The greatest opportunity to reduce the environmental impact of a new product occurs during the design phase of its life cycle. Design for Environment (DfE) tools, when implemented, become part of the product development process. Often, however, the DfE tools are isolated from the other activities that comprise the product development process. To avoid this problem, tools must be situated in a DfE process that describes how the DfE tools will be used and links DfE activities with the rest of the product development process. This paper presents an innovative DfE process that is being incorporated into an existing product development process at a leading power tool manufacturing company, The Black & Decker Corporation. The DfE process includes DfE tools and activities that are specifically designed to help Black & Decker achieve their environmental objectives.
Received on January 18, 2005
References:10

A functional economy, as defined in this paper, is one that optimizes the use (or function) of goods and services and thus the management of existing wealth (goods. knowledge, and nature). The economic objective of the functional economy is to create the highest possible use value for the longest possible time while consuming as few material resources and energy as possible. This functional economy is therefore considerably more sustainable, or dematerialized, than the present economy, which is focused on production and related material flows as its principal means to create wealth.One aim of this paper is to sketch out a functional economy. The other is to show the social, cultural, and organizational change that may arise in shifting from a production-oriented economy toward a functional or service-oriented economy.
Received on June 12, 2005
References:11

Debate over the global standardization has continued in the area of global strategic management. This paper examines underlying assumptions, criticisms, and counter-arguments on this issue. The major problem of existing studies on this topic is that they have static rather than dynamic views. The main argument of this paper is that the most challenging task of global firms is not to choose one of two strategies (i.e., standardization and customization), nor to compromise the two (i.e., transnational solution); but how to dynamically raise country specific products to the level of global products by enhancing product values that are acceptable in the global market. Global firms need new organizations to conduct this new type of global strategy.
Received on January 31, 2005
References: 29

In this paper, we present a new mathematical function, called systemability, by introducing the uncertainty of the operating environments as a random variable for predicting the reliability of systems in the field. Numerical calculations for several system configurations such as parallel, series, and k-out-of-n, are given to illustrate the results.
Received on June 10, 2005
References: 04

When sensor parameters cannot be directly measured, estimation of their performance can be carried out using other plant variables that can be measured, so long as they are correlated with the sensor parameters. The correlations can cause computational difficulties. Well-established techniques exist for dealing with these difficulties in the case where the relationship between the predictor variables and the response variable is approximately linear, but for cases where the relationship is nonlinear, the situation is less-well understood. This paper demonstrates that estimation of sensor performance in the nonlinear case can be reliably achieved using elementary neural networks that are subjected to the method of boosting. We first apply this method to a set of data from a nuclear power plant (NPP) in Florida that has been widely studied elsewhere. We show that for this data, which is close to linear, our boosting method provides estimates that are competitive with those obtained using regularized linear models. We then consider a data set from a NPP in the Netherlands where the relationship between predictor and response variables is considerably nonlinear and show that the boosting method gives excellent estimates.
Received on January 14, 2005
References: 15

The preference aggregation is one of the most important components in multiple criteria decision making analysis. It is generally possible to select some relevant models in accordance with different contexts, thanks to many methods open to us. Fuzzy logic theory constitutes an intuitive and algorithmic approach when different criterions are so heterogeneous that no classical method could satisfactorily deal with such problem. Fuzzy rules perform tradeoffs by involving expert judgments and translating linguistic expressions into mathematical computations. The outranking approach, another method involving sometimes the logic of fuzzy set theory, homogenizes qualitatively heterogeneous dimensions. These two methods could be fairly attractive in nuclear industry related decision making in view of the complexity and stakes implicated. In this article, we apply fuzzy logic to nuclear policy choice in Bulgaria in order to illustrate the scheme of fuzzy decision analysis applications.
Received on October 4, 2004
References: 10

This paper presents a mathematical model to perform availability analysis of a robot-safety system having n-redundant robots and m-redundant built-in safety units with common-cause failures. The system failure rates and the partially failed system repair rates are assumed constant, and the failed system repair time is assumed arbitrarily distributed. The supplementary variable method is used to develop generalized expressions for Laplace transforms of state probabilities and system availabilities.
Received on October 13, 2004
References:11