CLUSTERING OF SMALL AGRO-PROCESSING FIRMS IN INDONESIA

Small-scale industries in Indonesia provide more than 65% of total manufacturing employment. Sixty-three percent of small-scale firm employment is in firms that are clustered. A cluster is defined statistically in Indonesia as at least 20 firms in a village. For some agro-processing industries, such as bamboo plaiting, clustering does not involve interaction among firms; for others, notably the furniture industry, clustering firms make joint marketing efforts, subcontract each other, and share large orders. This article uses two recent case studies in the agro-processing sector – the furniture and the palm sugar industries – in Central Java. We argue that the target market of the industry (local or international) influences the nature of the contracts and other forms of interaction in the clusters. Targeting an international market requires formal contracts, more focus on marketing, and separate roles for finishing firms and subcontracting firms. Policy should be directed at enabling clusters to shift to the international market by improving contract enforcement regulations, vocational training, and providing opportunities for group lending.Agribusiness, Industrial Organization,

Upgrading traditional technologies in small-scale industrial clusters: producer-driven innovation adoption in Indonesia

This paper discusses processes of technological change in the tile cluster in the village Karanggeneng in Central Java, Indonesia. A growing number ofproducers in this cluster have switched from traditional kiln to so-called handpress production. We will analyze the processes of innovation adoption of the handpress technology in the cluster. Adoption of the handpress technology encompasses certain indivisibilities which require collaboration amongproducers to render innovation adoption profitable. We will discuss how pioneer adopters share information and stimulate social learning and adoption on the part of their neighbours, because simultaneous adoption of the handpress technology by groups of producers is needed in order to tackle theindivisibilities which pioneers are facing

Invisible in Thailand: documenting the need for protection

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) has conducted asurvey to document the experiences of Burmese people livingin border areas of Thailand and assess the degree to whichthey merit international protection as refugees

Network Operators Advice and Assistance (NOAA): a real-time traffic rerouting expert system

A real-time autonomous expert system has been developed to carry out traffic management in the Southern Californian telephone network. The system has been working on live data since September 1991 and generates rerouting advice that agrees with that generated by the present network management procedures. A modular software design was adopted to allow for evolution. A graphics interface allows the user to easily navigate through the display of exception conditions and advice. Exceptions are shown highlighted on a map of Southern California. A severity measure is calculated for each exception and is used to prioritize the display of information

Event-driven control in theory and practice : trade-offs in software and control performance

Feedback control algorithms are indispensable for the proper functioning of many industrial high-tech systems like copiers, wafer steppers and so on. Most research in digital feedback control considers periodic or time-driven control systems, where continuous-time signals are represented by their sampled values at a fixed frequency. In most applications, these digital control algorithms are implemented in a real-time embedded software environment. As a consequence of the time-driven nature of controllers, control engineers pose strong, non-negotiable requirements on the real-time implementations of their algorithms as the required control performance can be guaranteed in this manner. This might lead to non-optimal solutions if the design problem is considered from a broader multi-disciplinary system perspective. As an example, time-driven controllers perform control calculations all the time at a fixed rate, so also when nothing significant has happened in the process. This is clearly an unnecessary waste of resources like processor load and communication bus load and thus not optimal if these aspects are considered as well. To reduce the severe real-time constraints imposed by the control engineer and the accompanying disadvantages, this thesis proposes to drop the strict requirement of equidistant sampling. This enables the designers to make better balanced multidisciplinary trade-offs resulting in a better overall system performance and reduced cost price. By not requiring equidistant sampling, one could for instance vary the sample frequency over time and dynamically schedule the control algorithms in order to optimize over processor load. Another option is to perform a control update when new measurement data arrives. In this manner quantization effects and latencies are reduced considerably, which can reduce the required sensor resolution and thus the system cost price. As it is now an event (e.g. the arrival of a new measurement), rather than the elapse of time, that triggers the controller to perform an update, this type of feedback controllers is called event-driven control. In this thesis, we present two different event-driven control structures. The first one is sensor-based event-driven control in the sense that the control update is triggered by the arrival of new sensor data. In particular, this control structure is applied to accurately control a motor, based on an (extremely) low resolution encoder. The control design is based on transforming the system equations from the time domain to the angular position (spatial) domain. As controller updates are synchronous with respect to the angular position of the motor, we can apply variations on classical control theory to design and tune the controller. As a result of the transformation, the typical control measures that we obtain from analysis, are formulated in the spatial domain. For instance, the bandwidth of the controller is not expressed in Hertz (s¡1) anymore, but in rad¡1 and settling time is replaced by settling distance. For many high-tech systems these spatial measures directly relate to the real performance requirements. Moreover, disturbances are often more easily formulated in terms of angular position than in terms of time, which has clear advantages from a modeling point of view. To validate the theory, the controller is implemented on a high speed document printing system, to accurately control a motor based on an encoder resolution of only 1 pulse per revolution. By means of analysis, simulation and measurements we show that the control performance is similar to the initially proposed industrial controller that is based on a much higher encoder resolution. Moreover, we show that the proposed event-driven controller involves a significant lower processor load and hence outperforms the time-driven controller from a system perspective. The aim of the second type of event-driven controllers is to reduce the resource utilization for the controller tasks, such as processor load and communication bus load. The main idea is to only update the controller when it is necessary from a control performance point of view. For instance, we propose event-driven controllers that do not update the control value when the tracking/stabilization error is below a certain threshold. By choosing this threshold, a trade-off can be made between control performance and processor load. To get insight in this trade-off, theory is presented to analyze the control performance of these event-driven control loops in terms of ultimate bounds on the tracking/stabilization error. The theory is based on inferring properties (like robust positive invariance, ultimate boundedness and convergence indices) for the event-driven controlled system from discrete-time linear systems and piecewise linear systems. Next to the theoretical analysis, simulations and experiments are carried out on a printer paper path test-setup. It is shown that for the particular application the average processing time, needed to execute the controller tasks, was reduced by a factor 2 without significant degradation of the control performance in comparison to a timedriven implementation. Moreover, we developed a method to accurately predict the processor load for different processing platforms. This method is based on simulation models and micro measurements on the processing platform, such that the processor load can be estimated prior to implementing the controller on the platform. Next to these contributions in the field of event-driven control, a system engineering technique called "threads of reasoning" is extended and applied to the printer case study to achieve a focus on the right issues and trade-offs in a design. In summary, two types of event-driven controllers are theoretically analyzed and experimentally validated on a prototype document printing system. The results clearly indicate the potential benefits of event-driven control with respect to the overall system performance and in making trade-offs between control performance, software performance and cost price

Low rate of rhesus immunization from rh- incompatible blood transfusions during liver and heart transplant surgery

Transfusion of one unit or more of Rh-positive red blood cells normally causes circulating anti-D antibody to appear 2-6 months later in 80-95% of Rh persons. We asked whether transplant immunosuppression with cyclosporine and corticosteroids affects Rh immuniza¬tion. Nineteen Rh" liver, heart, and heart-lung transplant recipients received 3—153 (median: 10) units of Rh+ RBCs at surgery and were tested for anti-D >2 months later. Three patients developed anti-D at 11—15 days; one may have had an unusually rapid primary immune response and two were secondary to previous exposure by pregnancy. None of the other 16 patients had anti-D when tested 2.5-51 months later (13 patients, >11.5 months). This low rate of Rhesus immunization in association with cyclosporine immunosuppression allows greater flexibility in meeting the transfusion needs of Rh- liver and heart transplant patients. Caution is still advised in young females and in patients who may have been previously exposed to Rh+ RBCs by transfusion or by pregnancy prior to the availability of perinatal Rh immune globulin twenty years ago. Other humoral immune responses to some vaccines or infectious agents may also be impaired in transplant patients© 1989 by The Williams and Wilkins Co

Contract pricing project

Motorola offers its customers a repair contract option that sets a monthly fee per radio to cover radio repairs. When a contracted company needs a radio serviced, the repair cost is covered by the service contract. Currently Motorola determines their contract prices based only on the number and type of radios a customer owns. The current contract pricing system in use at Motorola is outdated and needs to be replaced with one that is more cost effective. Instead of basing contract prices solely on the number and type of radios a customer owns, Motorola would like to implement a contract-pricing model that takes possible failure factors into account. Since Motorola has never conducted a study to determine how particular factors determine failure rates, the project team will conduct contract customer surveys and analysis of historical data in order to determine what actually has a significant effect on radio failure rates. Based on the data, a new contract-pricing model will be developed which will incorporate possible factors determined to affect fail rates in order to reduce monetary loss from repairs, avoid price subsidizing and give fairer prices to customers. The project team performed linear regression and statistical analysis on the data using IMP statistical software. This software package determined that there were several factors that could have an effect on failure rate. Instead of determining a pricing model, it was concluded that the mean repair cost should be utilized in the new pricing system. Customers that fall into the categories determined to have a significant effect on failure and poorer historical failure rates would be priced slightly higher than the mean and vice versa for those with good historical data and didn\u27t fall into the categories