In most of the manufacturing operations, production management staffs usually empirical rules or pilot run experiment results to decide production scheduling. However, the former methodology could go with high risk and uncertainty; the latter might partially verify some schedules and products due to the restricted manufacturing resources, and could easily cause delivery delay. This research performed a design of experimentation by computer simulation tool to develop a micro resistance manufacturing process model and compared the performance measurements among different dispatching rules so as to find the process bottleneck. Meanwhile, this research implemented the TOC (Theory of Constraints) theory to improve the manufacturing process and studied the efficiency of the improved process. This experiment took five performance measurements: product throughout, mean flowing time, mean tardiness time, mean queued job quantity and resources utilization in order to validate the results of the various dispatching rules and its performance simulating the real production process and further expects this model to become a reference scheduling model for batch-typed manufacturing processes. Additional production factors are also included into our experiments. For example, the proportion of product types produced, production timings of orders, manufacturing equipments operation time, numbers of manufacturing equipment and order delivery due date. The experiment results exhibit multi-type products of batch-typed flow shop manufacturing could use different dispatching rules based on product requirements to achieve production optimization and output maximization. TOC and adjustments of bottleneck machines can alleviate manufacturing equipment loading and reduce job queue quantity.

Data mining techniques have been widely applied to extract desirable knowledge from existing databases for specific purposes. In real-world applications, a database usually involves the time periods when transactions occurred and exhibition periods of items, in addition to the items bought in the transactions. To handle this kind of data, temporal data mining techniques are thus proposed to find temporal association rules from a database with time. Most of the existing studies only consider different item lifespans to find general temporal association rules, and this may neglect some useful information. For example, while an item within the whole exhibition period may not be a frequent one, it may be frequent within part of this time. To deal with this, the concept of a hierarchy of time is thus applied to temporal data mining along with suitable time granules, as defined by users. In this thesis, we thus handle the problem of mining temporal association rules with a hierarchy of time granules from a temporal database, and also propose three novel mining algorithms for different item lifespan definitions. In the first definition, the lifespan of an item in a time granule is calculated from the first appearance time to the end time in the time granule. In the second definition, the lifespan of an item in a time granule is evaluated from the publication time of the item to the end time in the time granule. Finally, in the third definition, the lifespan of an item in a time granule is measured by its entire exhibition period. The experimental results on a simulation dataset show the performance of the three proposed algorithms under different item lifespan definitions, and compare the mined temporal association rules with and without consideration of the hierarchy of time granules under different parameter settings.

In this dissertation three different economic issues have been analyzed. The first issue is whether monetary policy rules can improve forecasting accuracy of inflation. The second is whether the preference of a central bank is symmetry or not. The last issue is whether the behavior of aggregate dividends is asymmetry. Each issue is considered in Chapter II, III and IV, respectively. The linkage between monetary policy rules and the prediction of inflation is explored in Chapter II. Our analysis finds that the prediction performance of the term structure model hinges on monetary policy rules, which involve the manipulation of the federal funds rate in response to the change in the price level. As the Fed's reaction to inflation becomes stronger, the predictive information contained in the term structure becomes weaker. Using the long-run Taylor rule, a new assessment of the prediction performance regarding future change in inflation is provided. The empirical results indicate that the long-run Taylor rule improves forecasting accuracy. In chapter III, the asymmetric preferences of the central bank of Korea are examined under New Keynesian sticky prices forward-looking economy framework. To this end, this chapter adopts the central bank's objective functional form as a linear-exponential function instead of the standard quadratic function. The monetary policy reaction function is derived and then asymmetric preference parameters are estimated during the inflation targeting period: 1998:9-2005:12. The empirical evidence supports that while the objective of output stability is symmetry, but the objective of price stability is not symmetry. Specifically, it appears that the central bank of Korea aggressively responds to positive inflation gaps compared to negative inflation gaps. Chapter IV examines the nonlinear dividend behavior of the aggregate stock market. We propose a nonlinear dividend model that assumes managers minimize the regime dependent adjustment costs associated with being away from their target dividend payout. By using the threshold vector error correction model, we find significant evidence of a threshold effect in aggregate dividends of S&P 500 Index in quarterly data when real stock prices are used for the target. We also find that when dividends are relatively higher than target, the adjustment cost of dividends is much smaller than that when they are lower.

With the advances in technology, the change of the healthcare environment, and the need for users, the use of computerized support systems or expert systems are able to cut down costs for unnecessary procedures, achieve higher levels of efficiency and productivity. Applied to the nursing department, it may provide good quality of care, decrease the time that nurses duplicate patient history, reduce nurses¡¦ burden and enhance the abilities to solve problems. The topic of this research mainly focused on the nursing department in the pediatric ward. I propose a framework for nursing knowledge management by using subjective data, objective data, assessment, and care plan (SOAP), which is used by the nursing staffs as a way of decision-making processes. The method is to collect subjective and objective data, read relevant clinical practice guidelines, make clinical judgments about patients¡¦ actual or potential problems and provide applicable nursing plans and interventions. The staffs review and make final decision to accept or reject these judgments, nursing plans and related interventions. If the staffs reject any judgment, nursing plan and intervention, the system should have inquiry-signs to ask physician and nursing staff. Then the staffs correct the inappropriateness. These clear and easy-to-follow processes help student nurses or beginning nurses cultivate their abilities to care and hope it can provide as a guide to nursing teaching and clinical patient care.

Unexpected properties of recently discovered mesons DsJ(2317) and DsJ(2460) have caused an excitement in the high energy community. These mesons are under experimental study in BaBar, Belle and CLEO. The experimental data on these mesons is quite limited at the moment, but it is expected to be improved in the following years. The unexpected properties of these mesons, such as the low mass, and small width, have caused speculations about their structure. Various models have been proposed which go beyond the simple quark-antiquark picture of the mesons, such as a meson molecule, or a four-quark state. Therefore, understanding the underlying structure of these mesons can reveal a deeper understanding of QCD. In this thesis, the strong decay of the DsJ(2317) meson, DsJ(2317)--&gt / Dspi0, is studied using three-point QCD Sum Rules method in the conventional cs framework. DsJ(2317) -&gt / Dspi0 decay violates isospin symmetry. Therefore, this decay is studied as a two stage process / an isospin conserving DsJ(2317) --&gt / Ds eta decay followed by the conversion of eta into a pi0 due to isospin violation.

The recently discovered DsJ(2317) and DsJ(2460) mesons had stimulated many theoretical and experimental studies due to their unexpected properties. In this thesis, we make a review of the predictions on the properties of these mesons using the quark model and QCD Sum Rules. We studied different models about the structure of these mesons, which are suggested because of their unexpected properties. Moreover, using the quark model which implies that the structure of DsJ meson as cs and QCD Sum Rules method, we investigated the semileptonic decay DsJ(2317)--&gt / D0 l nu.

Quantum Chromodynamics(QCD) is part of the Standard Model(SM) that describes the interaction of fundamental particles. In QCD, due to the fact that strong coupling constant is large at low energies, perturbative approaches do not work. For this reason, non-perturbative approaches have to be used for studying the properties of hadrons. Among several non-perturbative approaches, QCD sum rules is one of the reliable methods which is applied to understand the properties of hadrons and their interactions. In this thesis, the semileptonic rare decays of $B$ meson to $K_{1}(1270)$ and $K_{1} (1400)$ are analyzed in the framework of three point QCD sum rules approach. The $Brightarrow K_{1} (1270,1400) ell^+ ell^-$ decays are significant flavor changing neutral current (FCNC) decays of the $B$ meson, since FCNC processes are forbidden at tree level at SM. These decays are sensitive to the new physics beyond SM. The radiative $Brightarrow K_{1}(1270) gamma$ decay is observed experimentally. Although semileptonic $Bto K_1(1270,1400)$ decays are still not observed, they are expected to be observed at future B factories. These decays happens at the quark level with $brightarrow s ell^+ ell^- $ transition, providing new opportunities for calculating CKM matrix elements: $V_{tb}$ and $V_{ts}$. Applying three point QCD sum rules to $Brightarrow K_{1} (1270,1400) ell^+ ell^-$ decays is tricky, due to the fact that the $K_{1} (1270)$ and $K_{1} (1400)$ states are the mixtures of ideal $^{3}P_{1}(K_{1}^{A})$ and $^{1}P_{1}(K_{1}^{B})$ orbital angular momentum states. First, by taking axial vector and tensor current definitions for $K_1$ mesons, the transition form factors of $Brightarrow K_{1A} ell^+ ell^-$ and $Brightarrow K_{1B} ell^+ ell^-$ are calculated. Then using the definitions for $K_1$ mixing, the transition form factors of $Brightarrow K_{1} (1270,1400) ell^+ ell^-$ decays are obtained. The results of these form factors are used to estimate the branching ratio of $B$ meson into $K_1(1270)$ and $K_1(1400)$. The results obtained for form factors and branching fractions are also compared with the ones in the literature.

In this thesis, a requirements traceability model is proposed in order to make efficient and effective change request impact analysis. The proposed model is a requirements &ndash / requirements traceability model. There are several researches regarding software requirements traceability problem. The main problem of these researches is that the proposed solutions can not be applied to software industry with affordable changes. However, current literature begins to see that describing all the software requirements in a huge black box is not so much applicable to today&rsquo / s more dynamic and bigger software projects, especially regarding change management. The proposed traceability model tries to be a solution to these problems. Change requests and business rules are two important and popular terms for today&rsquo / s software industry. The traceability model consists of three types of software requirements: data definitions, business rules and use cases. The traceability model proposes bidirectional traces between these types. Data definitions, business rules and use cases are related to each other and they all should be seen as parts of a software system which should work together to make the software system work properly. Empirical investigation is made on a real industrial software project. These types were configured in order to match to the project specific needs in a reconfigurable way. Experimental results show that the traceability model has an acceptable degree of correctness.

With the growth in the size of datasets, data mining has been an important research topic and is receiving substantial interest from both academia and industry for many years. Especially, spatio-temporal data mining, mining knowledge from large amounts of spatio-temporal data, is a highly demanding field because huge amounts of spatio-temporal data are collected in various applications. Therefore, spatio-temporal data mining requires the development of novel data mining algorithms and computational techniques for a successful analysis of large spatio-temporal databases. In this thesis, a spatio-temporal mining technique is proposed and applied on Turkish meteorological data which has been collected from various weather stations in Turkey. This study also includes an analysis and interpretation of spatio-temporal rules generated for Turkish Meteorological data set. We introduce a second level mining technique which is used to define general trends of the patterns according to the spatial changes. Genarated patterns are investigated under different temporal sets in order to monitor the changes of the events with respect to temporal changes.

Wie schreibe ich einen Literaturbericht? Was gehört in einen Exzerpt? Wer sich mit den Schwierigkeiten des wissenschaftlichen Schreibens herumschlägt, kann sich an den WeltTrends – Lehrtext Nr. 4 wenden. In kurzen und präzisen Kapiteln wird dem Leser der korrekte Umgang mit den verschiedenen Anforderungen wissenschaftlicher Arbeit, wozu auch Protokolle und Referate zählen, nahe gebracht. Insbesondere die klare, strukturierte Darstellung der jeweiligen Anforderungen kann eine große Hilfe für den Anfänger darstellen.