Boosting the confidence of new product development teams: The role of team boundary spanning,team size and functional diversity

In today's highly interconnected, uncertain and dynamic business environment, team boundary spanning has become an important determinant of the performance of new product development (NPD) projects. Despite the positive evidence supporting the use of boundary spanning activities by NPD teams, little is still known about how boundary spanning teams become high-performance teams. The current study advances research on this subject by examining the mediating effect of team potency on the relationship between team boundary spanning and new product performance, as well as the moderating effects of team size and functional diversity on the relationship between team boundary spanning and team potency. Data from a time-lagged survey study of 140 NPD projects found that team boundary spanning can promote team potency that, in turn, results in greater new product quality and new product creativity. The positive effect of team boundary spanning on team potency was found to be more pronounced for NPD teams of medium size and high levels of functional diversity.     

About the origins of residual stresses in <Emphasis Type="Italic">in situ</Emphasis> consolidated thermoplastic composite rings

In a context of cost reduction, in situ filament winding of thermoplastic matrix composites becomes an appealing process. As residual stresses could considerably affect the produced part, models were proposed to predict process-induced residual stresses. After developing a validated thermal model of the process, mainly three different aspects are here addressed: the continuous bonding occurring during the process, the effect of the processed layer on the structure, and the effect of the curvature of the mandrel. While stresses coming from the continuous bonding appeared to be negligible, consequent levels of stresses can be achieved due to an iterative compression of the structure by the tow (supposed to be under tension). The mandrel properties and the tow tension profile followed during winding are essential parameters that might induce several different stress states. A comparison between measured and computed end-to-end openings of split rings illustrates the accuracy of the proposed models.     

User-Sensitive Inclusive Design

Although “User-Centred”, “Participatory”, and other similar design approaches have proved to be very valuable for mainstream design, their principles are more difficult to apply successfully when the user group contains, or is composed of, older and/or disabled users. In the field of design for older and disabled people, the “Universal Design”, “Inclusive Design” and “Design for All” movements have encouraged designers to extend their design briefs to include older and disabled people. The downside of these approaches is that they can tend to encourage designers to follow a traditional design path to produce a prototype design, and only then investigate how to modify their interfaces and systems to cope with older and/or disabled users. This can lead to an inefficient design process and sometimes an inappropriate design, which may be “accessible” to people with disabilities, but in practice unusable. This paper reviews the concept that the authors have called “User-Sensitive Inclusive Design”, which suggests a different approach to designing for marginalised groups of people. Rather than suggesting that designers rely on standards and guidelines, it is suggested that designers need to develop a real empathy with their user groups. A number of ways to achieve this are recommended, including the use of ethnography and techniques derived from professional theatre both for requirements gathering and for improving designers’ empathy for marginalised groups of users, such as older and disabled people.     

Solving identity delegation problem in the e-government environment

At present, many countries allow citizens or entities to interact with the government outside the telematic environment through a legal representative who is granted powers of representation. However, if the interaction takes place through the Internet, only primitive mechanisms of representation are available, and these are mainly based on non-dynamic offline processes that do not enable quick and easy identity delegation. This paper proposes a system of dynamic delegation of identity between two generic entities that can solve the problem of delegated access to the telematic services provided by public authorities. The solution herein is based on the generation of a delegation token created from a proxy certificate that allows the delegating entity to delegate identity to another on the basis of a subset of its attributes as delegator, while also establishing in the delegation token itself restrictions on the services accessible to the delegated entity and the validity period of delegation. Further, the paper presents the mechanisms needed to either revoke a delegation token or to check whether a delegation token has been revoked. Implications for theory and practice and suggestions for future research are discussed.     

Consequences and conjectures in preordered sets

In a preordered set, or preset, consequence operators in the sense of Tarski, defined on families of subsets, are introduced. From them, the corresponding sets of conjectures, hypotheses, speculations and refutations are considered, studying the relationships between these sets and those previously defined on ortholattices. All the concepts introduced are illustrated with three particular consequence operators, whose behavior is studied in detail. The results obtained are applied to the case of fuzzy sets endowed with the usual pointwise ordering.     

A particular approach for the Three-dimensional Packing Problem with additional constraints

This paper focuses on a restrained concretization of the general NP-hard Container Loading Problem that arises from a real world application. This particular problem can be informally described as: given different sets of bins and boxes, find the packing of the boxes into the smallest number of bins obeying some additional restrictions on the placement. The mathematical programming formulation that appears to better model this application is the Three-dimensional Bin-Packing Problem (3D-BPP) which is no more than an extension of the classic Bin-Packing Problem to the orthogonal packing of solid objects.We present an alternative non-linear formulation for the 3D-BPP version as well as new designed heuristic algorithms (CPBOX and BOXCP) for the approximation of the optimal solution using boxes and bins of heterogeneous dimensions. Moreover, we also present a heuristic specifically designed to work under very particular storage application restrictions. The numerical results indicate that all of these new heuristics have good performance standards especially when applied to replications of real input data.     

Temporal kernel CCA and its application in multimodal neuronal data analysis

Data recorded from multiple sources sometimes exhibit non-instantaneous couplings. For simple data sets, cross-correlograms may reveal the coupling dynamics. But when dealing with high-dimensional multivariate data there is no such measure as the cross-correlogram. We propose a simple algorithm based on Kernel Canonical Correlation Analysis (kCCA) that computes a multivariate temporal filter which links one data modality to another one. The filters can be used to compute a multivariate extension of the cross-correlogram, the canonical correlogram, between data sources that have different dimensionalities and temporal resolutions. The canonical correlogram reflects the coupling dynamics between the two sources. The temporal filter reveals which features in the data give rise to these couplings and when they do so. We present results from simulations and neuroscientific experiments showing that tkCCA yields easily interpretable temporal filters and correlograms. In the experiments, we simultaneously performed electrode recordings and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in primary visual cortex of the non-human primate. While electrode recordings reflect brain activity directly, fMRI provides only an indirect view of neural activity via the Blood Oxygen Level Dependent (BOLD) response. Thus it is crucial for our understanding and the interpretation of fMRI signals in general to relate them to direct measures of neural activity acquired with electrodes. The results computed by tkCCA confirm recent models of the hemodynamic response to neural activity and allow for a more detailed analysis of neurovascular coupling dynamics.     

Control of absorption columns in the bioethanol process: Influence of measurement uncertainties

The alcohol lost by evaporation during the bioethanol fermentation process may be collected and recovered using an absorption column. This equipment is also used in the carbonic gas treatment, a by-product from the sugar cane fermentation. In the present work, the development of nonlinear feedforward–feedback controllers, based on neural network inverse models, was proposed and tested to manipulate the absorbent flow rates. The control purposes are: to keep low ethanol concentration in the effluent gas phase from the first absorption column (ethanol recovery column); and to reduce the residual water concentration in the CO₂ gas effluent from the second tower (CO₂ treatment column).Based on simulation studies, the neural network (ANN) controller performance was compared with the conventional PID control scheme application. The best ANN architecture was set up according to the Foresse and Hagan (1997) criterion, while the PID parameters were found from the well-known Cohen–Coon Equations and trial-and-error fine tuning.Initially, performances were evaluated for the system without concentration measurement uncertainties. From these tests, the ANN controller presented the smallest response time and overshoot for regulator and servo problems. Three uncertainty levels were applied afterwards: 5%, 10%, and 15%.The ANN controller outperformed the PID for all uncertainty levels tested for the ethanol recovery column. For the CO₂ treatment column, the ANN controller proceeded successfully under uncertainties of 5% and 10%, while the PID did not deal properly with uncertainties above 5%. The statistical F-test, besides the ITAE, ISE, and IAE performance criteria, were calculated for both controllers applications and then compared. They proved the superiority of the ANN control scheme.Using appropriately the proposed well-controlled absorption columns increases the efficiency of the bioethanol production plant and can also provide carbon credits by avoiding CO₂ emission into the atmosphere.     

Influence of a chip scale package on the frequency response of a MEMS microphone

This paper describes the influence of a chip scale MEMS package (CSMP) on the acoustic behaviour of a silicon microphone. The influence was calculated using an electro-mechanical–acoustical equivalent circuit. Standard packaging of microphones using die bonding and wire bonding leads to a large front volume which acts as a Helmholtz resonator. This can dramatically influence the frequency response of the microphone system by adding a second resonance. In the worst case this second resonance is in the acoustic frequency range, thus degrading its performance in an unacceptable way. In case of the CSMP only a small front volume is generated between the substrate and the flip-chipped microphone chip. Thus the resonance step-up is very small compared to standard packages. Furthermore the frequency response can be flattened by optimizing the geometry of the small sound holes in the substrate. By choosing an appropriate geometry of these sound holes the package can act as a low pass filter where the cut-off frequency can be placed to the desired value of the acoustic spectrum.