This work concentrates on the design and implementation of an automated support for data extraction from product descriptions. This system will be used for e-shop purposes. The work introduces present approaches to information extraction from HTML documents. It focuses chiefly at wrappers and methods for their induction. The visual approach to information extraction is also mentioned. System requirements and basic principles are described in the design part of the work. Next, a detailed description of a path tracing algorithm in document object model is explained. The last section of the work evaluates the results of experiments made with the implemented system.

The aim of thediploma thesis is to design an architectural study of a new synagogue in Opava for the Jewish community. Content of the work is also a community center and administration. In the deign is a set of three buildings serving the Jewish community. The design is solved as an interconnected space between the public and the Jewish community. With its openness and permeability, it offers the opportunity to look into the Jewish community. The main object, the synagogue, for believers is directly linked to the construction of the Jewish community, where at the same level we can find mikve for ritual purrification. The second object, the Jewish community, offers two business units in the first floor. The important part of the Jewish community is education, and therefore the design of the Jewish community also contains a library and a clasroom connected to this library. The administration itself is located on the private last floor with a terrace. A third building, a community center, has been created to make the public familiar with the Jewish community, its religion and culture. The first floor is used by the kosher restaurant, which can use the central space between the park landscaping for sitting. The Community Center provides a lecture hall on the second floor and a spacious gallery for Jewish artists on the third floor.

The objective of this project is to design and create internet shop offering functions, which are common and essential for this type of application. It will also offer functions, which will ensure troublefree and safe run. The base of design are UML models (ER diagram, USE CASE diagram). This models will be created for compact design of database, and structure of whole application. This shop will offer standard administrative functions, which will allow administrators to control the shop. Users will be not only offered by goods, but also will have their own account, where they will be allowed to check the history of their operations. The system will use PHP, html, JavaScript and SQL languages. It will be based on MySql database, Apache server and Rewrite modul of Apache.

With the increase in fuel prices, the efficient movement of aircraft around an airport can impact the profitability of a flight and an airline. The assignment of a flight to a specific gate not only impacts passenger satisfaction, but also impacts the efficient movement of aircraft from the departure gate to the runway. There have been bodies of research investigating aircraft taxi problems and gate assignment problems. However, each of these research bodies has not included the effects of the other research areas into their respective areas. This research presents a proposed framework that integrates the passenger or freight movement within a terminal with the taxiing of the aircraft to support an integrated approach to solving the gate assignment problem. A solution technique that incorporates a job shop scheduling solution method is presented and demonstrates that a large problem can be solved efficiently and in a short time using both deterministic and stochastic data.

BACKGROUND: E-cigarette use has grown in popularity, especially as the devices have been touted as smoking cessation tools. In an exploratory study, we sought to compare dual users (i.e., users of both combustible tobacco and e-cigarettes) to e-cigarette only users. METHODS: The Electronic Cigarette Opinion Survey (ECOS) was employed to assess users' (n=78) perceptions and consumption of e-cigarettes and combustible cigarettes. Quantity of e-juice and nicotine used and time of initial nicotine exposure were assessed. Multivariable logistic regression was used to evaluate the association between e-cigarette use behaviors and being an e-cigarette only user compared to a dual user. RESULTS: Compared to dual users, e-cigarette only users consumed higher levels of nicotine in e-juice (p=0.0009) and more nicotine per month (p=0.03). For dual users, the time of first nicotine exposure after waking was significantly earlier than for e-cigarette only users (mean= 9.6 minutes (SD= 8.0) and mean= 26.6 minutes (SD= 22.0), respectively; p=0.0056). Results from the regression models suggest the amount of e-juice consumed and time of first nicotine exposure after waking are significantly associated with being an e-cigarette only user. CONCLUSIONS: These findings shed light on the perceptions and use patterns of e-cigarette only users compared to dual users. As regulation of e-cigarettes is considered, understanding the impact of e-cigarettes and dual use is imperative. Despite frequent marketing claims that e-cigarettes are completely safe, health campaigns need to convey emerging and mixed findings on safety as well as current scientific uncertainty to the public.

Mark Catlett will portray the role of Orin Scrivello D.D.S., as well as various other "cameo" roles, at Seaside Music Theater in Daytona Beach, Florida from January 13- February 13 2005. The role of Orin Scrivello will provide me with several acting challenges as well as multiple subjects and themes to research. The most challenging aspect of creating, developing and embodying the character of Orin will be his sadomasochistic nature and his blatant abuse towards Audrey. Sadomasochism is defined as "the deriving of sexual gratification, from being physically or emotionally abused". It is also defined as "a willingness or tendency to subject oneself to unpleasant or trying experiences". The psychology of sadomasochism is completely foreign to my life experience and will have to be deeply explored to fully realize the inner workings of Orin's behavior. To supplement the exploration of the psychology of sadomasochism, research will be completed on the following topics: • Sadomasochism in regards to the lead characters of Little Shop of Horrors. • The history of Little Shop of Horrors from its roots in the cult horror film of 1960, followed by the 1983 Off-Broadway production, segueing into the 1986 re-make film version, and culminating in the 2003 official Broadway production. Portrayal of Orin Scrivello D.D.S. also demands the creation of several other characters in the second act of the show. This will require me to develop several different characters ranging from the sadomasochistic dentist, to an ambitious entrepreneur, to even dressing in drag to portray a female florist customer. This will give me an opportunity to show versatility as well as research several different character personalities and dramatic structures. These characters come in and out of the florist shop very quickly, so the challenge will be to both perform a quick change of costume and also be able to completely switch characterizations within minutes. These characters should be different enough that the audience does not immediately realize it is the same actor playing all of these roles.

The motivation of this research investigation stems from a particular job shop production environment at a large international communications and information technology company in which electro-mechanical assemblies (EMAs) are produced. The production environment of the EMAs includes the continuous arrivals of the EMAs (generally called jobs), with distinct due dates, degrees of importance and routing sequences through the production workstations, to the job shop. Jobs are processed in batches at the workstations, and there are incompatible families of jobs, where jobs from different product families cannot be processed together in the same batch. In addition, there are sequence-dependent setups between batches at the workstations. Most importantly, it is imperative that all product deliveries arrive on time to their customers (internal and external) within their respective delivery time windows. Delivery is allowed outside a time window, but at the expense of a penalty. Completing a job and delivering the job before the start of its respective time window results in a penalty, i.e., inventory holding cost. Delivering a job after its respective time window also results in a penalty, i.e., delay cost or emergency shipping cost. This presents a unique scheduling problem where an earlinesstardiness composite objective is considered. This research approaches this scheduling problem by decomposing this complex job shop scheduling environment into bottleneck and non-bottleneck resources, with the primary focus on effectively scheduling the bottleneck resource. Specifically, the problem of scheduling jobs with unique due dates on a single workstation under the conditions of batching, sequence-dependent iii setups, incompatible job families in order to minimize weighted earliness and tardiness is formulated as an integer linear program. This scheduling problem, even in its simplest form, is NP-Hard, where no polynomial-time algorithm exists to solve this problem to optimality, especially as the number of jobs increases. As a result, the computational time to arrive at optimal solutions is not of practical use in industrial settings, where production scheduling decisions need to be made quickly. Therefore, this research explores and proposes new heuristic algorithms to solve this unique scheduling problem. The heuristics use order review and release strategies in combination with priority dispatching rules, which is a popular and more commonly-used class of scheduling algorithms in real-world industrial settings. A computational study is conducted to assess the quality of the solutions generated by the proposed heuristics. The computational results show that, in general, the proposed heuristics produce solutions that are competitive to the optimal solutions, yet in a fraction of the time. The results also show that the proposed heuristics are superior in quality to a set of benchmark algorithms within this same class of heuristics

No / The Job Shop Scheduling Problem (JSSP) is a hard combinatorial optimisation problem. This paper presents a heuristic-based Genetic Algorithm (GA) or Hybrid Genetic Algorithm (HGA) with the aim of overcoming the GA deficiency of fine tuning of solution around the optimum, and to achieve optimal or near optimal solutions for benchmark JSSP. The paper also presents a detail GA parameter analysis (also called sensitivity analysis) for a wide range of benchmark problems from JSSP. The findings from the sensitivity analysis or best possible parameter combination are then used in the proposed HGA for optimal or near optimal solutions. The experimental results of the HGA for several benchmark problems are encouraging and show that HGA has achieved optimal solutions for more than 90% of the benchmark problems considered in this paper. The presented results will provide a reference for selection of GA parameters for heuristic-based GAs for JSSP.

The clothing retail industry has developed globally and is today one of the world’s largest industries. In recent years, Sweden has developed a competitive fashion industry, where the new trend in e-commerce is clear. Since e-commerce is a suitable strategy for rapid growth, it is especially important for managers to understand the impact e-commerce has on their businesses. To be able to have the ability to survive in the long-term industrial competitiveness, firms have to continuously improve their knowledge base about the factors that must be considered when choosing sales channels in the clothing retail industry. In this master thesis we have studied and analysed factors that must be considered when choosing sales channels. A literature review was done, where eleven initial factors that affect the choice of sales channels were identified. Thereafter, to conduct a comprehensive empirical study, we conducted eight case studies with semi-structured interviews with companies in the Swedish clothing retail industry, founded no longer than approximately a decade ago to cover the recent developments in the industry. The empirical study resulted in that six factors from the literature were reinforced and that four new factors were identified. These ten final factors were thereafter analysed from two main perspectives: company focus and consumer focus. Finally, the impact of the final factors on the three different sales channels; online, brick-and-mortar and retailing, was discussed. The ten final factors are: Marketing and Customer Loyalty, High Costs, Customer Behaviour, Outsourcing or Insourcing, Managerial Productivity, Intangibility and Tangibility, Fill a Gap, Customer Experience Control, Spread of Distribution and Type of Assortment. Our contribution to previous research is that this study has a more distinct company focus, and due to the development of e-commerce this study has captured the new characteristics of the industry.

This thesis aims to review and analyze the scheduling problem in general and Job Shop Scheduling Problem (JSSP) in particular and the solution techniques applied to these problems. The JSSP is the most general and popular hard combinational optimization problem in manufacturing systems. For the past sixty years, an enormous amount of research has been carried out to solve these problems. The literature review showed the inherent shortcomings of solutions to scheduling problems. This has directed researchers to develop hybrid approaches, as no single technique for scheduling has yet been successful in providing optimal solutions to these difficult problems, with much potential for improvements in the existing techniques. The hybrid approach complements and compensates for the limitations of each individual solution technique for better performance and improves results in solving both static and dynamic production scheduling environments. Over the past years, hybrid approaches have generally outperformed simple Genetic Algorithms (GAs). Therefore, two novel priority heuristic rules are developed: Index Based Heuristic and Hybrid Heuristic. These rules are applied to benchmark JSSP and compared with popular traditional rules. The results show that these new heuristic rules have outperformed the traditional heuristic rules over a wide range of benchmark JSSPs. Furthermore, a hybrid GA is developed as an alternate scheduling approach. The hybrid GA uses the novel heuristic rules in its key steps. The hybrid GA is applied to benchmark JSSPs. The hybrid GA is also tested on benchmark flow shop scheduling problems and industrial case studies. The hybrid GA successfully found solutions to JSSPs and is not problem dependent. The hybrid GA performance across the case studies has proved that the developed scheduling model can be applied to any real-world scheduling problem for achieving optimal or near-optimal solutions. This shows the effectiveness of the hybrid GA in real-world scheduling problems. In conclusion, all the research objectives are achieved. Finaly, the future work for the developed heuristic rules and the hybrid GA are discussed and recommendations are made on the basis of the results. / Board of Trustees, Endowment Fund Project, KPK University of Engineering and Technology (UET), Peshawar and Higher Education Commission (HEC), Pakistan