In an earlier paper (Tien 2015), the author defined the concept of a servgood, which can be thought of as a physical good or product enveloped by a services-oriented layer that makes the good smarter or more adaptable and customizable for a particular use. Adding another layer of physical sensors could then enhance its smartness and intelligence, especially if it were to be connected with each other or with other servgoods through the Internet of Things. Such sensed servgoods are becoming the products of the future. Indeed, autonomous vehicles can be considered the exemplar servgoods of the future; it is about decision informatics and embraces the advanced technologies of sensing (i.e., Big Data), processing (i.e., real-time analytics), reacting (i.e., real-time decision-making), and learning (i.e., deep learning). Since autonomous vehicles constitute a huge quality-of-life disruption, it is also critical to consider its policy impact on privacy and security, regulations and standards, and liability and insurance. Finally, just as the Soviet Union inaugurated the space age on October 4, 1957, with the launch of Sputnik, the first man-made object to orbit the Earth, the U. S. has inaugurated an age of automata or autonomous vehicles that can be considered to be the U. S. Sputnik of servgoods, with the full support of the U. S. government, the U. S. auto industry, the U. S. electronic industry, and the U.S. higher educational enterprise.

Web search query data are obtained to reflect social spots and serve as novel economic indicators. When faced with high-dimensional query data, selecting keywords that have plausible predictive ability and can reduce dimensionality is critical. This paper presents a new integrative method that combines Hurst Exponent (HE) and Time Difference Correlation (TDC) analysis to select keywords with powerful predictive ability. The method is called the HE-TDC screening method and requires keywords with predictive ability to satisfy two characteristics, namely, high correlation and fluctuation memorability similar to the predicting target series. An empirical study is employed to predict the volume of tourism visitors in the Jiuzhai Valley scenic area. The study shows that keywords selected using HE-TDC method produce a model with better robustness and predictive ability.

As more and more companies have captured and analyzed huge volumes of data to improve the performance of supply chain, this paper develops a big data harvest model that uses big data as inputs to make more informed production decisions in the food supply chain. By introducing a method of Bayesian network, this paper integrates sample data and finds a cause-and-effect between data to predict market demand. Then the deduction graph model that translates products demand into processes and divides processes into tasks and assets is presented, and an example of how big data in the food supply chain can be combined with Bayesian network and deduction graph model to guide production decision. Our conclusions indicate that the analytical framework has vast potential for supporting support decision making by extracting value from big data.

Due date quotation and scheduling are important tools to match demand with production capacity in the MTO (make-to-order) environment. We consider an order scheduling problem faced by a manufacturing firm operating in an MTO environment, where the firm needs to quote a common due date for the customers, and simultaneously control the processing times of customer orders (by allocating extra resources to process the orders) so as to complete the orders before a given deadline. The objective is to minimize the total costs of earliness, tardiness, due date assignment and extra resource consumption. We show the problem is NP-hard, even if the cost weights for controlling the order processing times are identical. We identify several polynomially solvable cases of the problem, and develop a branch and bound algorithm and three Tabu search algorithms to solve the general problem. We then conduct computational experiments to evaluate the performance of the three Tabu-search algorithms and show that they are generally effective in terms of solution quality.

Infectious disease outbreaks occurred many times in the past and are more likely to happen in the future. In this paper the problem of allocating and scheduling limited multiple, identical or non-identical, resources employed in parallel, when there are several infected areas, is considered. A heuristic algorithm, based on Shih’s (1974) and Pappis and Rachaniotis’ (2010) algorithms, is proposed as the solution methodology. A numerical example implementing the proposed methodology in the context of a specific disease outbreak, namely influenza, is presented. The proposed methodology could be of significant value to those drafting contingency plans and healthcare policy agendas.

Dual hesitant fuzzy set (DHFS) is a new generalization of fuzzy set (FS) consisting of two parts (i.e., the membership hesitancy function and the non-membership hesitancy function), which confronts several different possible values indicating the epistemic degrees whether certainty or uncertainty. It encompasses fuzzy set (FS), intuitionistic fuzzy set (IFS), and hesitant fuzzy set (HFS) so that it can handle uncertain information more flexibly in the process of decision making. In this paper, we propose some new operations on dual hesitant fuzzy sets based on Einstein t-conorm and t-norm, study their properties and relationships and then give some dual hesitant fuzzy aggregation operators, which can be considered as the generalizations of some existing ones under fuzzy, intuitionistic fuzzy and hesitant fuzzy environments. Finally, a decision making algorithm under dual hesitant fuzzy environment is given based on the proposed aggregation operators and a numerical example is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method.