In an earlier paper (Tien 2012), the author augurs that, in contrast to the first and second industrial revolutions which respectively focused on the development and the mass production of goods, the next – or third – industrial revolution is focused on the integration of services and/or goods; it began in this second decade of the 21st Century. The Third Industrial Revolution (TIR) is underpinned by the integration or mass customization of services and/or goods. The benefits of real-time mass customization cannot be over-stated as goods and services become indistinguishable and are co-produced as “ServGoods”, resulting in an overwhelming economic advantage to the industrialized countries where the consuming customers are at the same time the co-producing producers. Adding sensors to these ServGoods and letting them connect or communicate among themselves or with other ServGoods can result in an Internet of Things (i.e., connected ServGoods). A number of considerations, consequences and concerns relating to such an Internet of Connected ServGoods are discussed herein.

In many equipment manufacturing industries, firms compete with each other not only on products price, but also on maintenance service. More and more traditional products oriented firms are offering their customers products bundled with maintenance service (P&S bundles). In this study, we examine firms’ incentive to offer customers products bundling with long-term maintenance or repair support service in a duopoly competitive environment. When providing P&S bundles, a firm need to determine the service level (in terms of average response time guarantee for the service in this paper) to offer and needs to build a service facility to handle the maintenance service requirements. Based on the analysis of three sub-game models, we characterize the market conditions in which only one firm, both firms or neither firm will offer P&S bundles. Finally, we analyze the affects of serval market factors on firms’ strategy choices.

This paper studies the reliability evaluation of a stochastic manufacturing system with multiple production lines in parallel. Multiple repairs and different failure rates, never simultaneously addressed in earlier works, are taken into account. First, a revised graphical methodology integrating transformation and decomposition is utilized to construct the stochastic manufacturing system as a multi-state manufacturing network (MSMN). In particular, a “predecessor-set” technique is proposed to deal with multiple repairs. An algorithm is proposed to generate the lowest capacity vectors (LCVs) that stations should provide to satisfy the workloads. Subsequently, the system reliability of the MSMN, which is defined as the probability of demand satisfaction, is calculated in terms of the LCVs. A real case of a printed circuit board manufacturing system is utilized to demonstrate how the system reliability can be evaluated. A further decision making issue is addressed based on the derived system reliability.

In this paper, a new decision making approach is proposed for the multi-attribute large group emergency decision-making problem that attribute weights are unknown and expert preference information is expressed by generalized interval-valued trapezoidal fuzzy numbers (GITFNs). Firstly, a degree of similarity formula between GITFNs is presented. Secondly, expert preference information on different alternatives is clustered into several aggregations via the fuzzy clustering method. As the clustering proceeds, an index of group preference consistency is introduced to ensure the clustering effect, and then the group preference information on different alternatives is obtained. Thirdly, the TOPSIS method is used to rank the alternatives. Finally, an example is taken to show the feasibility and effectiveness of this approach. These method can ensure the consistency degree of group preference, thus decision efficiency of emergency response activities can be improved.

In Myanmar, the formal financial institution does not provide uncollateralized credits. The rural unbanked under the poverty line is depending on the informal money-lenders with high interest rate. Private Agency Collaboration Together is only one microfinance institution providing the credits without collateral and with low interest rate to the unbanked in Myanmar. Half of the unbanked are unable to borrow the loans from the microfinance institution because of the weakness of the information contribution and the strict legal policies of the microfinance institution. Therefore, the objective of this study is to construct a system to improve the relationship between the microfinance institution and the unbanked by reducing the obstacles in the current system of microfinance institution. The legal policy is studied from the vision of the local unbanked as the originality of this research and the i-System methodology is applied to accomplish the research. The current system comprises the information contribution, loans and legal policies. The current system is only one relationship between the microfinance institution and unbanked. When the ten obstacles occurred in the current system, the unbanked cannot approach to the microfinance institution. An access system including four sub-systems is developed depending on the collected ideas to solve these obstacles and intend to improve the relationship between microfinance institution and the unbanked.