Measuring the need for manufacturing flexibility and evaluating its economic benefits

Flexible systems are known of enabling organizations to take advantage of diversified products, low volume production items with short life-cycles. They also improve the ability to respond to market changes. Flexibility has thus become a strategic manufacturing need in recent years. Because of the high initial capital outlay involved, the selection of the appropriate flexible solution has become a critical issue. This thesis proposes a methodology to determine the most cost effective and feasible flexibility strategy. A flexibility audit is developed to analyze and evaluate the changes taking place in a facility\u27s environment. These changes and a measurement scheme is then used to compute the needed measure of four types of flexibilities. The audit provides the percentage gap between the actual and needed measures which is used to select the appropriate strategy. Finally, factors like payback, opportunity cost, organizational readiness and top management support are considered to determine the most cost effective strategy. As a part of this thesis, the audit has been automated using Visual Basic 4 software

A Preliminary Study of Distracted Driving

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) report distracted driving is a “problem on the rise” with increasing numbers injuries and deaths each year. More than 9 people are killed each day while more than 1,153 people are injured in crashes involving a distracted driver. Specifically, the number one killer of adolescents (ages 15-24) is automobile related deaths due to distracted driving. One of the most dangerous forms of distracted driving is texting while driving because it combines all three types of distraction: visual, manual, and cognitive. Texting and driving is a growing public safety hazard as seen through media and public service announcements. As health science students, we wanted to find out if college students text and drive along with their opinions behind the issue. Overall, the aim of the study was to examine if distracted driving is viewed as merely one manifestation of distracted living. After analyzing our results, it was concluded that this research needs to be continued in order to investigate the integrated pattern regarding the use of electronic devices, social media, and distraction

Outreach strategies in international and hybrid courts : report of the ICTJ-ECCC Workshop, Phnom Penh, March 3-5, 2010

This document presents a non‐exhaustive summary of some of the topics discussed at a workshop on outreach organized by ICTJ in collaboration with the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) from March 3-5, 2010. It first provides a general overview of the ECCC functions and outreach activities. Thereafter, it highlights the main themes that were raised in the presentations and discussion sessions

SPECIAL VARIANTS BASED EMBOSSING PROCESS FOR POLYMER MICROFABRICATION (A REVIEW)

ABSTRACT Hot embossing is becoming an increasingly important alternative to silicon-and glass-based Microfabrication technologies. Continuous enhancement of this process, however, is needed to overcome some process limitations. Several special variants, including rapid-thermal-response embossing, room-temperature embossing, two-station embossing and localized embossing. By means of these embossing variants, economic efficiency and part quality can be enhanced for materials and geometries which are difficult-to-emboss can be incorporated

CC-MPI: A Compiled Communication Capable MPI Prototype for Ethernet Switched Clusters

Compiled communication has recently been proposed to improve communication performance for clusters of workstations. The idea of compiled communication is to apply more aggressive optimizations to communications whose information is known at compile time. Existing MPI libraries do not support compiled communication. In this paper, we present an MPI prototype, CC--MPI, that supports compiled communication on Ethernet switched clusters. The unique feature of CC--MPI is that it allows the user to manage network resources such as multicast groups directly and to optimize communications based on the availability of the communication information. CC--MPI optimizes one--to--all, one--to-- many, all--to--all, and many--to--many collective communication routines using the compiled communication technique. We describe the techniques used in CC--MPI and report its performance. The results show that communication performance of Ethernet switched clusters can be significantly improved through compiled communication