The purposes of this study were to identify the relative importance attributes, deduct the ideal combination of total utility and establish the marketing strategies for quality improvement of foodservice at funeral halls of medical centers. Data were collected using self-administered questionnaires from 102 funeral foodservice employees and 71 chief mourners or the bereaved. According to the results from a conjoint analysis, among foodservice employees at funeral hall, the relatively important attributes were 'taste (52.84%)', 'menu variety (24.419%)' and 'price (22.741%)'; among chief mourners or the bereaved, they were 'taste (50.004%)', 'price (31.388%)' and 'menu variety (18.008%)'. The ideal combination of total utility was different between funeral foodservice employees and chief mourners or the bereaved; it was higher among chief mourners or the bereaved (1.211) compared to funeral foodservice employees (1.169). Thus, there should an endeavor to improve the foodservice quality in funeral halls of medical centers through better taste, low price and similar menu variety.

The sequence which minimizes overall utility work in car assembly lines reduces the cycle time, the number of utility workers, and the risk of conveyor stopping. This study suggests mathematical formulation of the sequencing problem to minimize overall utility work, and present a genetic algorithm which can provide a near optimal solution in real time. To apply a genetic algorithm to the sequencing problem in car assembly lines, the representation, selection methods, and genetic parameters are studied. Experiments are carried out to compare selection methods such as roullette wheel selection, tournament selection and ranking selection. Experimental results show that ranking selection method outperforms the others in solution quality, whereas tournament selection provides the best performance in computation time.