Identifying the optimal strategy for suppliers’ involvement in product design: A case study

In order to increase efficiency and improve competitiveness, manufacturers around the globe are focusing on developing their core businesses. On the other hand, standard activities of engineering are optimally accomplished outside the borders of the firm; thus outsourcing of non-core businesses has become lately a common practice. Product design is considered as one of the most important phases in a product’s life cycle, since the majority of most critical decisions in terms of products’ overall performance are considered during the Research & Development (R&D) phase. Involving suppliers in a firm’s R&D offers significant benefits in various directions, such as feasibility, practicability, sustainability, competitiveness and innovativeness. However, selecting the optimal outsourcing strategy is not an easy decision. On the contrary, it is most challenging since it encompasses a number of different and in many cases mutually conflicting criteria. This paper presents a methodological approach for the selection of the optimal outsourcing strategy for a manufacturer’s R&D. The methodology is based on outranking multicriteria methods and more specifically ELECTRE III. The approach is illustrated and validated through a real world case study of a Greek olive oil producer.   Keywords: product design; suppliers; R&D; outsourcing strategy; multicriteria analysis, ELECTRE II

Integrated seismic and energy retrofitting of existing buildings: A state-of-the-art review

Ageing of the building stock is an issue affecting many regions in the world. This means a large proportion of existing buildings being considered energy inefficient, with associated high energy use for heating and cooling. Through renovation, it is possible to improve their energy-efficiency, hence reducing their significant impact on the total energy household and associated greenhouse gas emissions. In seismic regions, additionally, recent earthquakes have caused significant economic losses, largely due to the vulnerability of older buildings not designed to modern standards. Addressing seismic and energy performance by separate interventions is the common approach currently taken, however to achieve better cost-effectiveness, safety and efficiency, a novel holistic approach to building renovation is an emerging topic in the scientific literature. Proposed solutions range from integrated exoskeleton solutions, over strengthening and insulation solutions for the existing building envelope or their replacement with better materials, to integrated interventions on horizontal elements like roof and floor slabs. To identify pathways to combined seismic and energy retrofitting of buildings, a state-of-the-art review of all materials and solutions investigated to date is presented. This is followed by a critical analysis of their effectiveness, invasiveness, building use disruption as well as their impact on the environment. The assessment of current combined retrofitting research highlights a great potential for their application, with a potential to provide cost-effective renovation solutions for regions with moderate to high seismic risk. Still, to-date there is a lack of experimental research in this field, a need for further work on truly integrated technologies and their validation through applications on existing large-scale buildings. Moreover, there is a need for adequate design methods, regulations and incentives that further the implementation of integrated retrofitting approaches

Polymer Shape Anisotropy and the Depletion Interaction

We calculate the second and third virial coefficients of the effective sphere-sphere interaction due to polymer depletion. By utilizing the anisotropy of a typical polymer conformation, we can consider polymers that are roughly the same size as the spherical inclusions. We argue that recent experiments can confirm this anisotropy.Comment: 4 pages, 4 eps figures, RevTe

Flexural Strengthening of Two-Way RC Slabs with Textile-Reinforced Mortar: Experimental Investigation and Design Equations

The application of textile-reinforced mortar (TRM) as a means of increasing the flexural capacity of two-way reinforced concrete (RC) slabs is experimentally investigated in this study. The parameters examined include the number of TRM layers, the strengthening configuration, the textile fibers material (carbon versus glass), and the role of initial cracking in the slab. For this purpose six largescale RC slabs were built and tested to failure under monotonic loading distributed at four points. It is concluded that TRM increases substantially the precracking stiffness, the cracking load, the postcracking stiffness, and eventually the flexural capacity of two-way RC slabs, whereas the strengthening configuration plays an important role in the effectiveness of the technique. Simple design equations that provide good estimation of the experimental flexural moment of resistance are proposed

Deepening democracy within Ireland's social partnership

Ireland's social partnership process, now under attack from a number of quarters, has repeatedly been charged with being 'undemocratic' in that it undermines the sovereign position of elected political representatives, with key policy formulation and decision-making taking place in fora outside the institutions of representative democracy. These critiques echo those against new forms of networked governance more globally. A key question therefore is how (and if) democracy may be deepened within social partnership or its potential successor(s). This article addresses this question by employing a post-liberal democratic framework to examine social partnership in practice, and by drawing lessons from another partnership process, Malawi's PRSP. Drawing from Malawi's experience, it is argued that democracy can be deepened within social partnership when governance deliberations and negotiations are conducted under conditions of vibrant public debate and genuine perspective-based representation, and when the communicative and discursive norms are widened to allow for such representation

A common framework for learning causality

[EN] Causality is a fundamental part of reasoning to model the physics of an application domain, to understand the behaviour of an agent or to identify the relationship between two entities. Causality occurs when an action is taken and may also occur when two happenings come undeniably together. The study of causal inference aims at uncovering causal dependencies among observed data and to come up with automated methods to find such dependencies. While there exist a broad range of principles and approaches involved in causal inference, in this position paper we argue that it is possible to unify different causality views under a common framework of symbolic learning.This work is supported by the Spanish MINECO project TIN2017-88476-C2-1-R. Diego Aineto is partially supported by the FPU16/03184 and Sergio Jimenez by the RYC15/18009, both programs funded by the Spanish government.Onaindia De La Rivaherrera, E.; Aineto, D.; Jiménez-Celorrio, S. (2018). A common framework for learning causality. Progress in Artificial Intelligence. 7(4):351-357. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13748-018-0151-yS35135774Aineto, D., Jiménez, S., Onaindia, E.: Learning STRIPS action models with classical planning. In: International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, ICAPS-18 (2018)Amir, E., Chang, A.: Learning partially observable deterministic action models. J. Artif. Intell. Res. 33, 349–402 (2008)Asai, M., Fukunaga, A.: Classical planning in deep latent space: bridging the subsymbolic–symbolic boundary. In: National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI-18 (2018)Cresswell, S.N., McCluskey, T.L., West, M.M.: Acquiring planning domain models using LOCM. Knowl. Eng. Rev. 28(02), 195–213 (2013)Ebert-Uphoff, I.: Two applications of causal discovery in climate science. In: Workshop Case Studies of Causal Discovery with Model Search (2013)Ebert-Uphoff, I., Deng, Y.: Causal discovery from spatio-temporal data with applications to climate science. In: 13th International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications, ICMLA 2014, Detroit, MI, USA, 3–6 December 2014, pp. 606–613 (2014)Giunchiglia, E., Lee, J., Lifschitz, V., McCain, N., Turner, H.: Nonmonotonic causal theories. Artif. Intell. 153(1–2), 49–104 (2004)Halpern, J.Y., Pearl, J.: Causes and explanations: a structural-model approach. Part I: Causes. Br. J. Philos. Sci. 56(4), 843–887 (2005)Heckerman, D., Meek, C., Cooper, G.: A Bayesian approach to causal discovery. In: Jain, L.C., Holmes, D.E. (eds.) Innovations in Machine Learning. Theory and Applications, Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing, chapter 1, pp. 1–28. Springer, Berlin (2006)Li, J., Le, T.D., Liu, L., Liu, J., Jin, Z., Sun, B.-Y., Ma, S.: From observational studies to causal rule mining. ACM TIST 7(2), 14:1–14:27 (2016)Malinsky, D., Danks, D.: Causal discovery algorithms: a practical guide. Philos. Compass 13, e12470 (2018)McCain, N., Turner, H.: Causal theories of action and change. In: Proceedings of the Fourteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Ninth Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference, AAAI 97, IAAI 97, 27–31 July 1997, Providence, Rhode Island, pp. 460–465 (1997)McCarthy, J.: Epistemological problems of artificial intelligence. In: Proceedings of the 5th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Cambridge, MA, USA, 22–25 August 1977, pp. 1038–1044 (1977)McCarthy, J., Hayes, P.: Some philosophical problems from the standpoint of artificial intelligence. Mach. Intell. 4, 463–502 (1969)Pearl, J.: Reasoning with cause and effect. AI Mag. 23(1), 95–112 (2002)Pearl, J.: Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference, 2nd edn. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2009)Spirtes, C.G.P., Scheines, R.: Causation, Prediction and Search, 2nd edn. The MIT Press, Cambridge (2001)Spirtes, P., Zhang, K.: Causal discovery and inference: concepts and recent methodological advances. Appl. Inform. 3, 3 (2016)Thielscher, M.: Ramification and causality. Artif. Intell. 89(1–2), 317–364 (1997)Triantafillou, S., Tsamardinos, I.: Constraint-based causal discovery from multiple interventions over overlapping variable sets. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 16, 2147–2205 (2015)Yang, Q., Kangheng, W., Jiang, Y.: Learning action models from plan examples using weighted MAX-SAT. Artif. Intell. 171(2–3), 107–143 (2007)Zhuo, H.H., Kambhampati, S: Action-model acquisition from noisy plan traces. In: International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-13, pp. 2444–2450. AAAI Press (2013

Shear strengthening of concrete members with TRM jackets: Effect of shear span-to-depth ratio, material and amount of external reinforcement

An experimental work on reinforced concrete (RC) rectangular beams strengthened in shear with textile reinforced mortar (TRM) jackets is presented in this paper, with focus on the following investigated parameters: (a) the amount of external TRM reinforcement ratio, ρf, by means of using different number of textile layers and different types of textile fibre materials (carbon, glass, basalt); (b) the textile geometry, and (c) the shear span-to-depth ratio, a/d. In total, 22 tests were conducted on simply supported rectangular RC beams under (three-point bending) monotonic loading. The experimental results revealed that: (1) TRM is very effective when the failure is attributed to debonding of the TRM jacket from the concrete substrate; (2) the trend of effective strains for carbon, glass and basalt TRM jackets is descending for increasing values of the TRM reinforcement ratio, ρf, when failure is associated to debonding of the jacket; (3) the effect of textile geometry is significant only for low values of ρf, resulting in variances in the capacity enhancement and the failure modes, and (4) the shear span-to-depth ratio has practically no effect to the failure mode nor to the TRM jacket contribution to the total shear resistance of the RC beams

Sex steroids and personality traits in the middle luteal phase of healthy normally menstruating young professional women

.10, F(1,57)=6.23, p=0.016). We were unable to find any association between the circulating androgens and scores on the masculinity-femininity scale (Mf). We were also unable to document any association between the weak adrenal androgens DHEA and DHEA-S and depression in contrast to several published reports. (c) Our data suggest a marginally significant association between progesterone and scores on the 7-Pt (obsessive/compulsive/psychasthenia) scale (r=0.27, p<0.05). However, only 7% of the 7-Pt variance was explained by progesterone (r 2 =0.071, F(1,50)=3.81, p=0.057). cONcluSIONS: We have found that total testosterone was associated with the paranoia score, the metabolic product of activated androgens, 3alpha-diolG, to social introversion and, finally, progesterone to obsessive-compulsive behavior