Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar

About: Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar is a education organization based out in Bhubaneswar, India. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Large Hadron Collider & Computer science. The organization has 1185 authors who have published 3132 publications receiving 48832 citations.

Prioritizing barriers in reverse logistics of E-commerce supply chain using fuzzy-analytic hierarchy process

Abstract: Several factors like returns, undelivered and damaged goods, exchange, and environmental concern make reverse logistics (RL) inevitable in an E-commerce supply chain. In spite of understanding the importance of RL in current business scenario, most of the companies concentrate on forward logistics, while reverse flow from customer to upstream business is not receiving much interest. Considering this less focused aspect of reverse logistics, the objective of this research is to identify and propose a model to rank the inhibiting variables i.e. the barriers so the logistician can solve them as per the priority. The extensive literature survey and experts’ opinion helped in identifying 16 barriers for the study. But the availability of a number of barriers makes evaluating and selecting the most important RL barrier a challenging task and thus it can be dealt with as a multi-criteria decision-making problem. In this paper, a methodology based on analytic hierarchy process has been used to prioritize the barriers of RL. Findings of this paper show that the lack of investment in reverse logistics, lack of understanding about best practices and uncertain return and demand are the three topmost barriers for RL of E-commerce companies.

Tapered Fiber Attached Nitrile Diaphragm-Based Acoustic Sensor

Abstract: We present a low-cost acoustic sensor using tapered fiber structure attached to a nitrile polymer-based diaphragm. The tapered fiber is attached in the line of symmetry of a circular diaphragm of optimized thickness and diameter. The applied acoustic pressure deforms the diaphragm, which bends the tapered fiber attached with it. The bending induced change in transmission power is utilized to detect the applied acoustic pressure. The acoustic sensitivity and minimum detectable pressure at 2500 Hz are 36 mV/kPa and 21.11 Pa/√Hz, respectively, for the sensor setup with tapered fiber waist diameter of 18.37 μ m. The sensor shows a reasonably flat response from 250 to 2500 Hz. The performance parameters of the sensor, such as sensitivity, minimum detectable pressure, and flat response range can be easily tailored by changing the dimensions of diaphragm and tapered fiber.