Tzong Ru Lee

A study of vehicle routing problems with load‐balancing

In a modern business environment, employees are a key resource to a company. Hence, the competitiveness of a company depends largely on its ability to treat employees fairly. Fairness can be attained by using the load‐balancing methodology. Develops an integer programming model for vehicle routing problems. There are two objectives, first, to minimize the total distance, and second, to balance the workload among employees as much as possible. We also develop a heuristic algorithm to solve the problems. The findings show that the proposed heuristic algorithm performs well to our 11 test cases.

Using FAHP to determine the criteria for partner's selection within a green supply chain

Purpose – The criteria selection of green suppliers is an interesting and practical research topic. With the development and consciousness of environmental management, this issue has received a significant consideration from academics, researchers and businessmen. The purpose of this paper is to study what factors are considered to be the most important when choosing partners/suppliers in a green supply chain, with reference to the Taiwanese hand tool industry, as this industry plays a major role in the Taiwanese economy.Design/methodology/approach – Inheriting from previous researches, the literature about green supplier selection that appeared in international journals from 1997 to 2009 was reviewed. Then, the integrating fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP) approach is proposed to select the most important criteria for green supplier selection in the Taiwanese hand tool industry.Findings – Ultimately, a list of criteria, along with their priority levels, is presented, not only to support Taiwanese...

A User Study on the Adoption of Location Based Services

Based on the end user’s exact location, providing useful information and location based services (LBS) through wireless pervasive devices at right place and right time could be beneficial to both businesses and their customers. However, the adoption rates of these location-aware pervasive services from the consumption side are still low, implying that there might be some reasons keeping the potential users away from using LBS. This research attempted to find out such reasons by investigating what factors would negatively influence users’ adoption of LBS. A hybrid approach, integrating a qualitative method, ZMET, with the quantitative data analysis of the samples collected from a subsequent questionnaire survey, was designed and implemented in this study to elicit and validate potential LBS users’ in-depth feelings. Our study results show that cost, worry of security & privacy Issues, worry of quality of LBS information, and lack of cognition of LBS are the barriers impeding mobile service users’ adoption of LBS applications. Our findings can be referenced by service providers for the purpose of the design and development of successful business applications to catch the revolutionary opportunity and benefit of LBS.

Model selection with considering the CO2 emission alone the global supply chain

This study formulates a model for analyzing eco-environmental impact on global supply chain network. The multi-criteria optimization model is applied to seek optimal solutions that not only can achieve predetermined objectives, but also can satisfy constraints for multi-product problems. The overall optimization is achieved using mathematical programming for modeling the supply chain functions such as location, inventory, production, distribution functions and transportation mode selections. Then, the supply chain model is formulated as a minimization problem for costs and environmental impacts. Herein, the solution is the flow of goods in global supply chain environment in different periods of time over one year. Furthermore, the numerical values obtained from a real company are applied to these mathematical formulations to test its usability. The testing is conducted in four different cases that include two combinations, no due date constraint and due date constraint, without connection of distributor and with connection of distributors. The results from these experiments can help in determining the best transportation routes, inventory levels, shipment quantity, and transportation modes. Specifically, the results propose a new configuration for designing global supply chain for the case company that could minimize economical and environmental impacts problems simultaneously.

Agricultural e-government in China, Korea, Taiwan and the USA

E-government provides information and services by websites. Using the functions of e-government described by West (2000), we discuss government agricultural websites in China, Korea, Taiwan and the USA, and suggest improvement. The findings indicate that general functions, viz. online information, services, foreign language access, restricted area and information sharing, are established. Greater effort should be made for advanced functions, viz. disability access, privacy and security and advertisement and user pay system. The result of this research serves as reference for other countries in developing their agricultural e-government.

Establishing interrelationships among organisational learning, innovation and performance

Knowledge and learning ability are critically successful factors in the competitive advantage of an organisation. The knowledge from both internal and external sources should be transferred to all levels of the organisation. The reason is that increasing the performance of organisation focuses not only on improvement thru learning, but also on innovation. This study aims to review the key literatures relating to the relationships among organisational learning, innovation, and performance. The steps of reviewing the literature were performed in accordance to the methodology suggested by Denyer and Tranfield (2009). The findings showed that: 1 organisational learning directly influences innovation 2 innovation directly affects performance 3 organisational learning directly influences performance through innovation. As a result, organisational learning is essential for continuous performance improvement and long-term competitiveness.

The relationship between spiritual management and determinants of turnover intention

Purpose – Based on the first part of the service profit chain, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between 11 spiritual management tactics and determinants of turnover intention.Design/methodology/approach – A survey on managers and manufacturing employees is conducted. Later, the grey relational analysis to process the data is used together with the multi‐criteria‐weighted average in the decision‐making process to identify degree of relatedness between spiritual management and determinants of employee turnover intention.Findings – The paper finds that a difference in perception between managers and employees exists with regard to appropriate spiritual management tactics; the former put more emphasis on the tangibles aspects; and the later on the intangibles.Research limitations/implications – This paper is an exploratory research; so there is lack of other empirical studies in this area, more work needs to be done in regard to reliability and validity of measures of spiritual man...

Application of TRIZ and the Kano method to home life industry innovation

The home life industry is an emerging industry and very closely related to consumer life. The objective of this research is to apply the modified Teorija Rezhenija Izobretate Zadach (TRIZ) method and the Kano method to discuss the strategy direction and process of the home life industry from the viewpoint of the supplier and consumer. The result of the research shows that the home life industry is very competitive. To solve the problem, we propose four innovative principles. In accordance with its application to marketing, we introduce an innovative strategy to the home life industry and improve on its competitive nature.

COG: a composite genetic algorithm with local search methods to solve a mixed vehicle routing problem with backhauls

This paper considers a variant of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) called Mixed Vehicle Routing Problem with Backhauls (MVRPB), an extension of the Vehicle Routing Problem with Backhauls (VRPB). This problem involves two sets of customers, called line-haul and backhaul customers. The demand of each line-haul customer is served by a single depot with a set of homogeneous capacitated vehicles. Apart from this, some amount of load needs to be picked up from the backhaul customers and should be taken back to the depot. The visit sequence of vehicles for line-haul and backhaul customers is mixed. The application of the MVRPB for the public healthcare system is explained. The MVRPB is a well-known, proven Non-deterministic Polynomial (NP)-hard problem. Various heuristic algorithms are proposed to solve the MVRPB to obtain approximate solutions. In this paper, we propose a composite Genetic Algorithm (GA) combined with different local search methods to solve the MVRPB. This is the first research paper for the application of metaheuristics with local search methods to solve the MVRPB. Extensive computational investigation for the MVRPB instances shows the efficacy of the proposed algorithm.

'Antecedents' and 'postcedents' in relation to satisfaction in Taiwanese business relationships

The research objective is to test whether satisfaction in business relationships may constitute a mediating construct between trust and commitment on the one hand, and coordination, cooperation and continuity expectancy on the other. The structural relationships are summarised in an AMP-model (i.e., antecedents, mediator and postcedents), the sample at that time consisted of attitudes among leading executives in small and medium-sized companies in Taiwan. The tested structural relationships of the AMP-model complement previous theory and research of antecedents and postcedents in relation to satisfaction in business relationships. One contribution is that the empirical findings indicate that satisfaction in studied buyer-supplier relationships may be seen as a mediating construct between antecedents (such as trust and commitment) and postcedents (such as coordination, cooperation and continuity). Research limitations and suggestions for further research are provided.