Silk-based medical products have a long history of use as a material for surgical sutures because of their desirable mechanical properties. However, silk fibroin fabric has been reported to be haemolytic when in direct contact with blood. The layer-by-layer self-assembly technique provides a method for surface modification to improve the biocompatibility of silk fibroin fabrics. Regenerated sil...

The classical lot, sizing model deals with economic lot sizing for production in a deterministic framework. In real life, various forms of uncertainty affect the production. These include machine breakdown, quality variations, and so on. This paper develops a model with unreliable production systems and under alternative repair option strategies. @ 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved...

This paper presents an experimental study of the compression behavior of a typical warp-knitted spacer fabric which is specially developed as a cushioning material for human body protection. The fabric has a highly heterogeneous and discontinuous structure and exhibits a complicated compression behavior. Different test boundary conditions and sample sizes were first adopted to conduct compressi...

Often lot sizing and scheduling models have neglected the consideration of influence of product life cycles (PLCs). But, accordingly as desirable in a firm’s production strategy, decisions of lot sizing scheduling may have to respond to the stage changes in a product’s life cycle. In this paper, we propose an extension of the lot sizing scheduling, the multi-item, multi-level product-structure...

This paper presents an adaptive image segmentation method based on a new Regional Growing Pulse Coupled Neural Network (PCNN) model for detecting fabric defects. In this method, the pixels of analyzed image are mapped on the neurons in a pulse coupled neural network. Improved PCNN model and regional growing theory are combined in the light of the requirements for fabric defect detection. And th...

Sensory Fabric is a technology that uses electrically conductive textiles to fabricate switches and sensors. In this article we examine how a number of broad device types, or form factors, can be reconfigured or made more ubiquitous by replacing their traditional interface hardware with Sensory Fabric. The implications of using a fabric solution are explored for handheld and personal devices, e...

Looking at the distribution of the costs of IT, the largest part of the budget is allocated to maintenance and enhancement projects. New development comprises between 30 to 50% of IT costs. Functional size measurement methods are mostly used for new development only. With some extensions to common size measurement methods like Function Point Analysis [1] and COSMIC Full Function Point [2] one c...

Estimating the size of OO software is the main issue today in project planning and development. Accurate estimation of size may lead to precise prediction of effort during the process of system development. Predictive Object Point POPs are a metric designed specifically for estimating the size of object oriented software. But there is no direct relation between POP and Software size. In this pa...

This paper considers the e ect of stochasticity on the quality of convergence of genetic algorithms (GAs). In many problems, the variance of building-block tness or so-called collateral noise is the major source of variance, and a population-sizing equation is derived to ensure that average signalto-collateral-noise ratios are favorable to the discrimination of the best building blocks required...