Infrastructural support to promote farmer adoption of improved technologies.

The paper considers the factors responsible for technology adoption and suggests the infrastructures needed to hasten adoption. Case studies from Bangladesh are used to illustrate the beneficial effects of some of the infrastructural support systems on technology adoption

Diversity and seasonal variation of essential oils for wild Coridothymus capitatus (L.) using GC-MS technique

Essential oils of C. capitatus wild populations were quantitatively analyzed using gas chromatography and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry techniques. Significant diversity was obtained among wild C. capitatus populations. Thymol percentage ranged from 0.03 to 0.57%, and carvacrol percentage ranged from 0.10 to 0.90%. Populations showed average dissimilarity of 10.68. The unweighted pair group method with arithmatic mean (UPGMA) cluster analysis revealed thymol and carvacrol chemotypes. Monthly quantitative changes in thymol and carvacrol were obtained, the highest percentages of oil yields, thymol, carvacrol, and thymol plus carvacrol phenolic ingredients were recorded in July (2.45, 0.31, 0.87, and 1.19, respectively). The results of this study indicated that a broad range of genetic diversity exists among populations of C. capitatus collected from wild habitats in Jordan. The results obtained pave the road for a potential essential oil production from C. capitatus species

Scheduling Setup Changes At Bottleneck Workstations In Semiconductor Manufacturing

This paper presents a scheduling heuristic to aid the operators in semiconductor fabrication facilities (commonly referred to as fabs) in choosing what type of lots to process next and whether to change machine setup in order to reduce cycle time. Specifically, this study focused on developing a scheduling heuristic for ion implanters at Cirent Semiconductor (currently Agere Systems) in Orlando, Florida, where implanters are considered to be a bottleneck workstation. The re-entrant flow of production passes several times through the implanters at different stages of the wafer production, requiring changes to the current settings of the workstations and thus incurring a significant setup time. The scheduling heuristic aims at balancing workload levels for implanters processing jobs at different stages of the wafer production lifecycle. This is accomplished by first processing those jobs that contribute most to the increase in inventory levels at the bottleneck workstation. The measures used to evaluate the performance of the proposed heuristic were mean cycle time, mean work in process (WIP), and standard deviation of cycle time. The performance of the proposed heuristic was compared with the scheduling rules currently in use and other commonly used dispatching rules using a validated simulation model. Simulation results showed that the introduced heuristic performs better than all other rules in terms of mean cycle time and WIP in all cases, and better in terms of standard deviation of cycle time for most cases tested. The heuristic can be used at any bottleneck workstation that processes products at different stages of their production cycle and that requires a significant setup time

ABSTRACT SCHEDULING SETUP CHANGES AT BOTTLENECK FACILITIES IN SEMICONDUCTOR MANUFACTURING

In this paper, a scheduling heuristic was developed to aid the operators in semiconductor fabs in choosing what type of lots to process next on bottleneck facilities and whether to change machine setup in order to reduce cycle time. The scheduling heuristic aims at balancing workload levels for implanters processing lots at different stages of the wafer production lifecycle. This is accomplished by processing lots that contribute most to increasing inventory levels at the bottleneck facility. A whole production line simulation model was used to evaluate the performance of the scheduling heuristic and to compare it against several commonly used scheduling heuristics with respect to mean cycle time, work in process (WIP), and standard deviation of cycle time. Simulation results showed that the heuristic performed better than all other rules in terms of mean cycle time and WIP in all cases, and better in terms of standard deviation of cycle time for most cases tested.

Agricultural productivity in the lower Mekong Basin: trends and future prospects for food security

Agricultural productivity, Economic productivity, Mekong Basin, Food security,