Ming Chuan University

About: Ming Chuan University is a education organization based out in Taoyuan District, Taiwan. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Tourism & Service quality. The organization has 2206 authors who have published 3205 publications receiving 52602 citations. The organization is also known as: MCU.

c-Bottlenecks in serial production lines: Identification andapplication

Abstract: The bottleneck of a production line is a machine that impedes the system performance in the strongest manner. In production lines with the so-called Markovian model of machine reliability, bottlenecks with respect to the downtime, uptime, and the cycle time of the machines can be introduced. The two former have been addressed in recent publications [1] and [2]. The latter is investigated in this paper. Specifically, using a novel aggregation procedure for performance analysis of production lines with Markovian machines having different cycle time, we develop a method for c-bottleneck identification and apply it in a case study to a camshaft production line at an automotive engine plant.

Breaking through barriers to TQM effectiveness: Lack of commitment of upper-level management

Abstract: This paper examines the importance of senior management commitment to successful implementation of TQM initiatives. Subsumed under the general heading of senior management commitment will be the issues of employee commitment and, in consequence, the TQM success. The interrelationship between CEO commitment, employee commitment and effectiveness of TQM programmes is usually a very close and linear one, not least because, if a TQM organization wishes to improve and achieve success it has no choice but to be committed fully from top to shop floor. As commitment of senior management and employees are not substitutable, it is difficult to study either issue in isolation. The paper opens with an attempt to offer a clear explanation of TQM practices, and goes on from this to outline the importance of a highly-committed CEO and his or her senior management team as a test of whether an organization considers TQM initiatives as a managerial panacea towards competitive advantage or just another management f...

An ant colony optimization algorithm for the minimum weight vertex cover problem

Abstract: Given an undirected graph and a weighting function defined on the vertex set, the minimum weight vertex cover problem is to find a vertex subset whose total weight is minimum subject to the premise that the selected vertices cover all edges in the graph. In this paper, we introduce a meta-heuristic based upon the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) approach, to find approximate solutions to the minimum weight vertex cover problem. In the literature, the ACO approach has been successfully applied to several well-known combinatorial optimization problems whose solutions might be in the form of paths on the associated graphs. A solution to the minimum weight vertex cover problem however needs not to constitute a path. The ACO algorithm proposed in this paper incorporates several new features so as to select vertices out of the vertex set whereas the total weight can be minimized as much as possible. Computational experiments are designed and conducted to study the performance of our proposed approach. Numerical results evince that the ACO algorithm demonstrates significant effectiveness and robustness in solving the minimum weight vertex cover problem.