Virtual Collaborative R&D Teams in Malaysia Manufacturing SMEs

This paper presents the results of empirical research conducted during March to September 2009. The study focused on the influence of virtual research and development (R&D) teams within Malaysian manufacturing small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). The specific objective of the study is better understanding of the application of collaborative technologies in business, to find the effective factors to assist SMEs to remain competitive in the future. The paper stresses to find an answer for a question “Is there any relationship between company size, Internet connection facility and virtuality?”. The survey data shows SMEs are now technologically capable of performing the virtual collaborative team, but the infrastructure usage is less. SMEs now have the necessary technology to begin the implementation process of collaboration tools to reduce research and development (R&D) time, costs and increase productivity. So, the manager of R&D should take the potentials of virtual teams into account

An Experimental Study of Load Balancing of OpenNebula Open-Source Cloud Computing Platform

Cloud Computing is becoming a viable computing solution for services oriented computing. Several open-source cloud solutions are available to these supports. Open-source software stacks offer a huge amount of customizability without huge licensing fees. As a result, open source software are widely used for designing cloud, and private clouds are being built increasingly in the open source way. Numerous contributions have been made by the open-source community related to private-IaaS-cloud. OpenNebula - a cloud platform is one of the popular private cloud management software. However, little has been done to systematically investigate the performance evaluation of this open-source cloud solution in the existing literature. The performance evaluation aids new and existing research, industry and international projects when selecting OpenNebula software to their work. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the load-balancing performance of the OpenNebula cloud management software. For the performance evaluation, the OpenNebula cloud management software is installed and configured as a prototype implementation and tested on the DIU Cloud Lab. In this paper, two set of experiments are conducted to identify the load balancing performance of the OpenNebula cloud management platform- (1) Delete and Add Virtual Machine (VM) from OpenNebula cloud platform; (2) Mapping Physical Hosts to Virtual Machines (VMs) in the OpenNebula cloud platform.Comment: 6 page

Impacts of Common Components in Multistage Production System under Uncertain Conditions

Abstract The work desires: i) to determine the optimum level of batch size in bottleneck facility and ii) to analyze the effect of common components on work-in-process (WIP) level and cycle time in a multistage production system under uncertainties. The uncertainty is created by machine breakdown and quality variation. Few simulation models are developed based on a live case from a company. The models are verified and validated with the historical data from the company and by face validity. Taguchi approach for orthogonal array is used in designing experiments and these are executed in WITNESS. It is observed that the variation in level of common component in the system has significant impact on the production WIP level and cycle time. The main contribution of this research is determination of the optimal level of batch size in a bottleneck resource under the uncertainties. This approach can be generalized to any multistage production system, regardless of the precedence relationships among the various production stages in the system

Characterization techniques for nanotechnology applications in textiles

304-317Nanoscience and nanotechnology are considered to be the key technologies for the current century. Efforts are being made worldwide to create smart and intelligent textiles by incorporating various nanoparticles or creating nanostructured surfaces and nanofibres which lead to unprecedented level of textile performance, such as stain resistant, self-cleaning, antistatic, UV protective, etc. However, there are many challenges in the research and development of nanotechnology based products. The precise control of nanoparticle size, size distribution, dispersion at nanolevel and deposition on textile substrate needs sophisticated characterization techniques, such as particle size analyzer, electron microscopy (SEM/TEM/HRTEM), atomic force microscopy, X-ray diffraction, Raman spectroscopy, X-ray photon spectroscopy, etc. This paper discusses the basic principle and applications of these instrumental techniques in the field of nanotechnology research in textiles