• Health Policy and Management
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.1-14
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• 1998

Analysis of practice variations has been one of important issues in trying to contain costs as well as to manage quality in health care. This study was conducted to provide statistical model for analysing variations in inpatient costs by type of hospitals. Four K-DRGs including Cesarean section, appendectomy, cataract extraction, and pediatric pneumonia with CC class 0 were selected, and means and dispersions of inpatient procedure and operation costs were simultaneously compared between type of hospitals. The results indicated that joint modelling of means and dispersions by gamma distribution was a very useful analytic tool for identifying factors which might have relationship with variations in inpatient costs. This model can be expanded to test the significance of several independent variables in analysing cost variations. In surgical conditions, means and unit variations of procedure and operation costs showed consistent pattern which was tertiarty hospital, general hospital, and hospital in descending order. Different findings were identified in pediatric pneumonia, from which mean and unit variation of procedure and operation cost was the highest in general hospital. The practical implication of this difference could not be drawn from this study. It will be done by further sophisticated researches. In order to develop health policy for cost containment and quality management in Korea, it is essential to find out manageable factors affecting variations in practice patterns which include characteristics of population, providers, regions, and so on. The statistical model presented in this study will give health services researchers useful insights for future investigations in analysing cost variations.

• Proceedings of the KSME Conference
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• 2002.08a
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• pp.255-258
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• 2002

Liquid rocket engines using liquefied natural gas (LNG) or methane as a fuel is known to have several good characteristics, such as high specific impulse compared to other hydrocarbon fuels, environment-friendly exhaust gas, low production cost, and re-usability with low soot generation in the cooling channel. In this study, experimental combustion chambers capable of using LNC and $CH_{4}$ are being researched through experimental firing tests, and within easy range of eyes' inspection, there are the periodical existence of soot or discoloration in the chamber wall surface. This result means that mixture ratio of oxidizer and fuel fluctuates periodically between outer-row injectors in the mixing head in the circumferential direction. Therefore, based on this phenomenon, the variation of mixture ratio near the chamber wall caused by the spill pattern of a shear coaxial injector was analyzed quantitatively and the thermal heat flux Into the cooling channel is modified. Then, the calculated and modified results are compared with the measured ones.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2005.06a
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• pp.2451-2454
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• 2005

In recent years, the importance of the characterization of fall for a fracture prevention system keeps increasing since fracture from a fall can lead to serious health problems. Fall is one of the major sources which increase morbidity in elderly people. In terms of the cost and the influence to the quality of life, the most serious injury with hip fractures is caused by falls. The traditional methods in characterizing fall patterns have been mainly by the epidemiological surveys. With surveys, the exact data of fall patterns can not been acquired. In this paper, we measured and analyzed with the parameters related to fall pattern such as velocities and accelerations during the motion of falls using 3D motion capture program. We acquired the parameters of the fall pattern of intentional and unexpected fall. The result showed that the variation of velocity and acceleration during fall was very important in characterizing fall pattern, which of vital importance for the development of a fracture prevention system and for the safety of the elderly.

• IE interfaces
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.658-667
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• 2000

Seasonal variation of natural gas demand coupled with rigid and stable import pattern of gas represents the characteristic feature of the Korean Liquified Natural Gas(LNG) industry. This attribute has required a huge amount of investment for the construction of storage facility. Thus, to minimize the supply cost, it is legitimate to reduce storage requirement itself. In this study, we combine three alternative methods to deal with the storage requirement to minimize the supply cost. Those are (1) adding additional storage tanks, (2) inducing large firm customers, and (3) constructing gas-turbine self generation facilities. Methodologically, we employ the mixed integer program (MIP) to optimize the system. The model also consider demand and price-setting scheme in separate modules. From the results, it is shown that if alternatives are combined optimally, a number of storage tanks can be reduced substantially compared with the original capacity plan set by the industry authorities. We perform various sensitivity analyses to check the robustness of the results. The methodology presented in this study can be applied to the other physical network industry, such as hydraulics. The empirical results will shed some light on the rationalization of capacity planning of the Korean natural gas industry.

• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
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• v.34 no.4
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• pp.386-397
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• 2008

Due to the rapid advancement of technologies, a growing number of innovative products with a short life-cycle have been introduced to the market. As the life-cycles of such products are shorter than those of durable goods, the demand variation during the life-cycle adds to the difficulty of inventory management. Traditional inventory planning models and techniques mostly deal with products that have long life-cycles. The assumptions on the demand pattern and subsequent solution approaches are generally, not suitable for dealing with products with short life-cycles. In this research, inventory replenishment problems based on the logistic demand model are formulated and solved to facilitate the management of products with short life-cycles. An extended Wagner- Whitin approach is used to determine the replenishment cycle, schedules and lot-sizes.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Manufacturing Process Engineers
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.104-109
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• 2013

In order to apply nano imprint technology in large area process, roller pressing is promising because of its low cost and high productivity. When pressing mold by roller, liquid resin is locally squeezed between mold and substrate. In this study, the main focus is to understand which process parameter affects residual layer. To do this, a simple analytical model was introduced. Especially, we consider the aspect ratio of patterns as essential cause of variation of the thickness in the equation. As a result, when the aspect ratio of pattern in the mold increases, the thickness of residual layer also increases. In conclusion, we show that the uniformity of residual layer could be accomplished by the control of velocity and pressing force in roller pressing imprint process.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.15 no.11
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• pp.189-198
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• 1998

Recently, monitoring of tool life is a matter of common interesting because tool life affects precision, productivity and cost in machining process. Especially flank wear has a direct effect on cutting mechanism, so the various pattern of cutting force is obtained experimentally according to variation of wear condition. By investigating cutting force signal, AR(Autoregressive) modeling and correlation dimension analysis is conducted in turning operation. In this modeling and analysis, we extract features through 6th AR model, correlation integral and normalized correlation integral. After the back-propagation model of the neural network is utilized to monitor tool life according to flank wear. As a result. a very reliable classification of tool life was obtained.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.129-135
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• 2003

Optical fiber has many advantages, such as high reliability, long lifetime, immunity to the electromagnetic interference, high speed response and low cost. In this study, we proposed and developed an optical fiber impact and pressure sensor for prevention of accident which occurs in the automatic system or auto door. The principle of the sensor is to detect different optical intensity caused by variation of a speckle pattern due to the external perturbation. Speckle pattern appears at the end of a multimode fiber in which coherent beam propagates. The fabricated sensor in this study was tested. As a result of experiments, amplitude of the output signal isn't linear, but it has sufficient sensitivity for a sensor. Moreover, we can control sensitivity of the sensor by an amplifier at receiver. It has several advantages which are ability of detection at all point on the multimode fiber, large sensitive area, and many application areas for a sensing impact and pressure.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2005.06a
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• pp.1925-1928
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• 2005

In recent years, the importance of the characterization of fall for a fracture prevention system keeps increasing since fracture from a fall can lead to serious health problems. Fall is one of the major sources which increase morbidity in elderly people. In terms of the cost and the influence to the quality of life, the most serious injury with hip fractures is caused by falls. The traditional methods in characterizing fall patterns have been mainly by the epidemiological surveys. With surveys, the exact data of fall patterns can not been acquired. In this paper, we measured and analyzed with the parameters related to fall pattern such as velocities and accelerations during the motion of falls using 3D motion capture program. We acquired the parameters of the fall pattern of intentional and unexpected fall. The result showed that the variation of velocity and acceleration during fall was very important in characterizing fall pattern, which of vital importance for the development of a fracture prevention system and for the safety of the elderly

• International Journal of Highway Engineering
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.9-18
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• 2017

PURPOSES : This study evaluates the reasonableness of the recommended amount of deicing chemicals based on historical data for snow removal. The result can be used to aid decision-making for the reservation of cost-effective de-icing chemicals. METHODS : First, the recommended amount of de-icing chemical to use and historical usage data were evaluated to identify specific usage characteristics for each region. Road maintenance length and snow-removal working days were analyzed over the past five winter seasons. Next, differences in the recommended amount of chemical to use and actual use were compared using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. Last, the two types of data were analyzed using a chi-square test to verify if the two distributions of variation pattern are statistically significant. We found that there are significant differences between the data from each region during the past five winter seasons. RESULTS : The results showed that the equation for calculating the amount of de-icing chemical to use appears to be revised. CONCLUSIONS : The results imply that the equation for calculating the amount of de-icing chemical to apply as a national standard is very important when the public agency makes decisions related to snow-removal.