An Application Of The Entropy Maximization Approach In Shopping Area Planning

The Principle of Maximum Entropy is used as an useful alternative approach in studying the urban planning problem. As a specific example, the entropic model has been adapted and applied to the study of consumer mobility with respect to shopping for food items and for clothes in Fukushima, Japan. In this paper, we maximize the entropy of consumer mobility subject to the known constraints on the system. The model, when solved by the iterative scaling method, provides comparable or even better results than those obtained in previous works by the Multiplicative Competitive Interactive spatial model

Definition and Verification of Workers' Aptitude Toward Assembly Tasks in Production Cells

Major studies on cell production have put the emphasis on technical factors (machine order/layout, family part grouping, workŽow sequence, etc.), it is still insufficient to investigate how workers' aptitude affect the productivity of production cells. As the first attempt to examine the workers' aptitude toward the assembly tasks in production cells,we make a comparatively detailed literature review on the major theories and assessment measures developed in the field of industrial and organizational psychology. Then we give the definition of four aptitudes and related hypotheses from the aspects of workers' cognition and interest, finger dexterity, affection, and behavioral intention. We design a self-evaluation sheet to measure the workers' aptitudes, and moreover design a cell production experiment to investigate the relation between the workers' aptitudes and productivity of production cells. Through our experimental study, we verified statistically that the workers' cognition and interest, negative affection correlate significantly to the productivity of production cells. However, there are still some issues to be addressed further in order to measure the workers' aptitudes through the self-evaluation sheet