Fair Allocation of profits or costs arising from joint participation by multiple individuals or entities with different purposes is essential for their continuing involvement and for their dissatisfaction reduction. In this research, fair allocation of the profits of forming a grand coalition in Three-Echelon Supply Chain (TESC) game that is composed of manufacturer, distributor and retailer, is studied. In particular, the solutions of the proportional method of profit, the proportional method of marginal profit, and Shapley value based on cooperative game theory are proved to be in the desirable characteristics of the core. The proportional method of profit and the proportional method of marginal profit are often used because of their ease of application. These methods distribute total profit in proportion to profits or marginal profits of each game participant. In addition, Shapley value can be defined as the average marginal profit when one game player is added at a time. Even though the calculation of the average of all possible marginal profits is not simple, Shapley value are often used as a useful method. Experiments have shown that the solution of the incremental method, which calculates the marginal cost of adding game players in the order of manufacturers, distributors and retailers, does not exist in the core.

High variance observed in the measurement system can cause high process variation that can affect process capability badly. Therefore, measurement system analysis is closely related to process capability analysis. Generally, the evaluation for measurement system and process variance is performed separately in the industry. That is, the measurement system analysis is implemented before process monitoring, process capability and process performance analysis even though these analyses are closely related. This paper presents the effective concurrent evaluation procedure for measurement system analysis and process capability analysis using the table that contains Process Performance (Pp), Gage Repeatability & Reproducibility (%R&R) and Number of Distinct Categories (NDC). Furthermore, the long-term process capability index (Pp), which takes into account both gage variance and process variance, is used instead of the short-term process capability (Cp) considering only process variance. The long-term capability index can reflect well the relationship between the measurement system and process capability. The quality measurement and improvement guidelines by region scale are also described in detail. In conclusion, this research proposes the procedure that can execute the measurement system analysis and process capability analysis at the same time. The proposed procedure can contribute to reduction of the measurement staff’s effort and to improvement of accurate evaluation.

The cooperative game theory consists of a set of players and utility function that has positive values for a subset of players, called coalition, in the game. The purpose of cost allocation method is to allocate the relevant cost among game players in a fair and rational way. Therefore, cost allocation method based on cooperative game theory has been applied in many areas for fair and reasonable cost allocation. On the other hand, the desirable characteristics of the cost allocation method are Pareto optimality, rationality, and marginality. Pareto optimality means that costs are entirely paid by participating players. Rationality means that by joining the grand coalition, players do not pay more than they would if they chose to be part of any smaller coalition of players. Marginality means that players are charged at least enough to cover their marginal costs. If these characteristics are all met, the solution of cost allocation method exists in the core. In this study, proportional method is applied to EOQ inventory game and EPQ inventory game with shortage. Proportional method is a method that allocates costs proportionally to a certain allocator. This method has been applied to a variety of problems because of its convenience and simple calculations. However, depending on what the allocator is used for, the proportional method has a weakness that its solution may not exist in the core. Three allocators such as demand, marginal cost, and cost are considered. We prove that the solution of the proportional method to demand and the proportional method to marginal cost for EOQ game and EPQ game with shortage is in the core. The counterexample also shows that the solution of the proportional method to cost does not exist in the core.

The base quality score recalibration (BQSR) is an important step in the variant calling from high-throughput sequence data. Motivated by the fact that BQSR necessarily requires a database of known variants such as the dbSNP, we present an extensive analysis on BQSR results for human and rice genome. We showed that the recalibration results depended on the size of the database. The more variants are there in the database, the larger averaged value of the recalibrated quality scores is obtained. This implies that the recalibrated quality score is lower than it should be when the number of variants in the database is not large enough. Based on the finding that the size of the database should play a crucial role in BQSR, we proposed a method to create a database when the size of a database is not large enough for BQSR results to be reliable. We demonstrated that, in the case of human, the database constructed by the proposed method generated almost the same results as the human dbSNP. In the case of rice, however, we showed that the proposed database is more reasonable than the rice dbSNP by illustrating how the proposed method is effective.

Joint order and transportation system which can be used for the franchise business is considered. It is assumed that several agents exist on the same vehicle route and each agent has an EOQ inventory policy and the same order cycle. It is also assumed that transportation cost is proportional to the distance of farthest agent from the supplier. Various methods for rational and fair cost allocation such as line rule, AMEF, the Shapley value, nucleolus, and proportional method were researched and applied to the inventory transportation problem. The core is the basic condition for rational and fair cost allocation. Therefore, we examined if the solutions of various allocation methods are existed in the core through an example.

In this paper, we propose an Elman recurrent neural network to predict and analyze a time series of gas energy consumption in an air handling unit. To this end, we consider the volatility of the time series and demonstrate that there exists a correlation in the time series of the volatilities, which suggests that the gas consumption time series contain a non-negligible amount of the non-linear correlation. Based on this finding, we adopt the Elman recurrent neural network as the model for the prediction of the gas consumption. As the simplest form of the recurrent network, the Elman network is designed to learn sequential or time-varying pattern and could predict learned series of values. The Elman network has a layer of “context units” in addition to a standard feedforward network. By adjusting two parameters in the model and performing the cross validation, we demonstrated that the proposed model predicts the gas consumption with the relative errors and the average errors in the range of 2%~5% and 3kWh~8kWh, respectively. The results of this study can be used to the energy management system in terms of the effective control of the cross usage of the electric and the gas energies.

Cost allocation studies on the rational allocation method for the common cost of the joint products or services that provide different benefits to each economic entity under the constraints of the efficiency and fairness. Cooperative game theory is often used for cost allocation and studies on a fair and efficient allocation of the utility if some feasible utility for a whole or subset of the players in a game is given. This study shows a variety of cooperative game theory approaches and discusses the pros and cons of each approach.

If the coalition of players orders the product together, then they can reduce the inventory costs such as ordering cost and holding cost. Inventory game can be defined as the allocation of the inventory costs to the players in a fair and rational manner. The characteristics recommended for the solutions provided by the method for the inventory game are completeness, rationality, and marginality. The solutions that satisfy these characteristics are in the core, where the proportional method may depend on the allocator. This study has found out that the solutions of the proportional method with some allocators for economic order quantity model exist in the core.

With the development of industrial technology and science, production and manufacturing facilities have been enhanced and improved, and the importance of the safety of workers has also been regulated and limited by various safety management methods. As a way to secure the safety of the workers from the production facility, the fail-safe and fool-proof methods are now being applied. Any possible insecure behavior and unsafe conditions can be removed by adopting the standards and specifications that are now secure the safety of workers and equipment. This research analyzes EN ISO 13849-1 international and European standards during CE certification. In order to secure acceptable reduced risks, the risk assessment process of ISO 12100 and the processes for reducing its risk are applied. In the current ISO 13849-1 standard, the criteria for the required performance level PLr (Required Performance Level) for the applicable risk and safety functions through the risk assessment are subjective and not subdivided. Therefore, the evaluation criteria are likely to cause judge’s judgement error due to qualitative judgement. This research focuses on evaluation and acceptable performance level setting for the safety circuit of the equipment. We propose an objective and specific evaluation criteria to secure safety, and the proposed evaluation criteria are applied to the case study of the safety circuit for the equipment. In order to secure the safety of the entire safety circuit, the improvement of the MTTFd and DC level related to the SRP/CS (Safety-Related Parts of Control Systems)’ lifetime is required for the future research.

Vendor Managed Inventory is a well-known vendor-retailer coordination approach in supply chain management where the vendor manages inventory of the retailer and determines the order interval and order quantity for the retailer. To consider practical situation, the upper limit of inventory for the retailer is set. If the inventory level for the retailer exceeds the upper limit, then the penalty cost is charged to the retailer. Furthermore, maximum allowable inventory level is set for the vendor to prevent the vendor from keeping much inventory. Single-vendor multi-retailer supply chain model with upper limit of inventory for vendor and retailers is studied. All the retailers’ are assumed to have the common cycle time, and a vendor manages retailers’ inventory and replenishes products. The mathematical formulation is introduced to minimize the total cost including the penalty cost violating the upper limit of inventory for retailers with the constraint of maximum allowable inventory level. The solution procedure based on Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions is derived. KKT conditions are often applied to find an optimal solution of nonlinear programming problem with constraints. An illustrative example is used to show the application of the proposed solution procedure. Furthermore, sensitivity analysis is done to find out the relationship between maximum allowable inventory level and other values such as order quantity, the number of shipment, vendor’s cost, retailer’s cost, and total cost. As maximum allowable inventory level decreases, the number of shipment decreases but total cost increases. Order quantity has the trend of decline and is affected by the number of shipment.

Vendor Managed Inventory is a well-known vendor-retailer coordination approach in supply chain management. If the inventory level for the retailer exceeds the upper limit, then the penalty cost is charged to the retailer. Furthermore, maximum allowable inventory level is set for the vendor to prevent the vendor from keeping much inventory. Single-vendor multi-retailer supply chain model with upper limit of inventory for vendor and retailers is studied. All the retailers’ are assumed to have the common cycle time, and a vendor manages retailers’ inventory and replenishes products. The mathematical formulation is introduced to minimize the total cost including the penalty cost violating the upper limit of inventory for retailers with the constraint of maximum allowable inventory level. The solution procedure based on Karush-Kuhn-Tucker(KKT) conditions is derived.

The present study examines the features of communicative functions in middle school English textbooks, identifying whether or not they are presented based on the spiral structure. It also compares the communicative functions of 15 different middle school English textbooks and investigates whether the National English Listening Tests (NELTs) reflect the communicative functions presented in the textbooks. Two corpora were compiled using the 15 middle school English textbooks and the NELTs, and they were analyzed using WordSmith Tools. The results show that all the textbooks included communicative functions that the National Curriculum recommends; however, the textbooks presented a limited number of functions. Nonetheless, the communicative functions were presented relatively in a spiral way. The majority number of communicative functions in the textbooks and the NELTs were similar to each other, but there were some functions in the tests that were not covered in the textbooks. These results imply that more diverse communicative functions should be included in textbooks in order to help improve students’ communicative competence. The communicative functions not presented in the textbooks should not be included in the NELTs.