It is difficult to find an appropriate ordering policy for a many types of items. One of the reasons for this difficulty is that each item has a different demand trend. We will classify items by shipment trend and then decide the ordering policy for each item category. In this study, we indicate that categorizing items from their statistical characteristics leads to an ordering policy suitable for that category. We analyze the ordering policy and shipment trend and propose a new method for selecting the ordering policy which is based on finding the strongest relation between the classification of the items and the ordering policy. In our numerical experiment, from actual shipment data of about 5,000 items over the past year, we calculated many statistics that represent the trend of each item. Next, we applied the canonical correlation analysis between the evaluations of ordering policies and the various statistics. Furthermore, we applied the cluster analysis on the statistics concerning the performance of ordering policies. Finally, we separate items into several categories and show that the appropriate ordering policies are different for each category.

Individuals with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) have difficulty inferring other people's feelings from their facial expressions and/or from situational cues, and therefore, they are less able to respond with prosocial behavior. We developed a computer-based training program to help teach the connection between facial-based or situation-based emotions and prosocial behavioral responses. An 8-year-old male school child with ASD participated in the study. In this program, he was trained to identify persons in need of help and appropriate prosocial responses using novel photo-based scenarios. When he misidentified emotions from photographs of another's face, the program highlighted those parts of the face which effectively communicate emotion. To increase the likelihood that he would learn a generalized repertoire of emotional understanding, multiple examples of emotional expressions and situations were provided. When he misidentified persons expressing a need for help, or failed to identify appropriate helping behaviors, role playing was used to help him appreciate the state of mind of a person in need of help. The results of the training indicated increases in prosocial behaviors during a laboratory task that required collaborative work. His homeroom teacher, using a behavioral rating scale, reported that he now understood another's emotion or situation better than before training. These findings indicate the effects of the training are not limited to the artificial experiment situation, but also carried over to his school life.

Micro Electric Vehicles are considered as a solution for reducing $CO_2$ emissions, however, it is difficult to evaluate its impact in a local community when it has been introduced. In this study, we evaluated how to spread the Micro EV within the community, using the utility derived from a multinomial logit model, and analyze the effect on $CO_2$ emissions. The householder's utility model is based on an investigation about Kiryu citizen's activities of shopping, transportation methods, etc. Using the geographic information system, we get the distances of each householder and the stores, and estimate a multinomial logit model about the combination choices of shopping stores and transportation method.

As the global market becomes more competitive, manufacturing industries face relentless pressure caused by a growing tendency of greater varieties of products, shorter manufacturing cycles and more sophisticated customer requirements. Efficient and effective supplier selection and order allocation decisions are, therefore, important decisions for a manufacturer to ensure stable material flows in a highly competitive supply chain, in particular, when customers are willing to accept products with less desirable product attributes (e.g., color, delivery date) for economic reasons. This paper attempts to solve optimally the challenging problem of supplier selection and order allocation, taking into consideration the customer flexibility for a manufacturer producing multi-products to satisfy the customers' demands in a multi period planning horizon. A new mixed integer programming model is developed to describe the behavior of the supply chain. The objective is to maximize the manufacturer's total profit subject to various operating constraints of the supply chain. Due to the complexity and non-deterministic polynomial-time (NP)-hard nature of the problem, an improved genetic approach is proposed to solve the problem optimally. This approach differs from a canonical genetic algorithm in three aspects: a new selection method to reduce the chance of premature convergence and two problem-specific repair heuristics to guarantee feasibility of the solutions. The results of applying the proposed approach to solve a set of randomly generated test problems clearly demonstrate its excellent performance. When compared with applying the canonical genetic algorithm to locate optimal solutions, the average improvement in the solution quality amounts to as high as ten percent.

There has been a growing interest in firms' environmental sustainability activities to improve environmental practices in their supply chain. This study aims to deal with supplier evaluation of firm's green supply chain management (GSCM) criteria with incomplete information. Nevertheless, the suitable supplier is a key strategic direction in eliminating environmental impact on supply chain management for manufacturing firms. The firm's GSCM criteria and supplier selection need to be unified as a system to improve the firm's performance.

In this paper, a procedure using a genetic algorithm (GA) and a heuristic local search (HLS) is proposed for solving facility rearrangement problem (FRP). FRP is a decision problem for stopping/running of facilities and integration of stopped facilities to running facilities to maximize the production capacity of running facilities under the cost constraint. FRP is formulated as an integer programming model for maximizing the total production capacity under the constraint of the total facility operating cost. In the cases of 90 percent of cost constraint and more than 20 facilities, the previous solving method was not effective. To find effective alternatives, this solving procedure using a GA and a HLS is developed. Stopping/running of facilities are searched by GA. The shifting the production operation of stopped facilities into running facilities is searched by HLS, and this local search is executed for one individual in this GA procedure. The effectiveness of the proposed procedure using a GA and HLS is demonstrated by numerical experiment.

This paper presents a new approach to risk comparison in uncertain environment. Based on the uncertainty theory, some uncertain risk measures and risk comparison rules are proposed. Afterward the bridges are built between uncertain risk measures and risk comparison rules. Finally, several comparable examples are given.

In this paper, we study the fixed charge transportation problem with uncertain variables. The fixed charge transportation problem has two kinds of costs: direct cost and fixed charge. The direct cost is the cost associated with each source-destination pair, and the fixed charge occurs when the transportation activity takes place in the corresponding source-destination pair. The uncertain fixed charge transportation problem is modeled on the basis of uncertainty theory. According to inverse uncertainty distribution, the model can be transformed into a deterministic form. Finally, in order to solve the uncertain fixed charge transportation problem, a numerical example is given to show the application of the model and algorithm.

This paper presents a new mode of expressing a 3D assembly work for creating a 3D CG animation without judgment by human from minimal required information. In the field of manufacturing, there are favorable movements in the utilization of 3D CAD for 3D simulation to shorten lead time for product development and pre-production. But simulating an assembly work has troubles to need huge quantity of manually input data. This paper discusses what minimal necessary information for creating 3D CG animations of assembly works is, focusing on the features of assembly works. Furthermore, a new mode of expressing a 3D assembly work is proposed as "state/change transition diagrams" (SCTD), which express arbitrary scenes in an assembly work as "state" and describe a sequential assembly work with "state" and "change", and the outline of its stepwise generation algorithm is also described. SCTD can be converted to a 3D CG animation of an assembly work without judgment by human. This paper focuses on the creating 3D CG animation of assembly works which workers use only their both hands.

This study has developed a packaging criterion to minimize the level of discomfort which drivers using their vehicles for daily life purposes may experience due to ill designed vehicle packaging of mid-size sedan based on users' daily-life scenario. To find out optimal range of packaging dimension criterion, discomfort levels the test participants with different physical conditions suffer while performing various activities were analyzed. One hundred two test participants were carefully selected to represent entire Korean mid-size sedan owner-drivers. They were directed to test drive on the course designed to simulate mid-size sedan daily-usage scenario. At pre-designed locations, each of questions was asked to the test participants to be answered in the form of 10 point discomfort level score. By analyzing the test results, the optimal range for packaging dimensions was defined to be used as a packaging criterion.

This paper discusses the problem of determining locations for public health-care facilities and allocating patients to the public facilities with the objective of minimizing the total construction cost. The public health-care facilities have two types of facilities: public hospitals and health centers. The public hospital provides both hospital services and homecare services, while the health center provides only homecare service. We present an integer programming formulation for the problem, and develop two types of heuristics, based on priority rules and approximate mathematical formulation. Results of a series of computational experiments on a number of problem instances show that the algorithms give good solutions in a reasonable computation time.