BACKGROUND The extent of lung involvement visualized by high-resolution computed tomography (HRCT) is a predictor of decline in forced vital capacity (FVC) in scleroderma-interstitial lung disease. Our objective was to evaluate the performance of three different HRCT-defined staging systems in the Scleroderma Lung Study I (SLS I) over a 1-year period. METHODS We assessed two visual semiquanti...

This paper is concerned with a stochastic linear quadratic (LQ) control problem in the infinite time horizon, with indefinite state and control weighting matrices in the cost function. It is shown that the solvability of this problem is equivalent to the existence of a so-called static stabilizing solution to a generalized algebraic Riccati equation. Moreover, another algebraic Riccati equation...

This report examines a problem faced by Axent Audio Products Limited, a New Zealand speaker manufacturer, in forming stereo speaker pairs from a batch of similar speakers in such a way that the sound quality of the pairs is maximised. The applications of the maximum cardinality algorithm and sum matching algorithm to this problem are discussed in detail. A new heuristic is developed for matchin...

quality function development (qfd) is a planning tools used to fulfill customer expectation and qfd is a systematic process to translating customer requirement (whats) into technical description (hows). qfd aims to maximize customer satisfactions related to enterprise satisfaction. the inherent fuzziness of relationships in qfd modeling justifies the use of fuzzy regression for estimating the r...

Huang presented a trade-off problem, taking both product quality and process adjustment cost into account, to determine the optimum parameters (i.e., the process mean and process variance) of the input characteristic in the transformation model. In Huang’s transformation model, the input characteristic, x, is assumed to be normally distributed and the output characteristic, y, is nominal-the-be...

Quality loss functions have found widespread application in production engineering and today are an indispensable part of quality management. However, they share an obstacle with most other quality concepts concerning their limited communicability to top management. In the allocation of financial resources, a company’s executive board is commonly interested in the profit implications of competi...

1 32.3 Taguchi’s Robust Design Method Since 1960, Taguchi methods have been used for improving the quality of Japanese products with great success. During the 1980’s, many companies finally realized that the old methods for ensuring quality were not competitive with the Japanese methods. The old methods for quality assurance relied heavily upon inspecting products as they rolled off the product...

BACKGROUND Understanding the quality loss implications of short staffing is essential in maintaining service quality on a limited budget. OBJECTIVES For elaborate financial control on staffing decisions, it is necessary to quantify the cost of the incidental quality loss that a given workload and staffing level entail. DESIGN We develop a quantitative methodology that uses a quality loss fu...

The objective function based on mesh quality metric has a major impact on smoothing unstructured tetrahedral meshes. The ability of seven mesh quality metrics to distinguish four kinds of poor-quality elements and their effects on the change of element shape are analyzed in detail. Then, four better mesh quality metrics are chosen to construct objective functions. In addition, the rational dete...