Modelling customer satisfaction for product development using genetic programming

Product development involves several processes in which product planning is the first one. Several tasksnormally are required to be conducted in the product-planning process and one of them is to determinesettings of design attributes for products. Facing with fierce competition in marketplaces, companies try to determine the settings such that the best customer satisfaction of products could be obtained.To achieve this, models that relate customer satisfaction to design attributes need to be developed first. Previous research has adopted various modelling techniques to develop the models, but those models are not able to address interaction terms or higher-order terms in relating customer satisfaction to design attributes, or they are the black-box type models. In this paper, a method based on genetic programming (GP) is presented to generate models for relating customer satisfaction to design attributes. The GP is first used to construct branches of a tree representing structures of a model where interaction terms and higher-order terms can be addressed. Then an orthogonal least-squares algorithm is used to determine the coefficients of the model. The models thus developed are explicit and consist of interaction terms and higher-order terms in relating customer satisfaction to design attributes. A case study of a digital camera design is used to illustrate the proposed method

Crystal-like high frequency phonons in the amorphous phases of solid water

The high frequency dynamics of low- (LDA) and high-density amorphous-ice (HDA) and of cubic ice (I_c) has been measured by inelastic X-ray Scattering (IXS) in the 1-15 nm^{-1} momentum transfer (Q) range. Sharp phonon-like excitations are observed, and the longitudinal acoustic branch is identified up to Q = 8nm^{-1} in LDA and I_c and up to 5nm^{-1} in HDA. The narrow width of these excitations is in sharp contrast with the broad features observed in all amorphous systems studied so far. The "crystal-like" behavior of amorphous ices, therefore, implies a considerable reduction in the number of decay channels available to sound-like excitations which is assimilated to low local disorder.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

The Influence of Chemical Short Range Order on Atomic Diffusion in Al-Ni Melts

We use inelastic neutron scattering and molecular dynamics (MD) simulation to investigate the chemical short range order (CSRO), visible through prepeaks in the structure factors, and its relation to self diffusion in Al-Ni melts. As a function of composition at 1795K Ni self diffusion coefficients from experiment and simulation exhibit a non-linear dependence with a pronounced increase on the Al-rich side. This comes along with a change in CSRO with increasing Al content that is related to a more dense packing of the atoms in Ni-rich Al-Ni systems.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure

Evolving rules for document classification

We describe a novel method for using Genetic Programming to create compact classification rules based on combinations of N-Grams (character strings). Genetic programs acquire fitness by producing rules that are effective classifiers in terms of precision and recall when evaluated against a set of training documents. We describe a set of functions and terminals and provide results from a classification task using the Reuters 21578 dataset. We also suggest that because the induced rules are meaningful to a human analyst they may have a number of other uses beyond classification and provide a basis for text mining applications

Wavelength-selectable laser emission from a multistripe array grating integrated cavity laser

We report laser operation of a multistripe array grating integrated cavity (MAGIC) laser in which the wavelength of the emission from a single output stripe is chosen by selectively injection pumping a second stripe. We demonstrate a device that lases in the 1.5 µm fiber band at 15 wavelengths, evenly spaced by ~2 nm. The single-output/wavelength-selectable operation, together with the accurate predefinition of the lasing wavelengths, makes the MAGIC laser a very attractive candidate for use in multiwavelength networks