Awanis Romli

Integrated eco-design decision-making for sustainable product development

This paper presents an integrated eco-design decision-making (IEDM) methodology that is formed using three stages: life cycle assessment, an eco-design process (Eco-Process) model and an enhanced eco-design quality function deployment process. All product sustainability considerations are conducted within a special eco-design house of quality. This brings together the analysis of factors relating to manufacturing processes, product usage and end-of-life strategy. The concentration of environmental considerations in one place insures that product sustainability is central to any design development and that the implications of change are fully identified and justified. The IEDM methodology utilises of a set of Eco-Process parameters and their associated relationships to allow users with complementary knowledge to enter and access information in a timely and controlled manner. They are then able to contribute their expertise to support decisions with the aim of providing more sustainable products. An application of the approach is presented in the context of a case study considering the redesign of a single-use medical forceps. The materials and production methods used are investigated with a view to quantifying their environmental impact. The resulting IEDM methodology can be seen to be widely and easily applicable.

Conceptual modeling for simulation: Steaming frozen food processing in vending machine

Nowadays, frozen foods are well-known among Malaysia society. This is due to the modern lifestyles which require short food preparing times without neglecting the food nutritious. In supporting this requirement, the manipulation of vending machine is identified as a tool to promote modern and healthy living style, besides to simplify the cooking process. This paper describes the effort on designing conceptual model for a proposed steaming food vending machine simulator. Conceptual modelling is the most crucial part in developing simulation model; since in this part, the developer need to identify the variables; recognize the desired simulation flows and transform the deliverables into visualized form which can be understood by all parties related to the project. In this study, the process of three main states (user selection state, freezer state and steaming state) has been modelled using process approach, which emphasized on the process flow or control logic to construct the model for steamed buns vending machine application.

A conceptual model for sustainable product design

This paper proposes a conceptual model to support sustainable product design. The approach develops an integrated multimodal decision making model which is to be introduced early in the design process, as the basis for the integration of the life cycle assessment into an Eco-design model. The model, which is based upon an adapted “House of Quality” analysis, supports designers when assessing the environmental impact of the product design. The resulting Eco-design model evaluates the sustainability of the designed product using criteria that consider the impact of manufacturing process, product usage and end-of-life (EoL) disposal strategy. This approach is demonstrated using a case study that considers the design of a set of crocodile medical forceps, in which the redesign of a new forceps is undertaken by considering all the parameters in the Eco-design model.

Eco-design case-based reasoning tool: The integration of ecological quality function deployment and case-based reasoning methods for supporting sustainable product design

Several methods and tools have been developed to facilitate sustainable product design, but they lack critical application of the ecological design (eco-design) process and economic costing, particularly during the conceptual design phase. This research study overcomes these deficiencies by integrating eco-design approaches across all phases of the product life cycle. It proposes an eco-design case-based reasoning tool that is integrated with the recently developed ecological quality function deployment method, which supports sustainable product design. The eco-design case-based reasoning tool is an intuitive decision-support tool that complements the ecological quality function deployment method and proposes solutions related to customers’ requirements and the environmental and economic impacts of the product. The ecological quality function deployment method ensures that customers’ needs are considered within the context of product sustainability. The novelty of this article is in the development of the eco-design case-based reasoning tool which is based on the premise that if experiences from the ecological quality function deployment process can be captured in some useful form, designers can refer to and learn from them. This approach helps industrial decision-makers propose solutions by reusing solutions from similar cases and from their past experiences. The novelty is in the way the cases are structured and new cases are generated, using life-cycle assessments, cost estimations, and information about related manufacturing processes and means of transportation. This article demonstrates the applicability of the proposed approach through an industrial case study.

Green information technology system practice for sustainable collaborative enterprise: A structural literature review

Green information technology and information system (ITIS) refer to sustainable practices that seek to prevent environmental pollution and attain sustainable development in collaborative enterprise (CE). By implementing green ITIS practices, collaborative enterprise can reduce the amount of energy used; decrease high cost incurred in their business process and also care for the long time sustainability of the environment and humanity. Therefore, the purpose of this research paper is to a carryout a structural literature review approach to review existing techniques applied to achieve sustainability and standards deployed to assist practitioners in implementing and diffusing green practices in CE. Finding from this review indicates that previously applied techniques and standards lacks the capability to support IT practitioners in making green decisions on how to implement and adopt sustainable practice in collaborative enterprise.

Additive Tooling for Tube Hydroforming

The use of tube hydroforming in manufacturing is increasing in popularity, particularly in automotive applications where it offers numerous cost and well-recognized performance advantages over conventional stamping and welding processes. In this paper, the use of indirect Additive Tooling is explored in the creation of tool inserts to be used in the production of exhaust manifolds for the automotive industry. The principal focus of this research concerns the identification of operational issues arising from the exploitation of Additive Tooling, together with the suggestion of a number of techniques and solutions which may be applied to mitigate the problems inherent in the rapid manufacture of tube hydroforming tools.

An expert system for stress management

An Expert System for Stress Management (ESSM) is a system that mimics the role played by a psychologist or counselor of stress expert to provide a virtual consultancy. Counselor always uses these systems manually to determine level of stress and personality interest of individual. However, ESSM is aimed to change these two very different manual systems into computerized one, by extracting data from a career test and relates them together with stress test to determine and recommend best stress management for particular individual based on their activity interest. ESSM is applied through psychometric method where user is prompted to complete two set of questionnaire. ESSM combines stress test and personality test that is extracted from Hollands Self Directed Search Model (RIASEC), which is used as Career Test by career counselor/consultant. Extraction from Hollands Model is aimed to determine humans behavior and interests which existing websites only use stress test to determine stress disorder, and randomly recommend solutions for user, no matter what type of personality they are. ESSM contains recommendation based on interest activity by combining conclusion from both stress and personality test. Personality based on interest is extracted from RIASEC. The prototype of this system is rule-based expert system technique. The success of implementation and development of this project is expected to help in reducing time consumed and human power in determining best recommendation and solution for stress management.

Review on the Effect of Student Learning Outcome and Teaching Technology in Omani's Higher Education Institution's Academic Accreditation Process

Academic accreditation standards are defined clearly in Higher Educational Institutions (HEI) plans, management, and delivering results of assessment student with learning outcomes. In recent years, all universities and institutions work hard to increase their approval privileges, skills, achievements through getting the accreditation from HEI. The aim of this integrative review was to examine the current evidence on the impact of technology learning on student learning and academic performance and analysis the main factors of an institution accreditation process. The authors searched several electronic databases for relevant articles, with different learning techniques. The main contribution of this study lies in showing the general criterias of accreditation standards that focus on essential technology enhanced learning, student learning outcomes, and faculty technology experience on academic performance of universities. The result from this paper is showing the relations between what have been done and presented before with methods, factors, suggestions to identify these activities.

Case Based Reasoning for Green Information Systems Infusion and Assimilation among IT Professionals in University Campuses

Information Technology (IT) usage in university campuses consume enormous amount of power and incur other costs in cooling and related operations. Currently, universities are infusing environmental friendly initiatives in their campus. However, IT professionals in most universities are still not sure how to infuse and assimilate environmental friendly practices. Hence, Green Information Systems (IS) is suggested as the utilization of technologies and systems for a Greener and more sustainable planet. Accordingly, this study carried out a review on existing Green IS practices and further proposes a decision support framework based on Case Based Reasoning (CBR) technique. The proposed framework utilizes CBR to support the decision making of IT professionals in infusing and assimilating Green IS within university campuses. Findings from this study show how the framework utilizes CBR to support IT professionals in assimilating Green IS lifecycle and infusing Green IS determinants. Furthermore, findings from this study show how IT professionals can Green their university campuses. Moreover, this research study would also be of interest to data and knowledge management community as well as environmental scientists and sustainability researchers.

An improved memory-based collaborative filtering method based on the TOPSIS technique

This paper describes an approach for improving the accuracy of memory-based collaborative filtering, based on the technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) method. Recommender systems are used to filter the huge amount of data available online based on user-defined preferences. Collaborative filtering (CF) is a commonly used recommendation approach that generates recommendations based on correlations among user preferences. Although several enhancements have increased the accuracy of memory-based CF through the development of improved similarity measures for finding successful neighbors, there has been less investigation into prediction score methods, in which rating/preference scores are assigned to items that have not yet been selected by a user. A TOPSIS solution for evaluating multiple alternatives based on more than one criterion is proposed as an alternative to prediction score methods for evaluating and ranking items based on the results from similar users. The recommendation accuracy of the proposed TOPSIS technique is evaluated by applying it to various common CF baseline methods, which are then used to analyze the MovieLens 100K and 1M benchmark datasets. The results show that CF based on the TOPSIS method is more accurate than baseline CF methods across a number of common evaluation metrics.