Company Size, Age and Innovation Activity in the Steel Industry. (Example of BOF Technology)

In an era of technology globalization, management appears to be one of the main factors influencing success in technological development. The flexibility and speed with which a company or country is able to identify and introduce new technologies appear to be the most important factors for its subsequent success. Today possibly more than ever. the characteristics of management and organization which enable a company to be innovative are claiming the attention of managers and politicians. No less important is a company's or country's flexibility in exploring and developing already-introduced technologies. The possibility of describing the process of technology substitution through logistic functions is one method of forecasting future development of a technological species and one which is not yet fully utilized in practice. The management implications of the life cycle concept appear to be very important for managerial practice, but this is a tool which has not yet been fully adapted to managerial needs. The study and analysis of management dynamics along the different phases of the life cycle can make possible the definition of different management applications of the life cycle concept. Based on this, useful conclusions can be drawn for decision-makers. Size is one possible characteristic to describe organizational status and management, and the dynamics of size during different phases of the life cycle can indicate the innovative capabilities of small-, medium- and large-scale industries. This is the main objective of the study presented, which in contrast to prior studies, concentrates on two new aspects: new methods of clustering firms and, based on this, analysis of the role of firm size and age in different phases of the life cycle of basic oxygen technology

Economic Benefits of FMS (East-West Comparison)

One of the important tasks of the CIM project is to study and to reveal the main strategic goals, prerequisites, conditions of implementation and consequences of CIM adoption. Flexible manufacturing systems, as a part of CIM, have already been adopted in many countries and companies. The present paper analyzes one part of FMS adoption, i.e. the comparison of its economic consequences in centrally planned and in market economies. The data for the comparison are based on the existing literature. This paper is the second one of its kind -- the first was written by R. Sheinin and I. Tchijov, entitled "Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS): State of Art and Development". The comparison gives us interesting results and new impulses for our work. On the other hand, the database is limited. The only way to extend our investigations into the fields of management, society and logistics is to start with in-depth case studies in selected companies, having adopted FMS, through the use of questionnaires and interviews. Such an effort is, of course, only possible with the future assistance of the network of collaborating institutions in NMO countries, and IIASA is a unique place to carry out such interesting comparisons as East-West, small-large companies, small-medium-large companies, different industry sectors, in all above-mentioned areas. This database will allow us to arrive at new conclusions which will help decision makers at different levels in their strategic considerations concerning CIM adoption

Strategic, Organizational, Economic and Social Issues of CIM: International Comparative Analysis (Part II)

This working paper summarizes the results of the analysis of Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) of the broader (questionnaire) data base, consisting of case studies collected at IIASA during the period 1988-1989 (questionnaire data from 9 FMS in Finland, 5 FMS in Czechoslovakia, 6 FMS in Austria, 5 FMS in Sweden, 10 FMS in the GDR and 4 EMS in Bulgaria). The above-mentioned sample establishes the substantial FMS base of the respective country (except for Sweden and Czechoslovakia) and can be taken as the representative sample of FMS in that particular country. The IIASA case studies data base was reinforced by comparative studies published in literature. Our methodological approach is based on the hypothesis established in previous stages of our research work (see Maly, 1988). The main aim of this work is to generalize the results with special attention on outlining the specific features of a comparative analysis between centrally planned and market economies. The main topics on which we concentrate our attention are: characteristics of the users; strategic goals; organizational and operation characteristics, communication systems; economic characteristics; and social characteristics

Prognostic Model for Industrial Robot Penetration in Centrally Planned Economics

The CIM Project has developed cost-benefit models, based on the production function approach to make an assessment of economic impacts of robotics and to forecast the future penetration of robotics. The current paper is an extension of this basic approach to planned economies, by using CSSR statistics. It is especially interesting, as it provides a greater insight of penetration and future forecasts of robotics in planned economies

Choice logics and their computational properties

Qualitative Choice Logic (QCL) and Conjunctive Choice Logic (CCL) are formalisms for preference handling, with especially QCL being well established in the field of AI. So far, analyses of these logics need to be done on a case-by-case basis, albeit they share several common features. This calls for a more general choice logic framework, with QCL and CCL as well as some of their derivatives being particular instantiations. We provide such a framework, which allows us, on the one hand, to easily define new choice logics and, on the other hand, to examine properties of different choice logics in a uniform setting. In particular, we investigate strong equivalence, a core concept in non-classical logics for understanding formula simplification, and computational complexity. Our analysis also yields new results for QCL and CCL. For example, we show that the main reasoning task regarding preferred models is $\Theta^p_2$-complete for QCL and CCL, while being $\Delta^p_2$-complete for a newly introduced choice logic.Comment: This is an extended version of a paper of the same name to be published at IJCAI 202

Coherent control of magnetization precession in ferromagnetic semiconductor (Ga,Mn)As

We report single-color, time resolved magneto-optical measurements in ferromagnetic semiconductor (Ga,Mn)As. We demonstrate coherent optical control of the magnetization precession by applying two successive ultrashort laser pulses. The magnetic field and temperature dependent experiments reveal the collective Mn-moment nature of the oscillatory part of the time-dependent Kerr rotation, as well as contributions to the magneto-optical signal that are not connected with the magnetization dynamics.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, accepted in Applied Physics Letter

Reconstruction of Clothing Menak Sunda Media Planting Values Culture Local Wisdom Sunda

The scope of this study relates to the reconstruction of the Sunda ethnic clothing, especially in Bandung marvelous fashion with the intention to reinvest the values of local wisdom Sundanese culture. On Sunda marvelous fashion reconstruction used an experimental method with the following stages: a. Making fashion design Menak Sunda, b. Selection of materials/ material, c. Manufacture of clothing Menak Sunda/ Bandung. Experimental method used to reintroduce a form of fashion Menak Bandung to the public. The results showed that clothing menak Sundanese source can be found in museums Prabu GESAN Ulun is Menak Clothing Bandung. Reconstruction fashion Menak also functions as a medium in instilling the values of local wisdom of Sundanese culture, especially related to the fashion area of Indonesia. Clothing is a cultural phenomenon in a culture, because it is through the visual language/ visualization of clothing, it can be studied, explored and revealed the values contained therein. It also can be a communication medium that has a historical past and the meaning of positive values for the local culture then submitted at the present or future

Scalable parallel communications

Coarse-grain parallelism in networking (that is, the use of multiple protocol processors running replicated software sending over several physical channels) can be used to provide gigabit communications for a single application. Since parallel network performance is highly dependent on real issues such as hardware properties (e.g., memory speeds and cache hit rates), operating system overhead (e.g., interrupt handling), and protocol performance (e.g., effect of timeouts), we have performed detailed simulations studies of both a bus-based multiprocessor workstation node (based on the Sun Galaxy MP multiprocessor) and a distributed-memory parallel computer node (based on the Touchstone DELTA) to evaluate the behavior of coarse-grain parallelism. Our results indicate: (1) coarse-grain parallelism can deliver multiple 100 Mbps with currently available hardware platforms and existing networking protocols (such as Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and parallel Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) rings); (2) scale-up is near linear in n, the number of protocol processors, and channels (for small n and up to a few hundred Mbps); and (3) since these results are based on existing hardware without specialized devices (except perhaps for some simple modifications of the FDDI boards), this is a low cost solution to providing multiple 100 Mbps on current machines. In addition, from both the performance analysis and the properties of these architectures, we conclude: (1) multiple processors providing identical services and the use of space division multiplexing for the physical channels can provide better reliability than monolithic approaches (it also provides graceful degradation and low-cost load balancing); (2) coarse-grain parallelism supports running several transport protocols in parallel to provide different types of service (for example, one TCP handles small messages for many users, other TCP's running in parallel provide high bandwidth service to a single application); and (3) coarse grain parallelism will be able to incorporate many future improvements from related work (e.g., reduced data movement, fast TCP, fine-grain parallelism) also with near linear speed-ups

Strategic, Organizational and Social Issues of CIM: International Comparative Analysis (Part I)

There are many hypotheses regarding different social issues of CIM technologies. The paper gives a review and synthesis of the key hypotheses on the impact of managerial, organizational issues and work content, which are presented in the literature. The paper furthermore presents a procedure to test these hypotheses against the data coming from the concrete case studies and to draw conclusions from the respective cases. Some results and conclusions are presented by using data obtained from IIASA's world-wide FMS interview, survey and pilot cases in Finland and Czechoslovakia. The method of the paper forms a basis for making international comparisons and for drawing conclusions from the case studies, which will be pursued by the IIASA CIM Project in the near future