• International conference on construction engineering and project management
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• 2005.10a
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• pp.638-642
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• 2005

This paper presents incentive application strategies and delay prevention strategies as schematic approaches to improve time performance of highway construction contracts. This research recognizes the importance of improving time performance during highway construction. Strategic solutions of the most core issues on time performance incentive contracting are identified. The suggested incentive application strategies develop criteria for applying time classification to projects, for assigning project time classifications to contractors and designers, and for determining appropriate incentive values in A (cost) + B (time cost) and other performance incentive contracts. The suggested delay prevention strategies develop criteria for determining the appropriate subsurface utility engineering (SUE) level and to develop best practices for avoiding utility relocation delays. A schematic approach for each strategy is developed. This paper also introduces current incentive contracting practices in Florida. The researchers obtained the information from experienced persons in the highway construction industry, including key highway contractors, designers, and Department of Transportation (DOT) and Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) personnel. The major focus of this research is to develop strategies and suggest approaches to improve time performance of highway construction contracts. For future study, practical tools to facilitate implementation of the suggested strategies should be developed, so that the criteria, implementation processes, and best practices developed may contribute to the current industry-wide effort to improve time performance.

• Journal of Korean Society of Rural Planning
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.55-62
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• 2024

This study aimed to resolve issues in performance monitoring of the ecological sector of the Agricultural Environment Conservation Program through a comparative study of domestic ecological monitoring cases and to identify suitable performance monitoring methods for the project. To achieve this objective, current performance monitoring of the Agricultural Environment Conservation Program was compared and analyzed with domestic ecological monitoring cases to examine their applicability. Research results indicate that domestic ecological monitoring covers a wide range, making it difficult to diagnose the ecological environment at the village level. Therefore, it seems challenging to use these data for evaluating the performance of residents' activities. To accurately assess performances of participating villages in the project, on-site monitoring of the target areas is essential. For this purpose, efforts should be focused on strengthening on-site monitoring through the establishment of collaborative systems. However, domestic ecological monitoring can be utilized for long-term performance monitoring in the Agricultural Environment Conservation Program. By extracting necessary data on agricultural areas through geographic information and particularly by utilizing survey results according to the 'cultivated land ecosystem' type, long-term performance of the project could be evaluated. Accordingly, this study can serve as foundational research for establishing an ecological performance monitoring plan and system suited to the project.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.47 no.1
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• pp.11-25
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• 2015

The accident at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in March 2011, caused by an earthquake and a subsequent tsunami, resulted in a failure of the power systems that are needed to cool the reactors at the plant. The accident progression in the absence of heat removal systems caused Units 1-3 to undergo fuel melting. Containment pressurization and hydrogen explosions ultimately resulted in the escape of radioactivity from reactor containments into the atmosphere and ocean. Problems in containment venting operation, leakage from primary containment boundary to the reactor building, improper functioning of standby gas treatment system (SGTS), unmitigated hydrogen accumulation in the reactor building were identified as some of the reasons those added-up in the severity of the accident. The Fukushima accident not only initiated worldwide demand for installation of adequate control and mitigation measures to minimize the potential source term to the environment but also advocated assessment of the existing mitigation systems performance behavior under a wide range of postulated accident scenarios. The uncertainty in estimating the released fraction of the radionuclides due to the Fukushima accident also underlined the need for comprehensive understanding of fission product behavior as a function of the thermal hydraulic conditions and the type of gaseous, aqueous, and solid materials available for interaction, e.g., gas components, decontamination paint, aerosols, and water pools. In the light of the Fukushima accident, additional experimental needs identified for hydrogen and fission product issues need to be investigated in an integrated and optimized way. Additionally, as more and more passive safety systems, such as passive autocatalytic recombiners and filtered containment venting systems are being retrofitted in current reactors and also planned for future reactors, identified hydrogen and fission product issues will need to be coupled with the operation of passive safety systems in phenomena oriented and coupled effects experiments. In the present paper, potential hydrogen and fission product issues raised by the Fukushima accident are discussed. The discussion focuses on hydrogen and fission product behavior inside nuclear power plant containments under severe accident conditions. The relevant experimental investigations conducted in the technical scale containment THAI (thermal hydraulics, hydrogen, aerosols, and iodine) test facility (9.2 m high, 3.2 m in diameter, and $60m^3$ volume) are discussed in the light of the Fukushima accident.

• Korean Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.103-114
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• 2014

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) measures the relative efficiency of decision making units (DMUs) with multiple performance factors that are grouped into outputs and inputs. DEA has proven to be superior to simple aggregation of performance measures, and is also useful for evaluating the performance of construction companies for comparison with competitor performance. The purpose of this study was to survey literatures on the application of DEA methodology and to propose a methodological scheme to measure the performance of construction organizations. Articles on previous studies were surveyed and examined as part of a comprehensive review. The survey revealed that the application of DEA in the construction industry was li mited. Further, the survey indicated that there is a need for the development of a methodological framework on the special goals and subjects of performance measurement, methods of data structure and collection, selection of appropriate DEA models, analysis of results, and post-test. Based on the survey, this study identified and discussed the types of major issues and topics for future studies from a methodological perspective, which could be helpful to researchers interested in using DEA to study performance issues in construction organizations.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.7 no.12
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• pp.267-274
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• 2020

The focus of this study is to investigate the mediating role of online market orientation on information capital readiness-business performance relationship. The construct of information capital readiness is rarely researched. The readiness here refers to the availability of information capital needed to support strategy execution. As quantitative research, this study employs the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to test the hypotheses. Data was collected using questionnaires from the owners/managers of the micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in the East Java Province, Indonesia. As many as 433 respondents had participated. The result indicates that information capital readiness directly and positively affects business performance. Further analysis reveals that online market orientation partially mediates information capital readiness-business performance relationship. In conclusion, this study suggests that the owners/managers of the MSMEs should improve their information capital readiness to support online market orientation strategy so that it can improve their business performance. This is the first study that brings together the issues of information capital readiness and online market orientation as the antecedents of business performance in the Indonesian MSMEs research setting. The mediating role of online market orientation is rarely explored in previous studies.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.8
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• pp.3865-3883
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• 2016

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) encapsulates computer hardware into a large amount of virtual and manageable instances mainly in the form of virtual machine (VM), and provides rental service for users. Currently, VM anomaly incidents occasionally occur, which leads to performance issues and even downtime. This paper aims at detecting anomalous VMs based on performance metrics data of VMs. Due to the dynamic nature and increasing scale of IaaS, detecting anomalous VMs from voluminous correlated and non-Gaussian monitored performance data is a challenging task. This paper designs an anomaly detection framework to solve this challenge. First, it collects 53 performance metrics to reflect the running state of each VM. The collected performance metrics are testified not to follow the Gaussian distribution. Then, it employs independent components analysis (ICA) instead of principal component analysis (PCA) to extract independent components from collected non-Gaussian performance metric data. For anomaly detection, it employs multi-class Bayesian classification to determine the current state of each VM. To evaluate the performance of the designed detection framework, four types of anomalies are separately or jointly injected into randomly selected VMs in a campus-wide testbed. The experimental results show that ICA-based detection mechanism outperforms PCA-based and LDA-based detection mechanisms in terms of sensitivity and specificity.

• Journal of The Korean Association of Information Education
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.549-560
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• 2005

Web-based distance teacher training should focus on increasing self-directed problem solving skills of trainers by problem-based instruction(PBL). Performance assessment evaluates achievement of learning goals through the practical performance learning to solve problems in the real situation. This study proposes a web-based performance assessment model for the distance teacher training. It reflects fairness and objectiveness issues of performance assessment which elementary teachers are concerned about through the survey on distance teacher training, and relieves instructors from overload of managing and scoring performance tests. The proposed model provides problem-based learning situations, interactions between individuals and groups, and web-based cooperative evaluation and the peer evaluation.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.97-105
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• 2020

This paper explores the impact of capital structure on firm performance in the context of Vietnam. The paper investigates the different effect of capital structure on firm performance in state-owned and non-state enterprises listed on the Vietnam stock market. The panel data of research sample includes 488 non-financial listed companies on the Vietnam stock market for a period of six years, from 2013 to 2018. The Generalized Least Square (GLS) is employed to address econometric issues and to improve the accuracy of the regression coefficients. In this research, firm performance is measured by return on equity (ROE), return on assets (ROA), and earnings per share (EPS). The ratios of short-term liabilities, long-term liabilities, and total liabilities to total assets are proxy for capital structure. Firm sizes, growth rate, liquidity, and ratio of fixed assets to total assets are control variables in the study. The empirical results show that capital structure has a statistically significant negative effect on the firm performance. The result also shows this effect is stronger in state-owned enterprises than non-state enterprises in Vietnam. These evidences provide a new insight to managers of both state-owned and non-state enterprises on how to improve the firm's performance with capital structure.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.22 no.53
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• pp.45-54
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• 1999

Manufacturing today is becoming increasingly competitive. If a company is to exist and successfully compete, it must pay very careful attention to production management, total quality assurance and total proactive maintenance issues. Overall machine performance, repair efficiency, system level utilization, productivity and quality of output need to be optimized as possible. To accomplish that objective, the behavior of manufacturing equipment and systems need to be monitored and measured continuously if it is possible. Then early warning of possible failure should be generated and proacted on that type of the situation to improve overall operation performance of manufacturing environment. In this paper, Proactive maintenance framework using performance-based reliability structure as enabler technology is proposed. Its paradigm enables one to maximize system through-put and product quality as well as resources in the performance domain. In the case of inadequate knowledge of the failure mechanics, this empirical modeling concept along with performance degradation knowledge can serve as an important product and process improvement tool. The real-time framework extension to proposed framework uses on-line performance information and is capable of projecting the remaining useful period.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.841-848
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• 2021

This study seeks to investigate Key Audit Matters (KAMs) reporting of Thai listed companies in Thailand, and examines the influence of KAMs reporting on corporate financial performance. Data were collected from 180 companies listed in Thailand during 2016 to 2018, which accounted to 540 annual reports. KAMs reporting was quantified by content analysis from the audit reports, while financial performance and corporate characteristics were collected from the corporate annual reports. Descriptive analysis and multiple regressions were performed to analyze the data. The study results reveal that there was an increasing of KAMs reporting in audit report of listed companies in Thailand in terms of both number of issues and number of words across the observed period. The regression analysis indicates that was a significant and negative influence of words counted as KAMs reporting on financial performance, while there was no influence of KAMs reporting issue on the performance. Moreover, there was a negative relationship between corporate complexity and financial performance, while audit type had a positive correlation with financial performance. This study shows significant contribution on the implication of KAMs in an emerging economy and the role of KAMs as a communication device between auditor and stakeholders.