The purpose of in this paper is to study demand fluctuation of dairy product and the forecasting practices that have been used by Raipur Dugdh Sangh (Devbhog dairy industry) in Chhattisgarh. The objective is to detect how these industries have used forecasting method, what are the main factors that influence their choice and what are the main difficulties in the use of forecasting methods. Based on literature survey, weekly data collected over October 2011 to October 2012 from Raipur Dugdh Sangh (Devbhog dairy industry) in Chhattisgarh. Data were analyzed by statistics technique using the Microsoft excel software. The result shows that the demand of milk product fluctuated over the period of time. The factors that influence the choice of forecasting model are the type of product, time spent in forecasting and main difficulties are the availability of software.

Crude oil price volatility dynamics are governed by nonlinear and chaotic behaviour. This paper presents and compares the performance of four hybrid systems used to estimate and predict crude oil price volatility data. A GARCH family model is employed to estimate oil price volatility data and the Elman artificial neural network (ENN) system is used to model and predict the obtained data. Indeed, unlike previous studies found in the literature, recurrent artificial neural networks are chosen in this paper to model and predict future crude oil price volatility data estimated by GARCH family models since they are nonlinear systems capable of learning noisy and nonstationary data. In particular, four hybrid systems are tested and compared; including the GARCH-ENN, EGARCH-ENN, APARCH-ENN, and TARCH-ENN system. Using Brent crude oil price data, the obtained out-of-sample simulation results indicate that all hybrid systems provide very accurate forecasts of Brent future volatility. In addition, they show evidence of the superiority of the GARCH-ENN system over the EGARCH-ENN, TARCH-ENN, and APARCH-ENN systems. The presented four hybrid systems achieved very low forecasting errors. Thus, they could be effective in oil industry management and applications.

Hub covering problem is one of the most popular areas of research due to wide ranges of applications in different service or manufacturing industries. This paper considers a multi-objective hub covering location problem under congestion. The proposed study of this paper considers two objectives where the first one minimizes total transportation cost and the second one minimizes total waiting time for all hobs. The resulted multi-objective decision making problem is formulated as mixed integer programming. Simulated annealing is used to solve the resulted model and the performance of the proposed model is compared against two other alternative methods, particle sward optimization and NSGA-II. The results are compared in terms of four criteria including quality metric, mean ideal distance, diversification metric and spacing metric. The results indicate that the proposed model could perform better than the other two alternative methods in terms of quality metric but the results are somehow mix in terms of other three criteria.

An improper machine setting in a hard disk drive assembly process could reduce the read/write area of hard disk drives. This paper presents the methodology to increase the read/write area of hard disk drives by finding an optimal machine setting that minimizes the track zero. The Six Sigma improvement approach was applied. The design of experiment technique helped indicate the optimal levels of significant factors, which were the number of screw turn, the rotating pin height, and the cylinder force, that yield the minimum track zero. The results showed that the mean of track zero was decreased from 16,185 to 15,120 tracks and the standard deviation was decreased from 1,116 to 633 tracks resulting in the increase of the process capability index (Ppk) of the track zero performance from 0.54 to 1.52.

This study examined empirically the impact of cash management on the performance of manufacturing companies in Nigeria-A study of Cadbury Nigeria Plc. The researcher used both secondary and primary data for data collection. For clear analysis, the study centres on two broad variables; the dependent variable which is performance and the independent variable which is Cash management. Two different hypotheses were formulated and tested using descriptive statistics and correlation coefficients techniques respectively in order to establish whether there is a significant relationship between cash management, performance and liquidity. The results of the study suggested that a significant relationship exists between cash management on performance of manufacturing companies in Nigeria. It was also discovered that mere availability of cash (liquidity) without proper management does not necessarily translate into favorable performance for manufacturing companies. Hence, need for effective cash management for better performance.

This research gives an overview of an investigation into existing non-destructive testing (NDT) methods used to analyse composite materials. From the investigation and subsequent experimentation a new technique of failure identification in composite materials was developed. The new technique is a form of thermography whereby a temperature rise in a composite material during failure is detected via a thermal camera and a thermal image captured. By observing the thermal images captured of the event the location and the severity of the failure could be gained by only using the thermal images combined with a visual inspection to validate the results. By taking a thermal image and analysing the constituent red, green and blue colours that make up the image, the location of the defect could be pinpointed. This analysis method was developed using MATLAB® in order for the location of a defect to be found using only a thermal image of the composite during failure. The analysis showed that the information that yields the most accurate location of failure was the red part of the images.

Understanding mechanical properties of healthy and unhealthy cerebral vessels is a key element in the development of their science and the relevant clinical diagnosis, prevention and treatment. Thirteen healthy samples were obtained from 23 middle cerebral arteries. The changes of force and deformation until the vessel rupture were recorded using a biaxial device. Thereafter, the stress-strain curve was plotted and fitted with a hyperelastic five-parameter Mooney-Rivlin model and the model parameters (C1, C2, C3, C4, and C5) were determined according to the best fit. For statistical comparison, the samples were divided into three age and two gender groups and subjected to non-parametric statistical analyses. Comparison of obtained results for different age groups showed that there is a significant difference between the "old" group and the other two groups (middle-aged and young). There was no significant difference between male and female groups. Therefore, the results demonstrate the changes of blood vessel wall properties with aging. The results also depicted that the arterial wall is stiffer in the circumferential direction than the axial direction. Anisotropy of cerebral vessels was confirmed by all of the tests. Therefore, the significance of the biaxial tests is in the spot light in the derived data. Moreover, good fitting of data illuminated that the use of multiple-parameter constitutive models is useful for mathematical demonstration of cerebral vessel tissue behavior. In conclusion, good fitting of data illuminated that the use of multiple-parameter constitutive models is useful for mathematical demonstration of cerebral vessel tissue behavior.

Extensive brittle fracture curves are presented in the present paper for engineering components weakened by a U-shaped notch under different in-plane loading conditions from pure mode I to pure mode II. The curves were obtained in a computational manner on the basis of an appropriate brittle fracture model, namely the U-notched maximum tangential stress (UMTS) criterion, suggested and employed several times in the past by the author and his co-researchers to assess mixed mode fracture in numerous U-notched samples. Eight different notch tip radii were considered in the computations. Extensive brittle materials were also taken into consideration by using different values of the material critical distance in the calculations. By estimating theoretically the load-carrying capacity and the fracture initiation angle using solely the two basic material properties, namely the ultimate tensile strength and the plane-strain fracture toughness, engineers can design conveniently the U-notched brittle components and structures aiming to avoid abrupt fracture.

This paper investigates the instantaneous economic order quantity model by allocating the percentage of units lost due to deterioration in an on-hand inventory by framing promotional effort cost and variable ordering cost. The objective is to maximize the net profit so as to determine the order quantity, promotional effort factor, the cycle length and number of units lost due to deterioration. For any given number of replenishment cycles the existence of a unique optimal replenishment schedule are proved and mathematical model is developed to find some important characteristics for the concavity of the net profit function. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the results of proposed model, which benefit the retailer and this policy is important, especially for wasting of deteriorating items. Finally, sensitivity analyses of the optimal solution with respect to the major parameters are carried out.

In this paper, we develop an inventory model for deteriorating items with exponential time dependent demand rate. In this proposed model, shortages are allowed and partially backlogged. The model is explained with the help of numerical examples. We also show that total cost function is convex with time. Sensitivity analysis of the optimal solution with respect to various parameters of the system is given and results are discussed in details. Taylor’s series expansion is used for finding closed form optimal solution. Some results have been also obtained.