A NOVEL TYPE OF FLEXIBLE SOFT ANALYTIC NETWORK PROCESS TO SOLVE THE MULTIPLE-ATTRIBUTE DECISION-MAKING PROBLEM

  Research and development of scientific and technological products have been changing with each passing day in this new millennium. Decisions related to the production of technical products are the key to affecting the sustainable development and market share of enterprises. However, the decision-making related to the production of technology products contains many different evaluation criteria as well as qualitative and quantitative evaluation attributes. Moreover, the correlation between criteria must be considered so it can be treated as a complex multiple-attribute decision-making (MADM) problem. Moreover, performing a multi-attribute decision evaluation often encounters incomplete or missing information provided by experts, which will lead to difficulties in the solution process. In view of the incomplete or missing information of the assessment data, the traditional analytic network process (ANP) method and decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory ANP (DANP) method will delete the incomplete information during the process of assessment and decision-making, and this will bring about non-objective assessment results. In order to solve the above problems, this study proposes a novel type of flexible soft ANP (SANP) method to solve the MADM problems and uses a practical example of smartphone text entry to prove the effectiveness and suitability of the proposed SANP method

Security Threat Assessment of an Internet Security System Using Attack Tree and Vague Sets

Security threat assessment of the Internet security system has become a greater concern in recent years because of the progress and diversification of information technology. Traditionally, the failure probabilities of bottom events of an Internet security system are treated as exact values when the failure probability of the entire system is estimated. However, security threat assessment when the malfunction data of the system’s elementary event are incomplete—the traditional approach for calculating reliability—is no longer applicable. Moreover, it does not consider the failure probability of the bottom events suffered in the attack, which may bias conclusions. In order to effectively solve the problem above, this paper proposes a novel technique, integrating attack tree and vague sets for security threat assessment. For verification of the proposed approach, a numerical example of an Internet security system security threat assessment is adopted in this paper. The result of the proposed method is compared with the listing approaches of security threat assessment methods

Modeling the pulse signal by wave-shape function and analyzing by synchrosqueezing transform

We apply the recently developed adaptive non-harmonic model based on the wave-shape function, as well as the time-frequency analysis tool called synchrosqueezing transform (SST) to model and analyze oscillatory physiological signals. To demonstrate how the model and algorithm work, we apply them to study the pulse wave signal. By extracting features called the spectral pulse signature, {and} based on functional regression, we characterize the hemodynamics from the radial pulse wave signals recorded by the sphygmomanometer. Analysis results suggest the potential of the proposed signal processing approach to extract health-related hemodynamics features

Direct Effects of HIV-1 Tat on Excitability and Survival of Primary Dorsal Root Ganglion Neurons: Possible Contribution to HIV-1-Associated Pain.

The vast majority of people living with human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) have pain syndrome, which has a significant impact on their quality of life. The underlying causes of HIV-1-associated pain are not likely attributable to direct viral infection of the nervous system due to the lack of evidence of neuronal infection by HIV-1. However, HIV-1 proteins are possibly involved as they have been implicated in neuronal damage and death. The current study assesses the direct effects of HIV-1 Tat, one of potent neurotoxic viral proteins released from HIV-1-infected cells, on the excitability and survival of rat primary dorsal root ganglion (DRG) neurons. We demonstrated that HIV-1 Tat triggered rapid and sustained enhancement of the excitability of small-diameter rat primary DRG neurons, which was accompanied by marked reductions in the rheobase and resting membrane potential (RMP), and an increase in the resistance at threshold (RTh). Such Tat-induced DRG hyperexcitability may be a consequence of the inhibition of cyclin-dependent kinase 5 (Cdk5) activity. Tat rapidly inhibited Cdk5 kinase activity and mRNA production, and roscovitine, a well-known Cdk5 inhibitor, induced a very similar pattern of DRG hyperexcitability. Indeed, pre-application of Tat prevented roscovitine from having additional effects on the RMP and action potentials (APs) of DRGs. However, Tat-mediated actions on the rheobase and RTh were accelerated by roscovitine. These results suggest that Tat-mediated changes in DRG excitability are partly facilitated by Cdk5 inhibition. In addition, Cdk5 is most abundant in DRG neurons and participates in the regulation of pain signaling. We also demonstrated that HIV-1 Tat markedly induced apoptosis of primary DRG neurons after exposure for longer than 48 h. Together, this work indicates that HIV-1 proteins are capable of producing pain signaling through direct actions on excitability and survival of sensory neurons

Anodization of nanoporous alumina on impurity-induced hemisphere curved surface of aluminum at room temperature

Nanoporous alumina which was produced by a conventional direct current anodization [DCA] process at low temperatures has received much attention in various applications such as nanomaterial synthesis, sensors, and photonics. In this article, we employed a newly developed hybrid pulse anodization [HPA] method to fabricate the nanoporous alumina on a flat and curved surface of an aluminum [Al] foil at room temperature [RT]. We fabricate the nanopores to grow on a hemisphere curved surface and characterize their behavior along the normal vectors of the hemisphere curve. In a conventional DCA approach, the structures of branched nanopores were grown on a photolithography-and-etched low-curvature curved surface with large interpore distances. However, a high-curvature hemisphere curved surface can be obtained by the HPA technique. Such a curved surface by HPA is intrinsically induced by the high-resistivity impurities in the aluminum foil and leads to branching and bending of nanopore growth via the electric field mechanism rather than the interpore distance in conventional approaches. It is noted that by the HPA technique, the Joule heat during the RT process has been significantly suppressed globally on the material, and nanopores have been grown along the normal vectors of a hemisphere curve. The curvature is much larger than that in other literatures due to different fabrication methods. In theory, the number of nanopores on the hemisphere surface is two times of the conventional flat plane, which is potentially useful for photocatalyst or other applications

Integrating Spherical Fuzzy Sets and the Objective Weights Consideration of Risk Factors for Handling Risk-Ranking Issues

Risk assessments and risk prioritizations are crucial aspects of new product design before a product is launched into the market. Risk-ranking issues involve the information that is considered for the evaluation and objective weighting considerations of the evaluation factors that are presented by the data. However, typical risk-ranking methods cannot effectively grasp a comprehensive evaluation of this information and ignore the objective weight considerations of the risk factors, leading to inappropriate evaluation results. For a more accurate ranking result of the failure mode risk, this study proposes a novel, flexible risk-ranking approach that integrates spherical fuzzy sets and the objective weight considerations of the risk factors to process the risk-ranking issues. In the numerical case validation, a new product design risk assessment of electronic equipment was used as a numerically validated case, and the simulation results were compared with the risk priority number (RPN) method, improved risk priority number (IRPN) method, intuitionistic fuzzy weighted average (IFWA) method, and spherical weighted arithmetic average (SWAA) method. The test outcomes that were confirmed showed that the proposed novel, flexible risk-ranking approach could effectively grasp the comprehensive evaluation information and provide a more accurate ranking of the failure mode risk

A New Emergency-Risk-Evaluation Approach under Spherical Fuzzy-Information Environments

When major emergencies or accidents occur, risk evaluation and prediction are the most important means to reduce their impact. Typical risk evaluation uses the failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) method for failure-risk ranking and control. However, when faced with severe special infectious diseases such as COVID-19, there are many cognitive and information uncertainties that the FMEA method is unable to effectively handle. To effectively deal with the issue of risk evaluation when major emergencies or accidents occur, this paper integrated the risk-priority number and spherical fuzzy-sets methods to propose a novel emergency-risk-evaluation method. In the numerical verification, this paper applied the example of preventing secondary COVID-19 transmissions in hospitals to explain the calculation procedure and validity of the proposed new emergency-risk-evaluation approach. The calculation results were also compared with the typical RPN, fuzzy-set, and intuitionistic fuzzy-set methods. The calculation results showed that the proposed new emergency-risk-evaluation approach could effectively handle the cognitive and informational uncertainties of emergency-risk-evaluation issues during the COVID-19 pandemic

DEVELOPMENT AND APPLICATION OF A DECISION MODEL FOR THE INTEGRATED PRODUCTION AND MATERIAL PLANNING OF COLOR FILTER MANUFACTURING INDUSTRY: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY

Color Filters (CF) is a critical module of TFT-LCD industry whose products are widely applied to the customer electronics products. Since the color filters manufacturing stays in the 1-tier enterprise of the supply network of the TFT-LCD industry, its logistics planning is quite complex. This paper develops a LP-based planning method to support the logistics of a color filter manufacturing company. This developed planning model focuses on the mid-term planning, considering the issues in terms of production and material requirement planning in an integrated way. For application, this developed method is implemented by the optimization software LINGO and then integrated to the database system as decision support. To test the quality of this method, 52 weeks of real factory data are studied, and the validation result shows a variation less than 10%

A Novel Pythagorean Fuzzy Set–Based Risk-Ranking Method for Handling Human Cognitive Information in Risk-Assessment Problems

With the rapid evolution of the information age and the development of artificial intelligence, processing human cognitive information has become increasingly important. The risk-priority-number (RPN) approach is a natural language-processing method and is the most widely used risk-evaluation tool. However, the typical RPN approach cannot effectively process the various forms of human cognitive information or hesitant information provided by experts in risk assessments. In addition, it cannot process the relative-weight consideration of risk-assessment factors. In order to fully grasp the various forms of human cognitive information provided by experts during risk assessment, this paper proposes a novel Pythagorean fuzzy set–based (PFS) risk-ranking method. This method integrates the PFS and the combined compromise-solution (CoCoSo) method to handle human cognitive information in risk-assessment problems. In the numerical case study, this paper used a healthcare waste-hazards risk-assessment case to verify the validity and rationality of the proposed method for handling risk-assessment issues. The calculation results of the healthcare waste-hazards risk-assessment case are compared with the typical RPN approach, intuitionistic fuzzy set (IFS) method, PFS method, and the CoCoSo method. The numerical simulation verification results prove that the proposed method can comprehensively grasp various forms of cognitive information from experts and consider the relative weight of risk-assessment factors, providing more accurate and reasonable risk-assessment results