Automated fault detection and diagnostic (FDD) systems have the potential to reduce equipment downtime, service costs, and utility costs. However, very few commercial products exist and the ones that do exist are very specialized. This may be surprising to some, considering that FDD is very well developed for other applications such as for nuclear power plants, aircraft, chemical process plants...

There has been an increasing emphasis on health care efficiency and costs and on improving quality in health care settings such as hospitals or clinics. However, there has not been sufficient work on methods of improving access and customer service times in health care settings. The study develops a framework for improving access and customer service time for health care settings. In the framew...

Improving the product reliability is the main concern in both manufacturing and service processes which is obtained by monitoring the reliability-related quality characteristics. Nowadays, products or services are the result of processes with dependent stages referred to as multistage processes. In these processes, the quality characteristic in each stage is affected by the quality characterist...

the exhaustion doctrine refers to one of the limits of intellectual property rights. once a product protected of ip right has been marketed either by the ip right owner or by others whit her consent, the ip right owner cannot prohibit the further commercialization (like the resale) of that product. thus , a critical element in determining that the owner of an ip right has exhausted her/his righ...