Risk assessment is an important phase of risk management. It is the stage in which risk is measured thoroughly to achieve effective management. Some factors such as probability and impact of risk have been used in the literature related to construction projects. Because in high-rise projects safety issues are paramount, this study has tried to develop a quantifying technique that takes into account three factors: probability, impact and Safety Performance Index (SPI) where the SPI is defined as the capability of an appropriate response to reduce or limit the effect of an event after its occurrence with regard to safety pertaining to a project. Regarding risk-related literatures which cover an uncertain subject, the proposed method developed in this research is based on a fuzzy logic approach. This approach entails a questionnaire in which the subjectivity and vagueness of responses is dealt with by using triangular fuzzy numbers instead of linguistic terms. This method returns a Risk Critical Point (RCP) on a zoning chart that places risks under categories: critical, critical-probability, critical-impact, and non-critical. The high-rise project in the execution phase has been taken as a case study to confirm the applicability of the proposed method. The monitoring results showed that the RCP method has the inherent ability to be extended to subsequent applications in the phases of risk response and control.

This study aims to examine the effects of industrial clustering and manufacturing flexibility on innovation capability and operational performance. This study follow a survey method to collect data pertaining to the phenomena of industrial clustering, manufacturing flexibility, innovation capability, and operational performance by utilizing a single respondent design. A total of 124 Indonesian manufacturing SMEs are taken to test the proposed theoretical model by utilizing covariance-based structural equations modeling approach. It was found that both industrial clustering and manufacturing flexibility was positively associated with operational performance and innovation capability as well. In addition, innovation capability may account for the effects of industrial clustering and manufacturing flexibility on operational performance. This implies that manufacturing SMEs have to reorient their production and operation perspectives, including agglomerate with other similar or related SMEs to develop and utilize their own resources. The SMEs also need to possess some degree of manufacturing flexibility in respond to the uncertain environment and market changes. In addition, the SMEs should put a greater emphasize to use industrial cluster and manufacturing flexibility benefits to generate innovation capability to achieve high performance.

This study discusses a contract to promote collection and recycling of used products in a green supply chain (GSC). A collection incentive contract is combined with a reward-penalty contract. The collection incentive contract for used products is made between a retailer and a manufacturer. The reward-penalty contract for recycling used products is made between a manufacturer and an external institution. A retailer pays an incentive for collecting used products from customers and delivers them to a manufacturer with a product order quantity under uncertainty in product demand. A manufacturer remanufactures products using recyclable parts with acceptable quality levels and covers a part of the retailer's incentive from the recycled parts by sharing the reward from an external institution. Product demand information is assumed as (i) the distribution is known (ii) mean and variance are known. Besides, the optimal decisions for product quantity, collection incentive of used products and lower limit of quality level for recyclable parts under decentralized integrated GSCs. The analysis numerically investigates how (1) contract for recycling activity, (ii) product demand information and (iii) quality of recyclable parts affect the optimal operation for each GSC. Supply chain coordination to shift IGSC is discussed by adopting Nash Bargaining solution.

Purchase dependence is a frequent phenomenon in retail shops and is characterized by the purchase of certain items together due to their unknown interior associations. Although this concept has been significantly examined in the marketing field (e.g. market basket analysis), it has largely remained unaddressed in operations management. Since purchase dependence is an important factor in designing inventory replenishment policies, this paper demonstrates the means of applying it to the partial backordering inventory model. Through computational analyses, this paper compares the performance of inventory models that either consider or ignore purchase dependence; the results demonstrate that inventory models that ignore purchase dependence incur more average cost per unit time than the model that considers purchase dependence, and the impact of purchase dependence can increase in significance as the item set becomes more closely correlated with regard to order demand.

This paper analyses the best batch formations for order picking throughput in narrow-aisle order picking systems. Our analytical comparison finds that a high pick density variation leads to a heavy picker blocking. Simulation experiments show that a distance-based batching algorithm reduces picker blocking by decreasing the number of aisles visited and stabilizing the variation in number of picks per aisle by packing orders tightly, and that the solution quality and mechanism for determining the batch size dictated by the sorting strategy causes varying amounts of blocking. We conclude that combining a distance-based batching method with an appropriate batch sizing strategy will reduce picker blocking and shorten travel in narrow-aisle picking systems.

Nowadays, the distribution centres aim to reduce costs by reducing inventory and timely shipment. Cross docking is a logistics strategy in which products delivered to a distribution centre by inbound trucks are directly unloaded and transferred to outbound trucks with minimum warehouse storage. Moreover, on-time delivery in a distribution network becomes very crucial especially when several distribution centres and customers are involved. Therefore, an efficient truck scheduling is needed to synchronize the delivery throughout the network in order to satisfy all stake-holders. This paper presents a mathematical model of a mixed integer programming for door assignment and truck scheduling in a multiple inbound and outbound doors cross docking problem according to Just-In-Time concept. The objective is to find the schedule of transhipment operations to simultaneously minimize the total earliness and total tardiness of trucks. Then, a multi-objective differential evolution (MODE) is proposed with an encoding scheme and four decoding strategies, called ITSH, ITDD, OTSH and OTDD, to find a Pareto frontier for the multi-door cross docking problems. The performances of MODE are evaluated using 15 generated instances. The numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is capable of finding a set of diverse and high quality non-dominated solutions.

The dynamic system approach in time series has been used in many real problems. Based on Taken's embedding theorem, we can build the predictive function where input is the time delay coordinates vector which consists of the lagged values of the observed series and output is the future values of the observed series. Although the time delay coordinates vector from multivariate time series brings more information than the one from univariate time series, it can exhibit statistical redundancy which disturbs the performance of the prediction function. We apply dimension reduction techniques to solve this problem and analyze the effect of this approach for prediction. Our experiment uses delayed Lorenz series; least squares support vector regression approximates the predictive function. The result shows that linearly preserving projection improves the prediction performance.

This paper proposes a dynamic short-term load forecasting method that utilizes a new sequential learning algorithm based on Relevance Vector Machine (RVM). The method performs general optimization of weights and hyperparameters using the current relevance vectors and newly arriving data. By doing so, the proposed algorithm is trained with the most recent data. Consequently, it extends the RVM algorithm to real-time and nonstationary learning processes. The results of application of the proposed algorithm to prediction of electrical loads indicate that its accuracy is comparable to that of existing nonparametric learning algorithms. Further, the proposed model reduces computational complexity.