Current Issue : October - December Volume : 2011 Issue Number : 4 Articles : 3 Articles
The construction industry has incurred a considerable amount of waste as a result of poor logistics supply chain network management. Therefore, managing logistics in the construction industry is critical. An effective logistic system ensures delivery of the right products and services to the right players at the right time while minimising costs and rewarding all sectors based on value added to the supply chain. This paper reports on an on-going research study on the concept of context-aware services delivery in the construction project supply chain logistics. As part of the emerging wireless technologies, an Intelligent Wireless Web (IWW) using\r\ncontext-aware computing capability represents the next generation ICT application to construction-logistics management. This intelligent system has the potential of serving and improving the construction logistics through access to context-specific data, information and services. Existing mobile communication deployments\r\nin the construction industry rely on static modes of information delivery and do not take into account the worker�s changing context and dynamic project conditions. The major problems in these applications are lack of context-specificity in the distribution of information, services and other project resources, and lack of cohesion with the existing desktop based ICT infrastructure. The research works focus on identifying the context dimension such as user context, environmental context and project context, selection of technologies to capture context-parameters such wireless sensors and RFID, selection of supporting technologies such as wireless communication, Semantic Web, Web Services, agents, etc. The process of integration of Context-Aware Computing and Web-Services to facilitate the creation of intelligent collaboration environment for managing construction logistics will take into account all the necessary critical parameters such as storage, transportation, distribution, assembly, etc. within off and on-site project....
A quite common practice, even in academic literature, is to simplify a decision problem and model it as a cost-minimizing problem. In fact, some type of models has been standardized to minimization problems, like Quadratic Assignment Problems QAPs, where a maximization formulation would be treated as a ââ?¬Å?generalizedââ?¬Â QAP and not solvable by many of the specially designed softwares for QAP. Ignoring revenues when modeling a decision problem works only if costs can be separated from the decisions influencing revenues. More often than we think this is not the case, and minimizing costs will not lead to maximized profit. This will be demonstrated using spreadsheets to solve a small example. The example is also used to demonstrate other pitfalls in network models: the inability to generally balance the problem or allocate costs in advance, and the tendency to anticipate a specific type of solution and thereby make constraints too limiting when formulating the problem....
Based on the work of domestic and foreign scholars and the application of chaotic systems theory, this paper presents an investigation simulation of retailer�s demand and stock. In simulation of the interaction, the behavior of the system exhibits deterministic chaos with consideration of system constraints. By the method of space�s reconstruction, the maximal Lyapunov exponent of retailer�s demand model was calculated. The result shows the model is chaotic. By the results of bifurcation\r\ndiagram of model parameters k, r and changing initial condition, the system can be led to chaos....
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