The online product review has been advocated as an important determinant of a consumer’s purchase decision. Although prior research has been instrumental in articulating the benefits of the online product review, there remains a dearth of investigation on what kind of product review will be perceived to be helpful to a consumer. Through two sequential experiments, we investigate the endogenous ...

Concrete Vibration can take some time ans sometimes it just seems to take longer than it should to pour and consolidate a precast product, such as concrete pipe or a manhole section. Frustrated by sluggish procedures, The Cretex Companies’ Rapid City, South Dakota, plant determined to improve on the half hour it took to pour zeroslump concrete, consolidate it, and get the top ring in place on t...

Tire derived aggregate (TDA) has been proposed as a possible lightweight replacement for mineral aggregate in concrete. The role played by the amount of TDA replacing coarse aggregate as well as different treatment and additives in concrete on its properties is examined. Conventional concrete (without TDA) and concrete containing TDA are compared by examining their compressive strength based on...

–Flyash based geopolymer concrete is introduced in 1979 by Davidovits to reduce the use of OPC in concrete. Geopolymer is an inorganic alumino-hydroxide polymer synthesized form predominantly silicon and aluminum materials of geological origin and by product materials such as flyash (with low calcium). In this paper an attempt is made to study strength properties of geopolymer concrete using lo...

This article reviews a method for generating a product model from user data and introduces 12 design patterns for resolving conflicts that may occur in the integration and normalization process. The generating method and design patterns were evaluated during a project to integrate the product models collected from three different precast concrete companies in the United States, testing the new ...

We present a comparative study of four product operators on weighted languages: (i) the convolution, (ii) the shuffle, (iii) the infiltration, and (iv) the Hadamard product. Exploiting the fact that the set of weighted languages is a final coalgebra, we use coinduction to prove that a classical operator from difference calculus in mathematics: the Newton transform, generalises (from infinite se...

In order to fulfil sets of similar user requirements within a specific application domain, one typically uses software product line engineering. In this paper, we investigate the nature of implementations of concerns, specific to software product line engineering. Based on these investigations, we present an approach that allows a modular specification and composition of concerns, with the purp...

The study of variability in software development has become increasingly important in recent years. A common mechanism to represent the variability in a product line is by means of feature models. However, the relationship between these models and UML design models is not straightforward. UML statecharts are extended introducing variability in their main components, so that the behavior of prod...

We outline a new approach to process modeling in support of development of product data models. It is based on the definition of process models with far greater detail than have been used previously, and on the automated mapping of these models to product model schemas. A new process-modeling tool was developed for this purpose along with applications for structuring and analyzing the data coll...