The Causality of Supply Relationships

This study examines the 'logic' or underlying causality of supply relationships. It develops and tests hypotheses, in a LISREL model, on detailed data for 553, 450 and 226 supply relationships in the US, Japanese and European automobile industries. The differences found between the three regions seem small, given the received view that there are fundamental differences between 'Japanese' and 'Western' contracting. However, the differences that remain suggest that in the US perhaps the 'Japanese system' has been surpassed, in a 'third way' that combines the advantages of sufficiently durable relations with the advantages of an open system with great variety

Data Flow Graphs: System Specification With the Most Unrestricted Semantics

A new data flow graph concept is defined to be used for architectural synthesis as well as verification of a system. The graph contains only the explicit data dependencies, but any other constraints can also be described. The semantics of this graph does not impose any restriction on the scheduler, except for the explicit data dependencies. For instance, the scheduler is not forced to work on certain blocks in the graph, like loop bodies, but may work also across these borders. It is also proved that an optimal schedule can be found efficiently. 1. Introduction Data flow graphs are a well known and good modeling tool for the behavioral specification of a system [1, 2]. A data flow graph can be extracted from an algorithmic behavioral description of a system, written in a procedural or functional description language. Techniques used in compilers can be used for this purpose. In this paper, a data flow graph model is presented which in a sense is the most free specification. The propos..