Cost reduction is one of the methods applied for improving the productivity of organizations. In productivity literature, particularly in nonparametric methods, cost reduction related methods are regarded as input oriented models. This paper presents a Supply Chain Management (SCM) model in which purchasing iron ore and coke from different resources, along with production and distribution of st...

The deployment of the Virtual Home Environment (VHE) concept in 3G mobile systems in the near future will place many demands on managing a user’s personalised service environment. Key to the VHE concept is the performance of such services, resulting in a need to manage Quality of Service (QoS) demands and allocation on behalf of users. This paper examines the issues involved in managing QoS dem...

Introduction. In this paper we propose a multi-agent Selective Dissemination of Information service to improve the research community's access to digital library resources. The service also provides a new recommendation approach to satisfy researchers' specific information requirements. Method. The service model is developed by jointly applying Semantic Web technologies (used to define rich des...

Involving users in the design process is increasingly discussed as the quickest and most reliable way to capture the requirements and needs of users and consumers (Östlund, 2011; Chen & Chan, 2011; Dickinson & Dewsbury, 2006; Habell, 2001; Kohlbacher & Herstatt, 2011). In parallel, the fastest growing segment of the population in Asia and the West is older people (OECD, 2010). A question, howev...

Rhetorical figures, which are frequently applied in advertisements, can add literary flavor to the texts, gratify audiences’ aesthetic needs, and deepen their impression. In advertisement translation, it is very common that the rhetorical figures applied in the original text are replaced with new ones in the translation. This research focuses on rhetorical figures’ function of enhancing audienc...

The explosive growth in the size and use of the World Wide Web as a communication medium has been enthusiastically adopted by the mass market to provide an electronic connection between progressive businesses and millions of customers bringing to light the eBusiness sector. However, the nature of most Web structures is static and complicated, and users often lose sight of the goal of their inqu...