Supply Chain Management in the Emergin Context of Electonic Commerce

This research will examine the different kinds of supply chains by providing modeling variations that include coordination mechanism, production planning and scheduling, and logistics management in the emerging context of electronic commerce. In contrast to most of the supply chain literature that takes the existing supply chain as given and attempts to optimize material flows or information flows, the research will focus on emerging forms of supply chain enhanced by new technologies such as open EDI, the Internet, intranets, and extranets. An observation in supply chain management, which recently gained popularity, the bullwhip effect, suggests that demand variability increases as one moves up a supply chain. Solutions for bullwhip effect include supply chain integration through information sharing and supply chain partnership. However, in emerging business-to-business electronic commerce, a perfectly competitive market is possible, where many suppliers and buyers can keep track of real-time demand and supply of a product, thus the price being adjusted promptly by market itself. Although problems such as quality assurance and increasing transaction/coordination cost may arise in return for reliable supply chain partners, causes of bullwhip effect such as demand forecast update, order batching, price fluctuation and shortage gaming may diminish in electronic marketplaces due to immediate information about the availability of products as well as price and demand. Such information is costly and difficult to get, unless strong partnership and information sharing exists between many supply chain parties. Hence, the first research question is: In terms of bullwhip effect, will market mechanism coordinated by electronic intermediaries reduce the demand distortion in upstream supply chain? If so, how effective is it compared to the hierarchy mechanism with vertical integration or information sharing? Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems have become popular in 1990s with business process reengineering practices. ERP systems attempt to automate and integrate all functions in an enterprise’s value chain. With the burst of the Internet and electronic commerce, companies using or planning to use ERP, are beginning to demand interface functions that enable flexible communications among supply chain partners. Moreover, in electronic marketplaces, computerized agents (e.g. searching agent, purchasing agent) and intermediaries are expected to be the solution for controlling huge amount of information and material flow. The second research question regarding this issue, thus, is: What kinds of information systems or technologies are needed in order to support a firm’s supply chain or supply chain as a whole, in particular in electronic markets? While optimizing supply chains with regard to information flows and/or material flows, we expect that the following components for supply chain management will clearly be identified as enablers of successful supply chain management. • ERP extensions/modules that link adjacent supply chain partners • Supply chain reengineering and Web-enabled supply chain via intranet and extranet • Agents/intermediaries that control the costs (purchasing, sales, distribution), quality (parts, finished product), and time (on-time delivery, online demand information

Predictive Analytics with Sequence-based Clustering and Markov Chain

This research proposes a predictive modeling framework for Web user behavior with Web usage mining (WUM). The proposed predictive model utilizes sequence-based clustering, in order to group Web users into clusters with similar Web browsing behavior and Markov chains, in order to model Web users’ Web navigation behavior. This research will also provide a performance evaluation framework and suggest WUM systems that can improve advertisement placement and target marketing in a Web site

Incorporating Language-Driven Appearance Knowledge Units with Visual Cues in Pedestrian Detection

Large language models (LLMs) have shown their capability in understanding contextual and semantic information regarding appearance knowledge of instances. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to utilize the strength of an LLM in understanding contextual appearance variations and to leverage its knowledge into a vision model (here, pedestrian detection). While pedestrian detection is considered one of crucial tasks directly related with our safety (e.g., intelligent driving system), it is challenging because of varying appearances and poses in diverse scenes. Therefore, we propose to formulate language-driven appearance knowledge units and incorporate them with visual cues in pedestrian detection. To this end, we establish description corpus which includes numerous narratives describing various appearances of pedestrians and others. By feeding them through an LLM, we extract appearance knowledge sets that contain the representations of appearance variations. After that, we perform a task-prompting process to obtain appearance knowledge units which are representative appearance knowledge guided to be relevant to a downstream pedestrian detection task. Finally, we provide plentiful appearance information by integrating the language-driven knowledge units with visual cues. Through comprehensive experiments with various pedestrian detectors, we verify the effectiveness of our method showing noticeable performance gains and achieving state-of-the-art detection performance.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, 9 table

Electrolytic Recovery of High Purity Zr from Radioactively Contaminated Zr Alloys in Chloride Salts

It has been believed that high purity Zr metal is hard to be prepared from Zr alloys in LiCl-KCl salts since Zr has various redox reactions in LiCl-KCl including insoluble ZrCl formation and disproportionate reaction between Zr and Zr4+. We examined electrolytic Zr recovery from Zircaloy-4 by controlling anodic potential at five concentrations of ZrCl4 in LiCl-KCl salts. Anode potential of - 0.9 V (vs. Ag/AgCl) was applied to prevent the elements except Zr being dissolved from the anode into the electrolyte. Experimental results showed Zr with purity of over 99.9% was recovered and all alloying elements were analyzed below their detection limit in ICP-MS. In addition, at low ZrCl4 concentrations of 0.1 and 0.5 wt.%, the chemical form of the cathode deposits was Zr metal without ZrCl while only ZrCl without Zr metal was recovered at the high ZrCl4 concentration, 2.0 and 4.0 wt.%. At the ZrCl4 concentration of 1.0 wt.%, both Zr metal and ZrCl were recovered. Therefore, preparation of high purity Zr metal from Zr alloys is feasible in LiCl-KCl at low concentration of ZrCl4

Bridging Gaps in Organizational Knowledge - The Role of IT-Enabled Organizational Learning in Supply Chain Partnerships

Supply chains have increasingly become an opportunity for firms to access complementary competencies and learn from other firms. To better understand the role of IT-enabled learning strategies in affecting the supply chain firms’ learning outcome, we use a computational simulation approach to model the IT tools used for intra- and inter- organizational learning. This research-in-progress builds on March’s (1991) organizational learning model and extends it to a supply chain context. The study will lay a foundation for theory building in IT-enabled interorganizational learning and knowledge management

The Impact of RFID on Firm and Supply Chain Performance: a Simulation Study

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a tracking technology that enables firms to digitize their supply chain processes and manage their supply chain activities efficiently and effectively. This study develops an analytical model of the impact of RFID use on inventory accuracy and on the firm-level and supply chain-level performance of a single product line. Due to the complexity of the analytical model, we propose to analyze the model using simulation and to gain insights into the behaviors of the various players in the supply chain. This research in progress will help better understand RFID value in supply chain, from an inventory management perspective and also bring into focus the impact of product type and technology development status on technology use

Influence of bank geometry on the electrical characteristics of printed organic field-effect transistors

The electrical characteristics of organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) based on small-molecule organic semiconductors (OSCs) have been significantly improved by employing various fabrication techniques in solution processes to enhance the OSC crystallinity. However, complicated fabrication and inhomogeneity of OFETs remain as challenges before commercialization. In this work, we have efficiently controlled the size and orientation of 6,13-bis(triisopropylsilylethynyl)-pentacene (TIPS-pentacene) crystalline domains by tuning the Cytop bank dimension, in which OSC inks are printed, to improve the device performance. The optimized bank pattern forms uniform thin film morphology and well-aligned TIPS-pentacene crystalline domains along the charge transport direction, resulting in four-fold increase in field-effect mobility and one third reduction in relative standard deviation.11Ysciescopu

Diagnostics of Damages in Reinforced Concrete by the Parameters of Electric Response to Mechanical Impact

A method for non-destructive testing of reinforced concrete based on thephenomenon of mechano-electric transformations is proposed in this work. The procedure forassessing damage in concrete is based on the measurement of an electric response to a weakelastic impact. It was found that the moments of crack formation and growth during bendingare accompanied by a significant decrease in the correlation coefficient of the electricresponses spectra and by a stepwise change in spectrum shift (at frequency domain) at whichthe maximum correlation coefficient is observed. It was determined that the increase of energyattenuation coefficient of the electric response can serve as a forerunner of a catastrophicdestruction in concrete. The diagnostic criteria proposed in this work can be used formonitoring the damage processes in reinforced concrete under bending conditions