19398479
An application of the AHP in 3PL vendor selection of a 4PL system
As a fourth party logistics provider integrates the capacities of third party logistics providers, 3PL vendor selection is an important problem. Furthermore, 3PL vendor selection is a complex multi-criteria decision problem. The decision made by the decision maker or an evaluation team can be improved by a systematic and logistical approach to access priorities based on the inputs of the decision maker or the team made by several people. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) can be very useful in reaching a likely result which can satisfy the decision maker or the team. In this paper, an AHP-based model is formulated and applied to a case study to examining the function in 3PL vendor selection. The use of the proposed model indicates that the computed quantitative evaluations can be applied to improve the precision of the selection.
20777551
A Method of Network Simplification in a 4PL System
In fourth party logistics (4PL), network optimization needs to synthesize the entire possible 3PL vendors to provide integrated logistics schemes, which can meet all the requirements of customers. Since there are knapsack constraints and un-knapsack constraints, the computational burden is considered to be a problem and a modest computation is required. In this paper, a 4PL optimization network-model is established and a two-process method is suggested for simplifying the corresponding 4PL network. An example is provided and some analysis is given after the calculation.
24698432
An AHP/DEA Methodology for 3PL Vendor Selection in 4PL
Vendor selection is an important and complex problem, which contains many criteria. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) can be very useful in reaching a likely result which can satisfy the subjective opinion of the decision maker or the evaluation team. On the other hand, the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) can select vendors objectively with the quantitative data. In this paper, a four-step model based on both AHP and DEA is formulated and applied to a case study. The use of the proposed model can give precise evaluation combining the subjective opinion from the decision makers with the objective data of the relevant factors. In other words, this approach can add subjective factors to the evaluation without losing the objective precision of the selection.
32668520
2D DGT induced fluxes in sediments and soils (2D DIFS)
Diffusive gradients in thin films (DGT) is an emerging, dynamic, measuring technique that can provide diverse information on the concentrations and behaviour of solutes, including chemical speciation and partitioning between solid phase and solution in waters, sediments and soils. The DGT device, which accumulates solute in a binding layer after transport through a well-defined diffusion layer, is simple to construct and use. However, complete interpretation of the dependence of mass accumulation with time requires a numerical model of the transport and reactions occurring within the device and its deployment medium. We have developed a software tool that models the temporal dependence of DGT induced fluxes from soils or sediments by considering diffusion of solutes in two dimensions (2D) and incorporating first order exchange of solute between solid phase and solution. Microniches of elevated concentrations, that emulate zones of high microbial activity, can be created in the soil or sediment. The solver uses an advanced 2D FEM method and a flexible and user-friendly Graphical User Interface, which incorporates essential model calibration tools, is provided. This solution in 2D is shown to substantially increase the accuracy of the simulation, compared to that achieved with the established DIFS software that provides only a 1D solution, and yet it still has short calculation times on modern PCs. The 2D model is shown to provide a good approximation to the full 3D solution, obtained using FEMLAB, when the supply from the solid phase is larger than supply by diffusion. Example simulations are provided for the three major solute supply situations, namely diffusion only, very rapid and sustained supply from the solid phase and two intermediate cases of partial resupply.
21780190
A general numerical procedure for multilayer multistep IC process simulation
A new numerical procedure is presented for the simulation of multistep processes in IC fabrication of nonplanar multilayered structures. The numerical scheme utilizes a multizone adaptive grid generation (MAGG) technique for the discretization of the physical domains of arbitrary shape that may involve free or moving boundaries. The process model equations are discretized in the physical space using a curvilinear finite-volume formulation. The numerical scheme is validated by simulating silicon oxidation process (with the inclusion of stress effects) on a 50/spl deg/ trench and comparing the results with the published SEM photographic data. Capabilities of the methodology, including geometric flexibility, efficiency in grid distribution, accuracy in treating the moving boundaries, and facility for modification of the physical model are discussed. These characteristics are demonstrated by simulating simultaneous silicon oxidation and impurity diffusion in trench structures with corner angles equal to, and greater than, 90/spl deg/. >
15336204
Image Segmentation using Salient Points-Based Object Templates
Using prior knowledge about object(s) is greatly beneficial for accurate image segmentation. In this paper, we present an image segmentation method that performs segmentation using a set of user provided object templates. For the object templates, we call the salient points in the object the characteristic points of the object. Based on the correspondence between the salient points of an arbitrary image and the characteristic points of the objects, object templates are mapped onto the image as bit masks. All templates for the same object are combined to generate the final object/background segmentation. Experiments show that this method can create good segmentations.
1857778
Boosting image orientation detection with indoor vs. outdoor classification
Automatic detection of image orientation is a very important operation in photo image management. In this paper, we propose an automated method based on the boosting algorithm to estimate image orientations. The proposed method has the capability of rejecting images based on the confidence score of the orientation detection. Also, images are classified into indoor and outdoor, and this classification result is used to further refine the orientation detection. To select features more sensitive to the rotation, we combine the features by subtraction operation and select the most useful features by boosting algorithm. The proposed method has several advantages: small model size, fast classification speed, and effective rejection scheme.
7092740
Representing Conditional Independence Using Decision Trees
While the representation of decision trees is fully expressive theoretically, it has been observed that traditional decision trees has the replication problem. This problem makes decision trees to be large and learnable only when sufficient training data are available. In this paper, we present a new representation model, conditional independence trees (CITrees), to tackle the replication problem from probability perspective. We propose a novel algorithm for learning CITrees. Our experiments show that CITrees outperform naive Bayes (Langley, Iba, & Thomas 1992), C4.5 (Quinlan 1993), TAN (Friedman, Geiger, & Goldszmidt 1997), and AODE (Webb, Boughton, & Wang 2005) significantly in classification accuracy.