One of the main objectives of the European MUSING project is to design and test software tools in order to support the activities of small and medium sized businesses. In this paper we examine financial risk management and, more specifically, the self-assessment of business plans. The role of intangible assets is discussed, and we report on how intangible assets can be collected, how they can b...

Most existing approaches to computer aided process planning aim at full automation by searching for a plan that is optimal with respect to a pre-specified objective function. Such approaches are often infeasible in practice for three reasons: (i) the search space of potential plans is very large, (ii) optimality metrics are often context sensitive and can only be elicited through user interacti...

Step-stress accelerated degradation test (SSADT) is a useful tool for assessing the lifetime distribution of highly reliable products (under a normal-use condition) when the available test items are very few. Recently, an optimal SSADT plan has been proposed in the literature which is based on the assumption that the underlying degradation path follows a Wiener process. However, the degradation...

Today’s fast‐ pace manufacturing company environment requires that manufacturing decisions be made at the time when their impact will be the most relevant for the operations. The importance of the proper information and knowledge necessary for such decision can not be overstated. This paper discusses a procedure for the selection of process plans in real‐ time, during the manufacturing executio...

The study of Qualitative Physics has concentrated on expressing qualitatively how the physical world behaves. Qualitative Physics systems accept partial descriptions of the world and output the possible changes that can occur. These systems currently assume that the world is left untouched by human or robot agents, limiting them to certain types of problem solving. For instance, a stateof-the-a...

a r t i c l e i n f o Construction planning is a fundamental and challenging process in the management and execution of construction projects. The task of developing technical plans is critical to ensuring the success of a construction project. This task of preparing a technical plan is usually undertaken manually using two separate processes: (1) plan definition and (2) verification/checking. ...

The initial physics chart check, an essential quality assurance process, verifies that the physician intent is properly expressed in the treatment plan, the treatment plan is reasonable, and the Record and Verify (RV) system properly captures the plan parameters. In this work the process was automated by characterizing the initial physics chart check as a universal set of steps, compartmentaliz...

BACKGROUND In July 1994 an alternative funding plan for clinical services (global funding instead of fee-for-service payment) was established at the Southeastern Ontario Health Sciences Centre, Kingston, Ont. This study describes the perceptions of the referring physicians and consultants of the effects of the alternative funding plan 2.5 years after it was initiated. METHODS A questionnaire ...

Feature-based process planning has been popular in academia and industry owing to its ability rigorously to integrate design and manufacturing. In spite of this benefit, feature-based process planning has been difficult to implement because it is not easy to extract even simple features from the design data automatically and efficiently. Furthermore, it is even more difficult to construct the t...