Product definition has been recognized as one of the deciding factors in designing a product for success in the marketplace. It involves a tedious elaboration process enacted between customers, marketers and designers. Difficulties associated with product definition for developing product specifications are observed as contextual mismatching, lack of definite structures in requirements, lack of...

Total weighted tardiness is a measure of customer satisfaction. Minimizing it represents satisfying the general requirement of on-time delivery. In this research, we consider an ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm to solve the problem of scheduling unrelated parallel machines to minimize total weighted tardiness. The problem is NP-hard in the strong sense. Computational results show that th...

With significant impact on the personalized product configuration, Interactive Genetic Algorithm is introduced to respond to customer requirement. For the user could conveniently design their favorite product and interact with the system by a graphical interface, the car console conceptual design system is established. And IGA based on hesitancy degree is proposed in this paper to reduce user’s...

We analyze closed Engset service systems with requests having some random space requirement (volume) under assumption that service time of the request depends on its volume. We also assume that each customer (or source of requests) is characterized by his own join distribution of the request volume and service time, and the total requests volume is limited. For such systems we determine the sta...

With the aim of reducing cost of electricity consumption and peak load reduction, tools requirement for better managing electricity consumption have become inevitable in recent years. Smart home has some equipment which are controllable and this ability is used for increasing comfort and minimizing electricity cost for residence. As a key component of smart home , Electric Vehicle(EV) ,increase...

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a product development methodology which is aimed at increasing customer focus in product development. Industrial research has suggested that, in variant design, the provision of customer feedback information, from fielded products similar to the product under development, could be useful to the new development. This paper investigates the use of case outcome...

We study the steady-state queue-length vector in a multi-class single-server queue with relative priorities. Upon service completion, the probability that the next customer to be served is from class k is controlled by class-dependent weights. Once a customer has started service, it is served without interruption until completion. This is a generalization of the random-order-of-service discipli...

We consider a service provider facing a continuum of delay-sensitive strategic customers. The service provider maximizes revenue by charging customers for the privilege of joining an M/G/1 queue and assigning them service priorities. Each customer has a valuation for the service, with a waiting cost per unit time that is proportional to their valuation; customer types are drawn from a continuou...

The purpose of this paper is to improve service quality of freight forwarders and explore the quality function deployment (QFD) in terms of quality management technique. Freight forwarder business is mainly characterized by lower capital investment and entry barrier comparing with a shipping line. Freight forwarders usually work closely with shipping or airline companies as intermediary agent a...

We consider a service provider facing a continuum of delay-sensitive strategic customers. The service provider maximizes revenue by charging customers for the privilege of joining an M/G/1 queue and assigning them service priorities. Each customer has a valuation for the service, with a waiting cost per unit time that is proportional to their valuation; customer types are drawn from a continuou...