scholarly journals The Future of Flexible Product Manufacturing by Using Industry 4.0 Technologies in Regard to Consumer Preferences

2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 7-17
Author(s):  
Muhammad Rahim Ejaz

THE AIMS OF THE PAPER The core objectives of this paper are to understand constantly changing consumer choices over time and the manufacturing of flexible products to answer the problem. The flexible products with multiple utility choices can help consumers from every segment to fulfil their needs. The study has shed light on the flexible product manufacturing process and has also discussed launching strategies into the market with having considered various market factors in the process. METHODOLOGY A rigorous analysis of literature has been done to understand why flexible products should be preferred over standard products.  Literature related to flexible product strategy is being examined and explored its dimensions of price setting and product utility. MOST IMPORTANT RESULTS This study provides a road map for companies to shift their focus on developing new manufacturing processes in order to develop flexible products to address dynamic consumer preferences. This study also shed light on the fact the flexible products might be more profitable for the company. RECOMMENDATIONS The findings show that flexible products provide larger range of utility choices and with a right price; it can be more profitable than a standard product. Flexible products can go along with mass customisation of products which can enlarge utility choices for consumers to an unlimited level. 

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (14) ◽  
pp. 7746
Author(s):  
Leire Barañano ◽  
Naroa Garbisu ◽  
Itziar Alkorta ◽  
Andrés Araujo ◽  
Carlos Garbisu

The concept of bioeconomy is a topic of debate, confusion, skepticism, and criticism. Paradoxically, this is not necessarily a negative thing as it is encouraging a fruitful exchange of information, ideas, knowledge, and values, with concomitant beneficial effects on the definition and evolution of the bioeconomy paradigm. At the core of the debate, three points of view coexist: (i) those who support a broad interpretation of the term bioeconomy, through the incorporation of all economic activities based on the production and conversion of renewable biological resources (and organic wastes) into products, including agriculture, livestock, fishing, forestry and similar economic activities that have accompanied humankind for millennia; (ii) those who embrace a much narrower interpretation, reserving the use of the term bioeconomy for new, innovative, and technologically-advanced economic initiatives that result in the generation of high-added-value products and services from the conversion of biological resources; and (iii) those who stand between these two viewpoints. Here, to shed light on this debate, a contextualization of the bioeconomy concept through its links with related concepts (biotechnology, bio-based economy, circular economy, green economy, ecological economics, environmental economics, etc.) and challenges facing humanity today is presented.


Polymers ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 1084
Author(s):  
Kaimin Chen ◽  
Lan Cao ◽  
Ying Zhang ◽  
Kai Li ◽  
Xue Qin ◽  
...  

Stimuli-responsive nanoparticles are among the most popular research topics. In this study, two types of core-shell (polystyrene with a photoiniferter (PSV) as the core and diblock as the shell) polymer brushes (PSV@PNIPA-b-PAA and PSV@PAA-b-PNIPA) were designed and prepared using surface-initiated photoiniferter-mediated polymerization (SI-PIMP). Moreover, their pH- and temperature-stimuli responses were explored by dynamic light scattering (DLS) and turbidimeter under various conditions. The results showed that the conformational change was determined on the basis of the competition among electrostatic repulsion, hydrophobic interaction, hydrogen bonding, and steric hindrance, which was also confirmed by protein adsorption experiments. These results are not only helpful for the design and synthesis of stimuli-responsive polymer brushes but also shed light on controlled protein immobilization under mild conditions.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (6) ◽  
pp. 351-362 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernadette Wren ◽  
John Launer ◽  
Michael J. Reiss ◽  
Annie Swanepoel ◽  
Graham Music

SUMMARYIssues of sexual reproduction lie at the core of evolutionary thinking, which often places an emphasis on how individuals attempt to maximise the number of successful offspring that they can produce. At first sight, it may therefore appear that individuals who opt for gender-affirming medical interventions are acting in ways that are evolutionarily disadvantageous. However, there are persuasive hypotheses that might make sense of such choices in evolutionary terms and we explore these here. It is premature to claim knowledge of the extent to which evolutionary arguments can usefully be applied to issues of gender identity, although worth reflecting on the extent to which nature tends towards diversity in matters of sex and gender. The importance of acknowledging and respecting different views in this domain, as well as recognising both the uncertainty and likely multiplicity of causal pathways, has implications for clinicians. We make some suggestions about how clinicians might best respond when faced with requests from patients in this area.LEARNING OBJECTIVESAfter reading this article you will be able to:•understand evolutionary arguments about diversity in human gender identity•identify strengths and weaknesses in evolutionary arguments applied to transgender issues•appreciate the range and diversity of gender experience and gender expression among people who present to specialist gender services, as well as the likely complexities of their reasons for requesting medical intervention.


Author(s):  
Dr. Anwar ul Haq

The characters of angels(Jibrael, Izrael ,Israfeel and Rizwan) in the poetry of Iqbal are capable of great virtual importance. Through these supernatural characters, Iqbal has successfully conveyed his thoughts in a very impressive and artistic way. He was against the slavery and used these characters in his poetry to motivate Muslims to obtain the virtual goal of freedom. These characters are also the symbols of Islamic values and thoughts. They successfully convey the core subjects of Islamic thought. The researcher has shed light on this specific angle of Iqbal’s poetry in full detail.


Author(s):  
Risheng Liu

Numerous tasks at the core of statistics, learning, and vision areas are specific cases of ill-posed inverse problems. Recently, learning-based (e.g., deep) iterative methods have been empirically shown to be useful for these problems. Nevertheless, integrating learnable structures into iterations is still a laborious process, which can only be guided by intuitions or empirical insights. Moreover, there is a lack of rigorous analysis of the convergence behaviors of these reimplemented iterations, and thus the significance of such methods is a little bit vague. We move beyond these limits and propose a theoretically guaranteed optimization learning paradigm, a generic and provable paradigm for nonconvex inverse problems, and develop a series of convergent deep models. Our theoretical analysis reveals that the proposed optimization learning paradigm allows us to generate globally convergent trajectories for learning-based iterative methods. Thanks to the superiority of our framework, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on different real applications.


Author(s):  
Belal Hafnawi

Digital transformation is the core value of the 4th industrial revolution or Industry 4.0. Although the efforts are focused on utilization and usage of technologies like artificial intelligence, internet of things, cloud computing, and many other technologies. We should focus in parallel on regulating the technologies to provide the proper road map and put the proper regulatory frameworks to remove uncertainties in development, investment, or implementation of technologies. Regulatory effectiveness is very important in saving time and rolling out technologies. In one initiative, regulatory technology (RegTech) will utilize the technology to enhance the regulatory process in financial sector; Regulation 4.0 is another; however, plenty of work is still ahead. Some regulators are keen to facilitate the emerging technologies and to see the consequences immediately, thus they use sandbox thinking in evaluating the impact at a small scale. In summary, this chapter will highlight the different practices and methodologies to regulate the digital transformation in the best way.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (07) ◽  
pp. 10542-10550 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jingjing Chen ◽  
Liangming Pan ◽  
Zhipeng Wei ◽  
Xiang Wang ◽  
Chong-Wah Ngo ◽  
...  

Recognizing ingredients for a given dish image is at the core of automatic dietary assessment, attracting increasing attention from both industry and academia. Nevertheless, the task is challenging due to the difficulty of collecting and labeling sufficient training data. On one hand, there are hundred thousands of food ingredients in the world, ranging from the common to rare. Collecting training samples for all of the ingredient categories is difficult. On the other hand, as the ingredient appearances exhibit huge visual variance during the food preparation, it requires to collect the training samples under different cooking and cutting methods for robust recognition. Since obtaining sufficient fully annotated training data is not easy, a more practical way of scaling up the recognition is to develop models that are capable of recognizing unseen ingredients. Therefore, in this paper, we target the problem of ingredient recognition with zero training samples. More specifically, we introduce multi-relational GCN (graph convolutional network) that integrates ingredient hierarchy, attribute as well as co-occurrence for zero-shot ingredient recognition. Extensive experiments on both Chinese and Japanese food datasets are performed to demonstrate the superior performance of multi-relational GCN and shed light on zero-shot ingredients recognition.


2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-155
Author(s):  
Salim El Hoss

Lebanon has never experienced an extended interval of sustainable peace since its independence. In 1975, Lebanon was the scene of a civil war. In 1982, a full-scale war was mounted by Israel. In the process massacres were perpetrated by the Israelis. The current crisis has been punctuated by momentous tragic events which brought salient changes in the sordid course of life in the country, unleashing a prolonged cabinet crisis, and finally an intricate, highly critical discord over the election of a new president. It was no accident that so many spots of tension are boiling at the same time in the Middle East in Lebanon, in Palestine, in Iraq, and in Sudan. The conventional wisdom is that, in the final analysis, Palestine lies at the core of all the mayhem. The linkage between the repeated Lebanese crises and the Palestinian issue is only too obvious. The proclivity of Arab officialdom is to negotiate within the context of what is known as the Arab initiative. The Euro–American declared position is that any negotiations should be conducted in accordance with the Road Map sponsored by the Quartet. Both initiatives leave a lot to be desired.


2012 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 855-879 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ming-Sung Kuo

AbstractGlobalization redefines the relationship between law and space, resulting in the emergence of transnational administrative law in a globalizing legal space. I aim to shed light on transnational administrative law by examining how administrative law relates to the process of European integration. I argue that the idea of administrative legitimation is at the core of this relationship. In the European Union, transnational administration grounds its legitimacy on the fulfilment of administrative law requirements. However, given that in the European Union, administrative legitimation is rooted in Europe's constitutional transformation, I caution against the projection of Europe's experience onto global governance.


2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (01) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gualtiero LORINI

The article focuses on a concept placed at the core of the A-Deduction, of which the B-Version provides a different but not necessarily better exposition. It is the concept of “transcendental affinity” [transcendentale Affinität] (A 144). This concept is not present in the whole B-Edition of the KrV, and even the term “Affinity” does not appear in the B-Deduction, but only four times in the Transcendental Dialectic, and twice in the Discipline of the Pure Reason. In the economy of the A-Deduction, the concept of “transcendental affinity” plays a central role. It represents indeed the “thoroughgoing connection according to necessary laws” of all the possible phenomena. This connection is presupposed by transcendental consciousness insofar as it has a representation of these phenomena and their relationships, since what all the possible phenomena share is their determination in space and time according to the synthetic unity of the apperception. The concept of transcendental affinity between all the possible phenomena is intimately linked to imagination, which makes this affinity arise by reproducing a phenomenon in space and time according to the a priori laws of understanding. The necessary link between transcendental affinity and imagination represents an important passage in this paper. One goal is to point out that the implications of transcendental affinity are not rejected but rather deepened in the B-Deduction. On these assumptions, we consider the role of the “I think” in the B-Deduction, in order to claim that it implicitly relies upon the concept of transcendental affinity too. The last part of the paper aims to point out that the transcendental affinity between the phenomena describedin the A-Deduction is particularly apt to understand the unity of the representation of nature. To shed light on this point, we will deal with some significant passages from the Opus postumum.


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