The goal of the multi-reservoir operation planning is to provide an optimal release plan that maximize the reservoir storage and hydropower generation while minimizing the spillages. However, the reservoir operation is difficult due to the uncertainty associated with inflows. In order to consider the uncertain inflows in the reservoir operating problem, we present a Stochastic Dynamic Programming (SDP) model based on the markov decision process (MDP). The objective of the model is to maximize the expected value of the system performance that is the weighted sum of all expected objective values. With the SDP model, multi-reservoir operating rule can be derived, and it also generates the steady state probabilities of reservoir storage and inflow as output. We applied the model to the Geum-river basin in Korea and could generate a multi-reservoir monthly operating plan that can consider the uncertainty of inflow.

Previous studies have examined the relationship between corporate social responsibility and corporate's business performance (especially, consumers' corporate evaluation). According to them, the corporate social responsibility influences the consumers' corporate evaluation. A small and medium sized company as well as a large company is asked to conduct socially responsible actions, however, it is not easy to find a study that focuses on whether the effect of the corporate social responsibility on the consumers' corporate evaluation is different by the size of company. In this paper, we classified the corporate social responsibility into the four dimensions (economic responsibility, legal responsibility, ethical responsibility, philanthropic responsibility), and investigate the differences between a small and medium sized company and a large company in the effects of the four dimensions on the consumers' corporate evaluation. We showed that the each dimension of the corporate social responsibility had an positive effect on the corporate image regardless of the size of company. In addition, we demonstrated that the effects of the four dimensions on the company image were different by the size of company; The legal responsibility and ethical responsibility are more influential to the corporate image of a large company than to that of a small and medium sized company, however, the effects of economic responsibility and philanthropic responsibility are not different by the size of company.

Domestic LCD TV market is composed of two groups of products produced by major firms and small and medium enterprises. The major companies make the price relatively high, but the other makes lower in the same sizes. The model of the low price products does not make consumers choice when they choose LCD TV. This makes the questions of capability between difference price products. The reason above mentioned, the firms that include group of comparatively lower price, are worried about not increasing sale because of prejudice. This study is to find any interrelationship and evaluate the efficiency between the products using performance, exterior and brand power of product. In order to do this, a hybrid AHP/DEA evaluation model for comparison/valuation of LCD TV products is developed. The proposed process is; first, to derive hierarchy structure of LCD TV evaluation criteria using axiomatic design, second, to calculate the score of each LCD TV product through AHP analysis including weight calculation of evaluation criteria, and last, to evaluate the efficiency of LCD TV product by applying DEA by defining product scores as output and prices as input. It concludes that the high price products shows good efficiency, but there are some products with good exterior and brand power, not performance, also presenting good efficiency.

In this paper, we deal with a sector investment strategy by implementing the black-litterman model that incorporates expert evaluation and sector rotation momentum. Expert evaluation analyzes the relative performance of the industry sector compared with the market, while sector rotation momentum reflects the price impact of significant sector anomaly. In addition, we consider the portfolio impact of sector cardinality and weight constraints within the context of mean-variance portfolio optimization. Finally, we demonstrate the empirical viability of the proposed sector investment strategy with KOSPI 200 data.

Much of knowledge that can retain a company's competitive advantage remains within the organization. However, identifying, finding and leveraging knowledge in an organization is still problematic [17]. Although knowledge is the key to success, it is simply too valuable to be left in an organization [59]. The CoP (Community of Practice) within an organization is a practical way to manage knowledge in an organization as systematically as other critical assets in order to deploy and share it [59]. However, research related with CoP, has focused on the value of CoP. Therefore, we developed not only a holistic and systematic method for understanding and assessing the current position of CoP but also a method for extracting the core strategies and CSFs of CoP based on performance evaluation. We developed strategies, CSF (Critical Success Factor) and PM (Performance Measure)s of CoP based on BSC (Balanced Scorecard) process. Specifically, CSFs and strategies of CoP were extracted based on maturity model and type of CoP. According to the procedure from the methodology to evaluate the performance of CoP, three different industrial cases were adopted to validate the evaluation methodology.

In this paper, we deal with the dual-depot heterogeneous vehicle routing problem with simultaneous delivery and pick up(DH-VRPSDP) in reverse logistics. The DH-VRPSDP is a problem of designing vehicle routes in a day of given vehicle to minimize the sum of fixed cost and variable cost over the planning horizon. Each customer can be visited only once according to the service combinations of that customer. Due to the complexity of the problem, we suggest a heuristic algorithm in which an initial solution is obtained by changing the customer and the vehicle simultaneously and then it is improved. A performance of the proposed algorithm was compared to both well-known results and new test problems.

The demand for naval spare parts is intermittent and erratic. This feature, referred to as non-normal demand, makes forecasting difficult. Hierarchical forecasting using an aggregated time series can be more reliable to predict non-normal demand than direct forecasting. In practice the performance of hierarchical forecasting is not always superior to direct forecasting. The relative performance of the alternative forecasting methods depends on the demand features. This paper analyses the influence of the demand features on the performance of the alternative forecasting methods that use hierarchical and direct forecasting. Among various demand features variability, kurtosis, skewness and equipment groups are shown to significantly influence on the performance of the alternative forecasting methods.

Service Encounter employees play a crucial role in service delivery and building relationships with customers and their attitudes and behaviors towards customers determine customers' perceived service quality and satisfaction. Past research indicates that TQM managerial practices are a critical determinant of employee's attitude and performance in the workplace. Therefore, this study investigates a model examining the relationship among TQM, employees' attitude and service performance in a hospital. Our measurement results were acceptable in terms of reliability and validity. The statistical testing shows significance on the positive relationship in the sequential order of TQM, employee's attitude and service performance. In conclusion, the theoretical and practical implications of this study were discussed, along with its limitations.

The automated material handling systems today are playing ever more important roles in semiconductor/LCD fabrication facilities. Recently they became more flexible, intelligent, and speedy than in the past. The facilities have been fully automated because the size and weight of the unit loads used in the facilities were being increased beyond the limits that a human operator can handle. This research develops an efficient procedure to streamline the delivery of unit loads by the automated material handling system (AMHS). For this task, the research employs the event scheduling theory that has been successfully used in the both academia and industry. The developed procedure was applied to an actual LCD fabrication facility and improved the performance of an existing material handling system.

Location area planning (LAP) problem is to partition the cellular/mobile network into location areas with the objective of minimizing the total cost in location management. The minimum cost has two components namely location update cost and searching cost. Location update cost is incurred when the user changes itself from one location area to another in the network. The searching cost incurred when a call arrives, the search is done only in the location area to find the user. Hence, it is important to find a compromise between the location update and paging operations such that the cost of mobile terminal location tracking cost is a minimum. The complete mobile network is divided into location areas. Each location area consists of a group of cells. This partitioning problem is a difficult combinatorial optimization problem. In this paper, we use particle swarm optimization (PSO) to obtain the best/optimal group of cells for 16, 36, 49, and 64 cells network. Experimental studies illustrate that PSO is more efficient and surpasses those of precious studies for these benchmarking problems.

Order allocation is one of the most important decision-making problems of firms having significant influences on performances of themselves and the whole supply chain. Existing researches about order allocation have mainly focused on evaluating capabilities of directly connected suppliers so that it is hard to consider effects and interactions from undirected connections over multiple lower-layers. To alleviate the limitation, this paper proposed a novel approach to order allocation using structural hole. By applying the concept of structural hole to the supply network, we could evaluate the structural supplying powers of firms with respect to both of direct and indirect connections. In the proposed approach, we derived a methodology to measure the potential supplying power of each firm by modifying the effective size as one of the measurements of structural hole and then, proposed its application, the structural hole based order allocation strategy. Furthermore, we conducted the agent based modeling of supply chain to perform the decision-making process of order allocation and simulated the proposed strategy. As a results, by coping with the variance of demand more stably, it could improve the performance of supply chain from the aspects of fill rate, inventory level and demand-supply balance.