Researchers have typically searched for and postulated a universalistic form of the internationalization-performance relationship. In this study, we evaluate the validity of this ‘grande theory’ logic by investigating 80 Swiss multinational companies in manufacturing industries over the 5-year period 1998-2002. Our findings suggest that the form of the internationalization-performance relations...

Corporate responsibility marks a historical turnaround in corporate culture because it attributes to it a role in which many costs externalised by the company to society and to the planet, but in fact produced directly or indirectly by it. A correct cultural approach and greater familiarity, particularly with the issues of manufacturing processes and products that have no impact on the environm...

We demonstrate the use of an unsupervised learning technique called genetic algorithms to discover the association between a concept and its key attributes in concept characterization. The resulting conceptattribute associations are important domain concepts for knowledge engineers to structure interviews with the experts or to prepare representative data for inductive inference. Examples based...

Cognition in technical systems, as the ability to autonomously generate decisions, enables the systems to cope with heavily changing situations. But as its future behavior is not known a-priori, cognition adds new attributes to safety issues. The paper presents the application of an architecture for cognitive safety control to a manufacturing scenario. The architecture consists of an operationa...

It is inadequate to just assure the functional requirements. Quality of service (QoS) must also be satisfied. An important challenge for developing efficient Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is to maintain the QoS attributes because of compositional and dynamical environment of SOA. It is significant to scrutinize how quality attributes are supported by SOA. However, implementation of SOA pr...

An Object-Oriented Timed Petri-net (OOTPN) is proposed for modeling agile manufacturing cell (AMC). It consists of four phases: (1) grouping manufacturing resources into classes; (2) constructing general OOTPN block for each manufacturing resource class; (3) defining joint transitions and suitable control decision rules; (4) generating complete OOTPN model for agile manufacturing cell. This OOT...

Cost and product quality are significant attributes in manufacturing processes, such as multistation assembly. We use multiobjective optimization for integrated tolerance allocation and fixture layout design to address their interaction and to quantify tradeoffs among cost, product quality, and assembly process robustness. Design decisions relate to product tolerances, assembly process toleranc...

The ACTION organization design and analysis system is a research and development effort designed to assist business re-engineering and organizational or technology change by helping to improve the integration of technology, organizations, and people ("TOP-integration") in manufacturing enterprises. ACTION uses a multi-level constraintbased representation of organizational features including bus...

The objective measurement of hand and related attributes offabrics which determine their value to the consumer, has been well recognized by the manufacturing industries and consumers. This paper describes in brief the concept of fabric objective measurement and its potential in today's advanced, quality conscious and competitive market. The measurement principle and the various profitable appli...

A new method combining aqueous solution printing with UV Laser crystallization (UVLC) and post annealing is developed to deposit highly transparent and conductive Aluminum doped Zinc Oxide (AZO) films. This technique is able to rapidly produce large area AZO films with better structural and optoelectronic properties than most high vacuum deposition, suggesting a potential large-scale manufactur...