Toward A New Operations Strategy in the Network Economy

The rapid development of information technology has dramatically changed the dynamics of the market and altered the rules of competition. Inter-organization information systems make it possible for firms to achieve effective integration both in decision-making and operations processes, which brings enormous potential for supply chain cooperation. The scope of operations now is no longer confined to plant or strategic business unit (SBU) level. It has expanded to the whole supply chain. In the network economy, almost every underlying assumption of old economy operations management comes into questions. Competitive advantages making firms success in the old economy may lose their utility in the new IT-based economy. New source of competitive advantages should be identified and cultivated. This study conceptually extends existing operations strategy models: (1) to reflect the substantial change brought by the network economy and the new characteristics of emerging operations mode; (2) by extending the unit of analysis from plant and strategic business unit to supply chain organization; (3) by adding new construct and at the same time extending the connotation of prior constructs used in traditional operations strategy models. A conceptual framework of the new operations strategy is recommended

Synthetic culture platform and methods of using

The present invention provides a synthetic cell culture platform, comprising: a two dimensional and/or three dimensional surface comprising peptides conjugated to said surface and methods of using the platform for increasing cell adhesion, stable attachment and/or proliferation of cells grown on the platform and for promoting differentiation of neural stem cells into neurons

A Chaotic Particle Swarm Optimization-Based Heuristic for Market-Oriented Task-Level Scheduling in Cloud Workflow Systems

Cloud workflow system is a kind of platform service based on cloud computing. It facilitates the automation of workflow applications. Between cloud workflow system and its counterparts, market-oriented business model is one of the most prominent factors. The optimization of task-level scheduling in cloud workflow system is a hot topic. As the scheduling is a NP problem, Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) have been proposed to optimize the cost. However, they have the characteristic of premature convergence in optimization process and therefore cannot effectively reduce the cost. To solve these problems, Chaotic Particle Swarm Optimization (CPSO) algorithm with chaotic sequence and adaptive inertia weight factor is applied to present the task-level scheduling. Chaotic sequence with high randomness improves the diversity of solutions, and its regularity assures a good global convergence. Adaptive inertia weight factor depends on the estimate value of cost. It makes the scheduling avoid premature convergence by properly balancing between global and local exploration. The experimental simulation shows that the cost obtained by our scheduling is always lower than the other two representative counterparts

Detecting Differential Expression from RNA-seq Data with Expression Measurement Uncertainty

High-throughput RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) has emerged as a revolutionary and powerful technology for expression profiling. Most proposed methods for detecting differentially expressed (DE) genes from RNA-seq are based on statistics that compare normalized read counts between conditions. However, there are few methods considering the expression measurement uncertainty into DE detection. Moreover, most methods are only capable of detecting DE genes, and few methods are available for detecting DE isoforms. In this paper, a Bayesian framework (BDSeq) is proposed to detect DE genes and isoforms with consideration of expression measurement uncertainty. This expression measurement uncertainty provides useful information which can help to improve the performance of DE detection. Three real RAN-seq data sets are used to evaluate the performance of BDSeq and results show that the inclusion of expression measurement uncertainty improves accuracy in detection of DE genes and isoforms. Finally, we develop a GamSeq-BDSeq RNA-seq analysis pipeline to facilitate users, which is freely available at the website http://parnec.nuaa.edu.cn/liux/GSBD/GamSeq-BDSeq.html.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figure

Axis current damage identification method based on bispectral locally preserving projection

A bispectral locally-preserving projection fault identification method is proposed. Fault pattern recognition is performed using a support vector machine (SVM). The experimental results show that the method can effectively identify the current damage of the bearing shaft, and the classification accuracy of the bearing fault containing the shaft current damage can reach more than 96.25 %

Design and analysis of multi-megawatt wind turbines blades

Considering the change of circumferential velocity in the actual process of air flow, the aerodynamic shape of a 2 MW wind turbine blade is designed based on the Schmitz theory. The solid model for the blade is established using the three-dimensional coordinates of each section, which has been calculated by the coordinate transformation of the blade airfoil parameters. Then the solid model is imported to the finite element analysis software, and the influences of the layer thickness and ply angle on the modal characteristics and aerodynamic load of the blade are analyzed. The simulation results show that the modal characteristics are optimal when the layer thickness is 0.6 mm and the ply angle is 60°, the aerodynamic concentrated load of the blades is increased linearly as the chord length growing, which the largest load is located in the largest chord length, and the maximum concentration stress on blade under applied of aerodynamic load is minimal when the ply angle is 44°

Dynamical analysis of wind turbine blades based on harmonic response

As the forces applied on the wind turbine blade are irregular, the deformation and concentrated stress of the blade may vary with the load and excitation. And the lamination of composite materials is critical to blade design, it directly affects the performance and power of wind power plants. In this paper, the response characteristics of the wind turbine blade is analyzed by the application of the harmonic response method under different ply angles. Through the simulation results, the performance of the actual blade is estimated, and the rationality of this design is judged. The results demonstrate that the blade displacement response amplitude is the minimum when ply angle is 45°. It is also found that the maximum displacement response occurs in the Y direction (i.e. parallel to the flow direction) by analyzing the displacement of each section in the blade, while the maximum stress is located at blade root