• The Journal of Industrial Distribution & Business
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• v.9 no.12
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• pp.7-14
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• 2018

Purpose - The core objective of the research is to explore the quality of services provided by the Nigerian health care sector that lead to know the satisfaction levels of the consumers. Research design, data, and methodology - After a meticulous literature review, the researchers administered a two part questionnaire to know the service gaps and satisfaction levels of the customers. The research carried out with a sample of 400 respondents but received only 150 responses from the residents around Adamawa state. The collected data was edited, coded, and analyzed with the SPSS latest version with the descriptive and inferential statistical tools. Results - Majority of the respondents expressed their discontentment over the responsiveness of the service providers when compared to tangibility and reliability quality variables. There is no relationship between the quality variable tangibility and overall satisfaction. Related to the overall satisfaction, 42 percent of respondents have neutral perspective indicated that they are either satisfied or dissatisfied as against the 43.3 percent of dissatisfied customers. Conclusions - This research proffers invaluable information to the entire Nigerian health-care sector to review their existing delivery of services to improve patient satisfaction. This research is first of its kind concentrated to know the quality of health-care services and customers overall satisfaction in Nigeria.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.16 no.10
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• pp.23-30
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• 2018

Purpose - This study intended to investigate ways to influence on the Chinese female consumers' use of mobile payment services. For this purpose, this research investigated the relationships among security and compatibility of the mobile payment service, perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use, psychological benefit, and intention to use mobile payment. Research design, data, and methodology - This research developed a structural equation model in which the usefulness, the ease of use, and the psychological benefit are predictors and the intention to use is a dependent variable. Data were collected from China female in Jiangsu and Shandong province. Results - Empirical results showed that the security and the compatibility had a positive influence on the usefulness and the ease of use. The usefulness and the ease of use influenced on the psychological benefit respectively and the psychological benefit had a positive influence on the intention to use. Conclusions - This research contributed to the mobile payment service literature by showing how Chinese women consumers adopt the mobile payment service based on TAM. Moreover, current study introduced the security and the compatibility as antecedents of the usefulness and the ease of use and revealed the mediating role of psychological benefit. Managerially, theses results suggested retailing companies ways to influence on the Chinese female consumers' use of mobile payment services.

• The Journal of Industrial Distribution & Business
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• v.9 no.5
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• pp.17-24
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• 2018

Purpose - Through the analysis of the characteristics of overseas direct purchase websites and the relevant empirical analysis of the quality of service delivery, the activated theory/strategy and significance of the overseas direct purchase are sorted out. Research design, data, and methodology - In the process, to make more effective analysis, several analysis tools and analysis programmes are used, IBM SPSS Statistics 23.0 and IBM SPSS AMOS 23.0. Results - Among the characteristics of the overseas direct purchase website, the security, convenience and information provided by the overseas direct purchase have already had a positive impact on the satisfaction. The quality of the delivery service is composed of four factors: rapidity, reliability, intimacy and correctness. The research results indicate that the satisfaction level has a positive impact on the re-purchase intention. Conclusions - The significance of this study has the characteristics of overseas direct purchase sites which have confirmed that security convenience and intelligence availability have a positive impact on satisfaction and re-purchase intent. It is important to have a safe and reliable access to shopping sites on overseas direct purchase sites. In the characteristics of overseas direct purchase sites, the interaction have no positive effect on satisfaction and re-purchase intention.

• Journal of the Korea Society for Simulation
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.39-47
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• 2006

In most of supply chain planning practices, the estimated demands, which are forecasted for each individual period in a forecasting window, are regarded as deterministic. But, in reality, the forecasted demands for the periods of a given horizon are stochastically distributed. Instead of using a safety stock, this study considers a direct control of service level by choosing the demand used in planning from the distributed forecasted demand values for the corresponding period. Using the demand quantile and echelon stock concept, we propose a simple but efficient heuristic algorithm for multi-echelon serial systems under service level constraints. Through a comprehensive simulation study, the proposed algorithm was shown to be very accurate compared with the optimal solutions.

• East Asian Journal of Business Economics (EAJBE)
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.15-26
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• 2019

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine total logistics concept performed by 3^rd party logistics, managing with 4th party logistics to achieve more efficient and systematic dealing with sub-functions of physical distribution process. Research design and methodology - The research method to be adopted is first to review 3th party logistics providers that has attracted to various functions of 4PL, and then total logistics concept to be investigated which is related to 3 PL and 4 PL. Results - For the total logistics concept implemented by 3PL, management technique should be widen, then 3 PL's service activities and area should extend. Especially for the collaboration effects between the company and external organizations, it can be collaborated with some commitments in terms of their own independent activities, carrying on inherent functions by both 3PL and 4PL, pursuing total logistics concept. Conclusions - More areas of logistics service has been required by clients in the field, and service activities available is strongly related to roles of 3th party logistics providers as main player in logistics market. However, total logistics management is could be implemented by 3PL combining with various functions of logistics service offered by 4th logistics provider.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.1-20
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• 2018

Service composition in the Inter-Cloud raises new challenges that are caused by the different Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of the users, which are served by different geo-distributed Cloud providers. This paper aims to explore how to select and compose such services while considering how to reach high efficiency on cost and response time, low network latency, and high reliability across multiple Cloud providers. A new hybrid multi-objective evolutionary algorithm to perform the above task called LS-NSGA-II-DE is proposed, in which the differential evolution (DE) algorithm uses the adaptive mutation operator and crossover operator to replace the those of the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II (NSGA-II) to get the better convergence and diversity. At the same time, a Local Search (LS) method is performed for the Non-dominated solution set F{1} in each generation to improve the distribution of the F{1}. The simulation results show that our proposed algorithm performs well in terms of the solution distribution and convergence, and in addition, the optimality ability and scalability are better compared with those of the other algorithms.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.14 no.6
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• pp.27-37
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• 2016

Purpose - This study aims to suggest a developmental direction to small enterprisers who start their business. The developmental direction makes the small enterprisers more stable with providing the Business District Information System service, which offers the location and business area's information aimed at pre-enterprisers after analyzing its overcrowded index's current state and problems. Research design, data, and methodology - This research proposes the developmental direction for helping the pre-small enterprisers to have more stability through examining the Business District Information System's-operated by Small Enterprise and Market Service-overcrowded index's current state and problems. Results - This system has drawbacks about giving the start-up overcrowded index as follows: ① non-accurate consultative group for sharing the DB ② providing analysis information, not evaluation information ③ not to anticipate the changes of business types & the flow of business district and perceive the symptom data with providing predictive information. Conclusions - This system should be more publicized through the mass media for making it approachable with collecting the user's opinion and investigating customer satisfaction & the level of awareness.

• Journal of Communications and Networks
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.296-305
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• 2015

Coupled schemes between service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0 have recently been researched. Web-based content providers and telecommunications company (Telecom) based Internet protocol television (IPTV) providers have struggled against each other to accommodate more three-screen service subscribers. Since the advent of Web 2.0, more abundant reproduced content can be circulated. However, because according to increasing device's resolution and content formats IPTV providers transcode content in advance, network bandwidth, storage and operation costs for content management systems (CMSs) are wasted. In this paper, we present a user centric CMS for open IPTV, which integrates SOA and Web 2.0. Considering content popularity based on a Zipf-like distribution to solve these problems, we analyze the performance between the user centric CMS and the conventional Web syndication system for normalized costs. Based on the user centric CMS, we implement a social Web TV with device-aware function, which can aggregate, transcode, and deploy content over social networking service independently.

• International Journal of Reliability and Applications
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.89-106
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• 2010

This paper deals with the reliability and availability characteristics of three different series system configurations with warm standby components and a repairable service station. The failure time of the primary and warm standby are assumed to be exponentially distributed with parameters ${\lambda}$ and ${\alpha}$ respectively. The repair time distribution of each server is also exponentially distributed with parameter ${\mu}$. The breakdown time and the repair time of the service station are also assumed exponentially distributed with parameters ${\gamma}$ and ${\beta}$ respectively. We derive the reliability dependent on time, availability dependent on time, the mean time to failure, $MTTF_i$, and the steady-state availability $A_i$(${\infty}$) for three configurations and perform comparisons. Comparisons are made for specific values of distribution parameters and of the cost of the components. The three configurations are ranked based on: $MTTF_i$, $A_i$(${\infty}$), and $C_i/B_i$ where $B_i$ is either $MTTF_i$ or $A_i$(${\infty}$).

• Wind and Structures
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.87-109
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• 2012

A substantial part of South Africa is subject to more than one strong wind source. The effect of that on extreme winds is that higher quantiles are usually estimated with a mixed strong wind climate estimation method, compared to the traditional Gumbel approach based on a single population. The differences in the estimated quantiles between the two methods depend on the values of the Gumbel distribution parameters for the different strong wind mechanisms involved. Cluster analysis of the distribution parameters provides a characterization of the effect of the relative differences in their values, and therefore the dominance of the different strong wind mechanisms. For gusts, cold fronts tend to dominate over the coastal and high-lying areas, while other mechanisms, especially thunderstorms, are dominant over the lower-lying areas in the interior. For the hourly mean wind speeds cold fronts are dominant in the south-west, south and east of the country. On the West Coast the ridging of the Atlantic Ocean high-pressure system dominate in the south, while the presence of a deep trough or coastal low pressure system is the main strong wind mechanism in the north. In the central interior cold fronts tend to share their influence almost equally with other synoptic-scale mechanisms.