prostate Cancer Patients: A Population-Based Study in Taiwan

Use of herbal medicine is popular among cancer patients. This study aimed to explore the coprescription of CHM and WM among prostate cancer patients in Taiwan. This cross-sectional retrospective study used a population-based database containing one million beneficiaries of National Health Insurance. Claims and prescriptions were analyzed. In 2007, 218 (22.4%) prostate cancer patients were CHM users. Among CHM users, 200 (91.7%) patients with 5618 (79.5%) CHM prescriptions were on coprescription of CHM and WM. A total of 484 types of CHM and 930 types of WM were used. The most commonly used CHMs on coprescription were Shu Jing Huo Xue Tang, Ma Zi Ren Wan, and Xue Fu Zhu Yu Tang. The most commonly used WMs on coprescription were magnesium oxide, amlodipine, and aspirin. The average number of prescriptions per user per year was 261.2 versus 151.7 in all (P < 0.001), 123.6 versus 76.9 in WM (P = 0.033), and 34.8 versus 5.1 in CHM (P < 0.001) for patients with and without coprescription, respectively. In conclusion, use of CHM among prostate cancer patients was popular in Taiwan. Most CHMs were used with WM concurrently. The potential drug-herb interactions should be investigated, especially for patients with more prescriptions

A study on Impressiveness Management of Internet Celebrities

The issue of social media has attracted much attention in the fields of information management and marketing. Recently, the live webcast service newly introduced on social media has renewed the issues. With the increasing popularity of social media, the live webcast service provides more opportunities of higher interactivity to Internet celebrities to communicate with Internet users. With frequent interaction with Internet users, the Internet celebrities construct their self-images and build a long-term personal reputation. Therefore, how Internet celebrities enhance their self-image and personal reputation is an interesting research issue. Specifically, this study intends to investigate how Internet celebrities employ personal impressiveness management to improve their personal image and branding. The corporate reputation formation framework was employed as the theoretical perspective to investigate Internet celebrities’ personal impressiveness management through social media

A single-producer multi-retailer integrated inventory model with a rework process

This study considers a single-producer multi-retailer integrated inventory model with the reworking of random defective items produced. The objective is to find the optimal production lot size and optimal number of shipments that minimizes total expected costs for such a specific supply chains system. It is assumed that a product is manufactured by a producer. All items are screened for quality purpose and random nonconforming items will be picked up and reworked at the end of regular production in each cycle. After the entire lot is quality assured, multiple shipments will be delivered synchronously to m different retailers in each production cycle. Each retailer has its own annual product demand, unit stock holding cost, and fixed and variable delivery costs. Mathematical modeling and analysis is used to deal with the proposed model and to derive the expected system cost. Hessian matrix equations are employed to prove the convexity of the cost function. As a result, a closed-form optimal replenishment-delivery policy for such a specific single-producer multi-retailer integrated inventory model is obtained. A numerical example is provided to show the practical usage of the proposed model

The influence of the internet on catering and accommodation industry efficiency

Accommodation and catering industry efficiencies have been widely evaluated from destination, market concentration, and catering supply chain management perspectives; however, few studies have dynamically evaluated the overall accommodation and catering industry efficiencies under the influence of the internet. Therefore, to go some way to filling this research gap, this study used catering and accommodation industry data and related internet data from 31 Chinese provinces from 2012 to 2016 and employed a Dynamic DDF DEA model to evaluate the catering and accommodation industry efficiencies and the influence of the rising internet connections. It found that: 1. the overall catering and accommodation revenue efficiencies were higher when the internet connection inputs were considered; and 2. there were significant catering and accommodation income distribution differences between the eastern, central and western regions, with higher efficiencies being found in the more developed east