The growing importance of the service economy during the last 40 years has raised the need for new tools for designing and managing services. As a result, several authors have developed service classification systems, in order to better understand the nature of service operations and provide methods and tools to improve service efficiency and quality. This paper exploits the work resulting from service classification systems and identifies the principal attributes to be considered in service management. The tool introduced for this purpose is the Service Attribute-Process Matrix (SAPM), which uses selected results from existing service classification schemes to investigate the importance of the significant service attributes to major processes of the service life cycle.

This paper proposed a multi-period dynamic optimal portfolio selection model. Assumptions were made to assure the strictness of reasoning. This Approach depicted the developments and changing of the real stock market and is an attempt to remedy some of the deficiencies of recent researches. The model is a standard form of quadratic programming. Furthermore, this paper presented a numerical example in real stock market.

This paper presents a methodology which determines the allocation of power demand among the committed generating units while minimizes number of objectives as well as meets physical and technological system constraints. The procedure considers two decoupled problems based upon the dependency of their goals on either active power or reactive power generation. Both the problems have been solved sequentially to achieve optimal allocation of active and reactive power generation while minimizes operating cost, gaseous pollutants emission objectives and active power transmission loss with consideration of system operating constraints along with generators prohibited operating zones and transmission line flow limits. The active and reactive power line flows are obtained with the help of generalized generation shift distribution factors (GGDF) and generalized Z-bus distribution factors (GZBDF), respectively. First problem is solved in multi-objective framework in which the best weights assigned to objectives are determined while employing weighting method and in second problem, active power loss of the system is minimized subject to system constraints. The validity of the proposed method is demonstrated on 30-bus IEEE power system.

This paper argues that agent-based simulation can be used as a way for testing Kansei Engineering methods which deal with the human reaction from sensory to mental state, that is, sensitivity, sense, sensibility, feeling, esthetics, emotion affection and intuition. A new fuzzy linear quantification method is tested in an artificial world by agent-based modeling and simulations, and the performance of the fuzzy linear method is compared with that of a genetic algorithm. The simulations can expand people’s imagination and enhance people’s intuition that the new fuzzy linear quantification method is effective.

There are many disruptive accidents in the supply chain operations system and achieving the coordination of supply chain is main objective for supply chain research. While disruptive accidents have increasingly influenced the coordinated operation of the supply chain, existing research literature on the supply chain coordination is setting in a stationary environment. The answer for how the disruptive accidents affect the coordinated supply chain is given in this paper. Based on the benchmark supply chain which is coordinated by the negative incentive mechanism, we study the impacts of supply disruption on the supply chain system by using simulation approach in which two different distribution function of random variable are used to express the supply disruption. Comparison between these two simulation results and possible coordination mechanism under the supply disruption are proposed. From the perspective of supply chain risk management, we provide the inspiration for the manager.

In the era of e-businesses, the traditional business services are greatly challenged by the ever-increasing demands from customers with various backgrounds and personalities. Large numbers of new e-businesses are driven by the needs of customers. The existing dynamics inherent in the customer needs require the corresponding dynamic management of services. Attempting to respond to customers in a rapid and intelligent way, this paper proposes a situation calculus based approach for dynamically managing e-Business services in the ubiquitous environment. By employing the formalism of the situation calculus to enable intelligence and automation, the approach can implement the functions of service automatic composition and model verification. These functions will improve the degree of customer-orientation and enable fast responsiveness in the emerging e-service systems.

Text mining, also known as discovering knowledge from the text, which has emerged as a possible solution for the current information explosion, refers to the process of extracting non-trivial and useful patterns from unstructured text. Among the general tasks of text mining such as text clustering, summarization, etc, text classification is a subtask of intelligent information processing, which employs unsupervised learning to construct a classifier from training text by which to predict the class of unlabeled text. Because of its simplicity and objectivity in performance evaluation, text classification was usually used as a standard tool to determine the advantage or weakness of a text processing method, such as text representation, text feature selection, etc. In this paper, text classification is carried out to classify the Web documents collected from XSSC Website (http://www.xssc.ac.cn). The performance of support vector machine (SVM) and back propagation neural network (BPNN) is compared on this task. Specifically, binary text classification and multi-class text classification were conducted on the XSSC documents. Moreover, the classification results of both methods are combined to improve the accuracy of classification. An experiment is conducted to show that BPNN can compete with SVM in binary text classification; but for multi-class text classification, SVM performs much better. Furthermore, the classification is improved in both binary and multi-class with the combined method.

The clustering coefficient C of a network, which is a measure of direct connectivity between neighbors of the various nodes, ranges from 0 (for no connectivity) to 1 (for full connectivity). We define extended clustering coefficients C(h) of a small-world network based on nodes that are at distance h from a source node, thus generalizing distance-1 neighborhoods employed in computing the ordinary clustering coefficient C = C(1). Based on known results about the distance distribution P _δ(h) in a network, that is, the probability that a randomly chosen pair of vertices have distance h, we derive and experimentally validate the law P _δ(h)C(h) ≤ c log N / N, where c is a small constant that seldom exceeds 1. This result is significant because it shows that the product P _δ(h)C(h) is upper-bounded by a value that is considerably smaller than the product of maximum values for P _δ(h) and C(h). Extended clustering coefficients and laws that govern them offer new insights into the structure of small-world networks and open up avenues for further exploration of their properties.