Services are perishable and are simultaneously produced and consumed. A reservation is a traditional and effective means for coordinating service demand and supply. In recent years, computerized reservation systems have been used widely by many service vendors such as airline companies and hotels to satisfy their customer's demands and improve their profits. In this paper, we propose and describe a more flexible reservation method called "YuuZuu" reservation that motivates cooperation among customers with different preferences for services. It increases utilization of vendor-provided services. The DREAM reservation system, which is an implementation of "YuuZuu" reservation, comprises three functions: (1) reservation allocation, (2) demand analysis, and (3) price optimization. Preliminary experiments show that the DREAM reservation system outperforms a standard reservation system when some customers are insistent upon detailed preferences and others are not, which, we believe, reflects real-world conditions.

Services are perishable and are simultaneously produced and consumed. A reservation is a traditional and effective means for coordinating service demand and supply. In recent years, computerized reservation systems have been used widely by many service vendors such as airline companies and hotels to improve their profits. In this paper, we propose and describe a "YuuZuu" reservation that motivates cooperation among customers with different preferences for services. It increases utilization of vendor-provided services. The DREAM reservation system, which is an implementation of "YuuZuu" reservation, comprises three functions: (1) reservation allocation, (2) price optimization, and (3) demand prediction. Preliminary experiments show that the DREAM reservation system outperforms a standard reservation system when some customers are insistent upon detailed preferences and others are not, which, we believe, reflects real-world conditions.

In this paper, we propose an innovative production planning and control methodology, called CONSTIN, and its associated simulation software for large-scale and unstable production environments such as semiconductor manufacturing. CONSTIN presumes to maintain appropriate levels of work-in-process inventory (WIP) and move WIP between processes only at a fixed time interval. Our theoretical analysis shows a clear relationship between WIP levels and the time interval in CONSTIN. Computational experiments using a set of realistic wafer fabrication process data show that CONSTIN simulator is comparable in accuracy to a traditional event-driven simulator and can run much faster than that. Therefore, we conclude that CONSTIN is a promising production planning and control methodology and provides a powerful simulation solution to large scale semiconductor manufacturing processes.

Abstract This paper describes a human gait animation system with a precise neuromusculoskeletal model and evolutionary computation. The neuromusculoskeletal model incorporates 14 rigid bodies, 19 degrees of freedom, 60 muscular models, 16 pairs of the neural oscillators, and other neuronal systems. By changing the search parameters and the evaluative criteria of the evolutionary search process, we demonstrate various locomotive patterns, such as normal gait, pathological gait, running and ape‐like walking. The proposed simulation system takes not only kinematic data but also in vivo dynamic data such as energy consumption information into consideration, so that the resultant locomotion patterns are natural and valid from a biomechanical point of view. Hence the simulation system can also be used for finding a biologically appropriate physical model to realize a desired gait by simultaneously modifying the body dynamics parameters with the neuronal parameters. This capability creates a novel application of human gait simulation systems, such as rehabilitation tool design and consultation for physically handicapped people. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Shows how genetic programming can be applied to the task of evolving the neural oscillators that produce the coordinated movements of human-like bipedal locomotion. In biomechanical engineering research, robotics and neurophysiology, it is of major interest to clarify the mechanism of human bipedal walking. This serves as the basis for developing several applications, such as rehabilitation tools and humanoid robots. Nevertheless, because of the complexity of the neuronal system that interacts with the body dynamics system to make walking movements, much is left unknown about the details of the locomotion mechanism. Researchers have previously been looking for the optimal model of the neuronal system by trial and error. In this paper, we apply genetic programming to induce the model of the nervous system automatically and show its effectiveness by simulating a human bipedal gait with the obtained model. Our experimental results are preliminary but they show some promising evidence for further improvements.