Abstract

Most hi-tech industries owe at least some of their success to being in the right place at the right time. This is especially true for the aircraft parts manufacturer approval (PMA) industry. A PMA is both a design approval and a production approval. It is issued for the production of modification or replacement parts for aircraft, which includes materials, parts, processes, and appliances. In the current economic climate, airlines throughout the world are looking for partners with financial stability. The reason is simple, they want partners that will continue to support them with extra savings opportunities in the short and long-term future. As more and more PMA companies are advertising through the Internet, a supplier performance measurement model applying to each of these networked organizations will facilitate the airline selection of long-term PMA partners. In this chapter, the Mahalanobis Taguchi System (MTS) approach, a multivariate data based selection system, will be used to identify the promising PMA suppliers. Suppliers who are known to be promising are called promising groups and their performance data sets are used to create a reference metric for the promising PMA supplier population. In view of the synergetic performance of neural network and data mining technologies, it is expected that this MTS-based PMA partner selection method, implementing through a neural data mining system (NDMS) will provide a practical solution in the identification of the promising PMA suppliers. Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel traffic engineering framework able to automatically provide near-optimal OSPF routing configurations for QoS constrained scenarios. Within this purpose, this work defines a mathematical model able to measure the QoS compliance in a class-based networking domain. Based on such model, the NP-hard optimization problem of OSPF weight setting is faced resorting to Evolutionary Algorithms. The presented results show that, independently of other QoS aware mechanisms that might be in place, the proposed framework is able to improve the QoS level of a given domain only taking into account the direct influence of the routing component of the network. The devised optimization tool is able to optimize OSPF weight configurations in scenarios either considering a single level of link weights or using multiple levels of weights (one for each class) in multi-topology routing scenarios. Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Abstract

The provision of services and the production of wares and services nowadays often require the cooperation of partners from different sectors. These cooperations can comprise public and private organizations, companies, universities, NGOs, and other groupings as well as individuals. The cooperative collaboration is esteemed as a core element of democratic social systems within a free market economy (Kirsch, 1996; Pongsiri, 2001). As one relevant method of organizing such collaborations, public private networks (PPN) extend the concept of public private partnerships (PPP) by adding the idea of networking and its core elements. From a scientific point of view as well as from the business perspective there is a shortcoming in the systematic processing of ideas, motivations, and forms as well as implications for internal and external participants of PPPs/PPNs. In the following, partnerships between partners from public and private business environments will be discussed. (Pongsiri, 2001) In particular, PPPs and PPNs in the field of academic education will be portrayed, since the cooperation in knowledge intensive areas is seen as an important issue. (Inkpen, 1996; Seufert, von Krogh, & Back, 1999) In the following the concepts of PPPs and PPNs will be explained. This will be done by an extensive literature review. The aim is to provide the required definitions and to discuss the incorporated views of others. Document type: Part of book or chapter of book