SUMMARY: The literature on risk perceptions and occupational accidents is replete with causal descriptions which only show the relationship between the two variables. However, there is a " black box " which needs to be illuminated as to the meditational process that links the two variables. To address this gap in the literature, this paper surveys both the theoretical (theories of risk percepti...

Continuous improvement initiatives have proliferated among manufacturing and services organizations. In this context, knowledge has been claimed to play a key role, as a significant antecedent of an organization’s ability to continuously improve its performance. At the same time, attempts to implement knowledge management initiatives prove fruitless if employees a...

Frameworks are an important form of reuse that can help to significantly decrease the time and cost of application development. Although widely known, there are still some difficulties associated with framework reuse, which are critical to its success. In this paper, we focus on the issues regarding the framework reuse process, and more specifically, on the framework architecture description. T...

Globally Linearizing Control (GLC) is a control algorithm capable of using nonlinear process model directly. In GLC, mostly, first-principles models derived from dynamic mass, energy and momentum balances are used. When the process is not perfectly known, the unknown parts of the first principles model should be represented by black-box models, e.g. by neural networks. This paper is devoted to ...

Nowadays enterprises have played an important role in China’s economic development and increasingly become the main force of China’s growing research and innovation activities. Different from some related work on developing countries’ innovation policy and strategy, the evolutionary model of secondary innovation, based on Chinese enterprises’ innovation practice, highlights the significant role...

Modularity is a key requirement for collaborative ontology engineering and for distributed ontology reuse on the Web. Modern ontology languages, such as OWL, are logic-based, and thus a useful notion of modularity needs to take the semantics of ontologies and their implications into account. We propose a logic-based notion of modularity that allows the modeler to specify the external signature ...

The conventional Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model considers Decision Making Units (DMUs) as a black box, meaning that these models do not consider the connection and the inner structures of DMUs. Moreover, these models consider that the activities of DMUs in each time are independent of other times, but in the real world, the inner structures of DMUs are complicated, and the activities of ...

Modern data systems comprise of heterogeneous and distributed components, making them difficult to manage piece-wise, let alone as a whole. Furthermore, the scale, complexity, and growth rate of these systems render any heuristic and rule-based system management approaches insufficient. In response to these challenges, statistics-based techniques for building gray or black box models of system ...

The simulation modeling community consists of several frameworks or approaches that have been developed at different times to handle different problems, and persist in a state of relatively limited interaction. Various forms of hybrid modeling, combining aspects of two or more modeling approaches, have been proposed and used, but these still represent a relatively small part of the world of sim...