• Earthquakes and Structures
• /
• v.18 no.1
• /
• pp.129-145
• /
• 2020

Seismic resilience is a key feature for buildings that play a strategic role within the community. In this framework, not only the structural and non-structural elements damage but also the protracted structural dysfunction can contribute significantly to overall seismic damage and post-seismic crisis situations. Reduction of the residual and peak displacements and energy dissipation by replaceable elements are some effective aspects to pursue in order to enhance the resilience. Control systems able to adapt their response based on the nature of events, such as active or semi-active, can achieve the best results, but also require higher costs and their complexity jeopardizes their reliability; on the other hand, a passive control system is not able to adapt but its functioning is more reliable and characterized by lower costs. In this study it is proposed a strategy for the optimization of the dissipative capacity of a seismic resistant system obtained placing in parallel two different groups dissipative Re-Centering Devices, specifically designed to enhance the energy dissipation, one for the low and the other for the high intensity earthquakes. In this way the efficiency of the system in dissipating the seismic energy is kept less sensitive to the seismic intensity compared to the case of only one group of dissipative devices.

• Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences
• /
• v.14 no.8
• /
• pp.1098-1105
• /
• 2001

There is little information on smallholder dairy farming in Zimbabwe. With such inadequate knowledge, no meaningful decisions on how to improve these systems can be made. A study was, therefore, carried out in Nharira communal area and Lancashire small-scale commercial area to provide information on the viability of dairy farms. This paper is based on data obtained through participatory monitoring of 13 smallholder dairy farms in 1996 and 1997. All the four farms in Lancashire were found to be viable in both years. In Nharira, two out of the nine farms in 1996 and three farms in 1997 failed to break even. There were considerable inter-farm differences in the contribution of milk sales towards total income from dairy farming, ranging from 41% to 99% in Nharira and 71% to 81% in Lancashire in 1996. Corresponding estimates in 1997 were 51-95% and 72-78%, respectively. Expenses on cattle feeds contributed 36-84% in 1996 and 37-80% in 1997 towards total variable costs in Nharira. In Lancashire, the respective estimates were 15-33% and 22-36%. Seven out of the nine studied farms in Nharira and three out of four in Lancashire realized higher gross margin (GM) in 1997 than in 1996. All these farming households had conserved considerable amounts of farm-grown feeds. It was concluded that feed costs, number of cows and sizes of land holdings were the main factors determining viability of smallholder dairy farming. The major challenge to smallholder dairy farming in Nharira, in particular, was to develop low-cost feeding strategies.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
• /
• v.36 no.7
• /
• pp.571-579
• /
• 2009

A left-comer and look-ahead chart parsing algorithm suppresses the generation of meaningless intermediate structures, and thus, gains parsing speed-ups. However, the algorithm requires additional costs to maintain left-comer and look-ahead information throughout the parsing process. Albeit the additional costs, previous research shows that significant parsing speed-ups have been achieved for large-sized context-free grammars. In this paper, we perform similar experiments with a small-sized grammar. We still get parsing speed-ups, but relatively low. We also find that left-comer information has rather negative effects on parsing speed-ups.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
• /
• v.5 no.4
• /
• pp.101-105
• /
• 2018

Price discount is one of the commonly used promotion strategies to increase sales and revenue. If a discount is perceived before the purchase (i.e., pre-purchase discount), consumers are likely to perceive it as a potential gain. If it is noticed after making a regular-priced purchase (i.e., post-purchase discount), consumers may develop negative emotions and attitudes. Based on the rising transparency and omnipresence of price and discount information through web and mobile platforms, we attempt to tackle an understudied topic on the negative effect of post-purchase price discount. Specifically, post-purchase discount information may increase consumers' perception of monetary loss, which may affect consumers' decision to return the product, potentially increasing the operating costs borne by retailers. Based on a close scrutinization of the current market environment and previous academic literature, we suggest a novel conceptual framework to understand consumers' perception, attitude, and behavior (perception of loss, willingness to return) upon perceiving various formats of discount promotion (absolute value vs. percentage discount) posterior to the purchase of a product. We also look at the effect of price level (low-priced vs. high-priced). For marketing practitioners, we intend to suggest optimal promotion formats that can alleviate consumers' negative perceptions and prevent additional operation costs.

• Environmental Analysis Health and Toxicology
• /
• v.19 no.1
• /
• pp.49-58
• /
• 2004

It is important to select a risk based priority area for environmental policy formation and decision-making. We estimated the health risks and associated damage costs from exposure to fine particles and assigned priority areas for twenty -five districts in Seoul. In order to estimate the theoretical mortality incidence of the health risk, baseline risks were estimated from mortality rates in two low level areas of fine particles, Seocho Gu and Cheju city To estimate the damage cost from the risk estimates, we investigated and estimated the willingness to pay (WTP) for specific risk reduction. We assumed two different locations as the reference area, Cheju city as Scenario I and Seocho gu as Scenario II. From the results, the five districts, Kwangjin, Chungnang, Kangbuk, Nowon, and Kangnam, ranked high in the categories of both health risk and economic risk. Damage costs were over twenty billion won in each of these districts. As there are uncertainties in these results, the parameter values such as PM$_{2.5}$ level, dose -response slope factor, baseline risk, exposure population and WTP should be continuously validated and refined.d.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
• /
• v.19 no.4
• /
• pp.343-357
• /
• 1994

Current commercial dairy feed has various problems in low feed productivity, inadequate formulation and higher feeding cost due to excessive capital investment and non-specialized system for the end product. To solve those problems, 6 TMR terminal models were developed in this study. The developed TMR terminal system consists of TMR terminal, TMR main center and combined system linked TMR terminal and TMR main center. 15 TMR main center models were developed to support 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 TMR terminal(30 ton/day basis) by 3 different types, and evaluated for capital investment and operation cost by the analysis of the newly developed computer program. Optimum model size is analyzed and suggested for each model. Followings are summary of this study : 1. The capital investment costs of TMR main centers were 1,600 to 3,800 million won for type 1, 2,200 to 4,500 million won for type 2 and 2,200 to 4,800 million won for type 3. Also model MACE30 or bigger were justified as the economical models. 2. The feed production costs of TMR main center models were 3,166 to 4,824 won/ton for type 1, 3,816 to 6,182 won/ton for type 2 and 3,990 to 6,263 won/ton for type 3. So feed production cost range was 3,166 to 6,263 won/ton. 3. The bigger production capacity, the less TMR main center production cost. The feed production cost of the biggest model MACE50 was 62~65% of smallest model MACE10.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
• /
• 2002.11a
• /
• pp.39-42
• /
• 2002

Recently, CMP (chemical mechanical polishing) technology has been widely used for global planarization of multi-level interconnection for ULSI applications. However, COO (cost of ownership) and COC (cost of consumables) were relatively increased because of expensive slurry. In this paper, we have studied the possibility of recycle of reused silica slurry in order to reduce the costs of CMP slurry. The post-CMP thickness and within-wafer non-uniformity(WIWNU) were measured as a function of different slurry composition. As a experimental result, the performance of reused slurry with annealed silica abrasive of 2 wt% contents was showed high removal rate and low non-uniformity. Therefore, we propose two-step CMP process as follows In the first-step CMP, we can polish the thick and rough film surface using remaked slurry, and then, in the second-step CMP, we can polish the thin film and fine pattern using original slurry. In summary, we can expect the saving of high costs of slurry.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
• /
• v.22 no.50
• /
• pp.23-32
• /
• 1999

Reliability and maintainability allocation in the analysis of the system's design, with the objective of planning and installing the individual components in such a way that the system performance is achieved. This paper has been made to solve an important task in reliability management of manufacturing systems within the general objective being to increase productivity while maintaining costs low. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to provide an analytical approach to determine an optimal reliability and maintainability allocation, trading off among system performance and parts investment costs. Two important considerations will be addressed in this regard : (ⅰ) determine the reliability and maintainability allocation of parts which maximizes a given production index, having fixed the total cost of investments ; and (ⅱ) determine the reliability and maintainability allocation which minimizes the total cost of investments, having fixed a minimum acceptable level of productivity. The procedure proposed in this paper is able to provide to managers and designers useful indications on the reliability and maintainability characteristics of parts in series -parallel systems. And this heuristic model is a decision support tool for contractors who are involved in large scale design projects such as ship and aircraft design. Numerical examples prove that an approximate expression of the average throughput rate is sufficiently accurate to be used in a numerical optimization method.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
• /
• v.16 no.9
• /
• pp.759-764
• /
• 2003

Recently, CMP (chemical mechanical polishing) technology has been widely used for global planarization of multi-level interconnection for ULSI applications. However, COO (cost of ownership) and COC (cost of consumables) were relatively increased because of expensive slurry. In this paper, we have studied the possibility of recycle of roused silica slurry in order to reduce the costs of CMP slurry. The post-CMP thickness and within-wafer non-uniformity (WIWNU) wore measured as a function of different slurry composition. As an experimental result, the performance of reused slurry with annealed silica abrasive of 2 wt％ contents was showed high removal rate and low non-uniformity. Therefore, we propose two-step CMP process as follows , In tile first-step CMP, we can polish the thick and rough film surface using remaked slurry, and then, in the second-step CMP, we can polish the thin film and fine pattern using original slurry. In summary, we can expect the saying of high costs of slurry.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
• /
• v.21 no.11
• /
• pp.93-101
• /
• 2016

In this paper, we propose a new model, assembled ERP, to analyze the reason why the small and medium sized companies have a low ERP implementation rate and to solve this. As a result of our analysis, the high initial costs and time required for implementing ERP keep such companies from implementing it as they have relatively limited resources. The assembled ERP model, however, reduces the scale of ERP by developing the ERP for the unique business of each and connecting a few 3rd-Party applications as a module to make ERP for common work. Also it enables easier data utilization by drawing up an API list that connects the 3rd-Party applications to the developed ERP when the user lacks knowledge in the master data of the 3rd-Party applications. Therefore it lets the small and medium sized companies introduce the ERP more easily by reducing the costs for ERP implementation and user training.