According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them.

Out of the Crisis

Differential evolution (DE) is arguably one of the most powerful stochastic real-parameter optimization algorithms in current use. DE operates through similar computational steps as employed by a standard evolutionary algorithm (EA). However, unlike traditional EAs, the DE-variants perturb the current-generation population members with the scaled differences of randomly selected and distinct population members. Therefore, no separate probability distribution has to be used for generating the offspring. Since its inception in 1995, DE has drawn the attention of many researchers all over the world resulting in a lot of variants of the basic algorithm with improved performance. This paper presents a detailed review of the basic concepts of DE and a survey of its major variants, its application to multiobjective, constrained, large scale, and uncertain optimization problems, and the theoretical studies conducted on DE so far. Also, it provides an overview of the significant engineering applications that have benefited from the powerful nature of DE.

/pdf/differential-evolution-a-survey-of-the-state-of-the-art-3lz840pz2t.pdf

Differential Evolution: A Survey of the State-of-the-Art

How to ... be a reflective practitioner.

(1998). Human cognitive abilities: A survey of factor analytic studies. Gifted and Talented International: Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 97-98.

Human cognitive abilities: A survey of factor analytic studies

Organizational learning II: Theory, method and practice

https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstream/1810/286953/3/Crilly_et_el_%282004%29_Seeing_things_%5bDesign_Studies%5d.pdf

Seeing things: consumer response to the visual domain in product design

In redesign and design for customization, products are changed. During this process a change to one part of the product will, in most cases, result in changes to other parts. The prediction of such change provides a significant challenge in the management of redesign and customization of complex products where many change propagation paths may be possible. This paper reports on an analysis of change behavior based on a case study in Westland Helicopters of rotorcraft design; the development of mathematical models to predict the risk of change propagation in terms of likelihood and impact of change; and the development of a prototype computer support tool to calculate such information for a specific product. With knowledge of likely change propagation paths and their impact on the delivery of the product, design effort can be directed towards avoiding change to "expensive" sub-systems and, where possible, allowing change where it is easier to implement while still achieving the overall changes required.

Predicting change propagation in complex design

Based on a detailed case study on change and customisation to existing products in the aerospace industry, this paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the problems and processes associated with product change. It looks at the potential causes and effects of changes, and analyses the formal and informal processes that are used to handle change. Change processes become problematic when change to one system propagates to other systems, because the tolerance margins of individual parameters are exceeded. The paper concludes with suggestions for handling change.

Change and customisation in complex engineering domains

This paper introduces a new technique called species conservation for evolving parallel subpopulations. The technique is based on the concept of dividing the population into several species according to their similarity. Each of these species is built around a dominating individual called the species seed. Species seeds found in the current generation are saved (conserved) by moving them into the next generation. Our technique has proved to be very effective in finding multiple solutions of multimodal optimization problems. We demonstrate this by applying it to a set of test problems, including some problems known to be deceptive to genetic algorithms.

/pdf/a-species-conserving-genetic-algorithm-for-multimodal-4obbw3atoz.pdf

A species conserving genetic algorithm for multimodal function optimization

Diagrams are effective instruments of thought and a valuable tool in conveying those thoughts to others. As such, they can be usefully employed as representations of a research domain and act as st...

P. John Clarkson

Papers

Seeing things: consumer response to the visual domain in product design

Predicting change propagation in complex design

Change and customisation in complex engineering domains

A species conserving genetic algorithm for multimodal function optimization

Graphic elicitation: using research diagrams as interview stimuli