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The Czech Republic, like many countries in Central and Eastern Europe, has a tremendous task ahead in transforming its economy, and the individual enterprises that contribute to it, into a competitive, modern, economy. This requires a major attitude change for most organisations and requires skills and experience which are significantly under‐developed. Change is starting to happen and the techniques of industrial engineering are being harnessed to facilitate organisational change. Outlines the transformation required, the approach and the steps being taken, and the supporting and facilitating processes providing the necessary knowledge and expertise.

An account is given of futures research as a scientifically oriented field of knowledge. Its specific contemporary task as a study of transient change of the human society is described and the futures research approach is outlined. A generalization of the concept of knowledge of the standard sciences is presented as a sine qua non to futurology. The relationship between knowledge and information is elaborated and clarified, which makes it possible to better understand the present era as an information age.

In order to implement the sustainable development principles of Agenda 21 some municipalities in Sweden have developed scenarios for sustainable local societies. These scenarios differ from the two previous generations of scenarios in the sense that they require the participation of citizens in their preparation and implementation. This article discusses the premises of the three generations of scenarios: expert, hybrids and participatory. It describes the efforts to prepare a participatory scenario by the municipal government of Orebro (Sweden) in order to provide guidelines for a sustainable society. The article also discusses a method for preparing such a scenario.

The purpose of this paper is to compare indicative expected changes in maintenance costs due to changes in corrosion of building facades caused by climate change or by possible reduction of air pollution, in Norway and Europe.

Available climate and pollution dose‐corrosion response functions from the literature were used to calculate corrosion costs for buildings façades and construction surfaces. Metals and stone were used as indicator materials.

An annual average temperature increase of 2°C and increase in precipitation of 20 per cent in the city of Bergen in western Norway in the twenty‐first century is likely to increase maintenance costs of building facades as much or more than a 50 per cent reduction in the concentrations of single air pollutants, and similarly to between 20 per cent and 50 per cent reduction in all the air pollutants, minus chloride, that have been found to corrode the materials. An increase in costs up to about 1 Euro/m² 10 years can be expected, but depending on surface material. This is in contrast with an approximate European average situation where no change in precipitation is expected during the twenty‐first century and an increase in temperature will result in reduced corrosion of metals due to drying up of surfaces and reduced maintenance costs. The maintenance costs for Portland limestone surfaces may increase for the European average situation due to an increased effect of air pollution on corrosion at higher temperature. Reduction in amounts of precipitation is expected in southern Europe. This will further reduce corrosion rates and maintenance costs for all materials.

The results reported include the uncertainty inherent in climate model scenarios and in the empirically derived dose‐response functions. Degradation of real building facades varies depending on factors such as building design, type of surface materials and surface treatments.

Reduction of air pollutants, monitoring of degradation, adjustment of building standards and guidelines, and use of more suitable materials and building techniques are some possible measures to adapt to increased atmospheric corrosion of buildings caused by climate change.

Expected increase in maintenance costs is one additional expense for society due to climate change, which can contribute to reduced welfare and increased social stress.

The comparison of expected future degradation and cost of maintenance of building facades due to climate change and due to change in air pollution makes the practical significance of such changes more evident.

This paper aims to present a model of a multi‐phase multi‐product manufacturing system considering a CONstant work‐in‐process (CONWIP) control mechanism and using continuous‐time Markov chain modelling approach.

The model includes defining a state space then constructing the rate matrix, which contains the transition rates, followed by formulating the transition matrix. The time‐dependent probabilities that a product is in a particular state at a certain time are characterized. Performance measures related to the statistics on the waiting time and average number of work‐in‐process in the production system have been determined. Consequently, a numerical example is presented to illustrate the computations of different model aspects.

The analyses explain a foundation needed for analyzing the steady state behavior of manufacturing systems. Results have shown how production data can be easily modified for what‐if analyses by the use of Excel add‐in tool.

The multi‐level model outlines a framework that provides a practical tool for production engineers seeking to enhance the performance of their production system by selecting the best order release mechanism.

A novel aspect of the work reported in this paper is the application of Chapman‐Kolmogrov mathematics and CONWIP ordering theory, which is developed for evaluating and managing CONWIP controlled production systems.

The purpose of this paper is balancing multi-manned assembly lines with load-balancing constraints in addition to conventional ones Most research works about the multi-manned assembly line balancing problems are focused on the conventional industrial measures that minimize total number of workers, number of multi-manned workstations or both.

This paper provides a remedial constraint for the model to balance task load density for each worker in workstations.

Comparisons between the proposed mathematical model and the existing multi-manned mathematical model show a quite promising better task load density performance for the proposed approach.

In this paper, a mathematical model that combines the minimization of multi-manned stations, worker numbers and difference of task load density of workers is proposed for the first time.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of economic conditions on various categories of criminal activities in Malaysia for the period 1973‐2003.

The autoregressive distributed lag bounds testing procedure was employed as the main tool. Dynamic ordinary least squares was also used to check the robustness of the results.

The results indicate that murder, armed robbery, rape, assault, daylight burglary, and motorcycle theft exhibit long‐run relationships with economic conditions, and the causal effect in all cases runs from economic conditions to crime rates and not vice versa. In the long‐run, strong economic performances have a positive impact on murder, rape, assault, daylight burglary, and motorcycle theft, while on the other hand, economic conditions have negative impact on armed robbery.

Further researches using other macroeconomic variables and also other countries are encouraged.

The important implication of this result is that real gross national product per capita is an exogenous variable and it is, therefore, useful for fiscal policy variable. Government of the day should seriously consider the results of this study in any crimefighting policies that are formulated.

An economic viewpoint of criminal activities in Malaysia.

Motivated by recent research indicating that the operational performance of an enterprise can be enhanced by building a supporting data-driven environment in which to operate, this paper presents a simulation framework that enables an examination of the effects of applying smart manufacturing principles to conventional production systems, intending to transition to digital platforms.

To investigate the extent to which conventional production systems can be transformed into novel data-driven environments, the well-known constant work-in-process (CONWIP) production systems and considered production sequencing assignments in flowshops were studied. As a result, a novel data-driven priority heuristic, Net-CONWIP was designed and studied, based on the ability to collect real-time information about customer demand and work-in-process inventory, which was applied as part of a distributed and decentralised production sequencing analysis. Application of heuristics like the Net-CONWIP is only possible through the ability to collect and use real-time data offered by a data-driven system. A four-stage application framework to assist practitioners in applying the proposed model was created.

To assess the robustness of the Net-CONWIP heuristic under the simultaneous effects of different levels of demand, its different levels of variability and the presence of bottlenecks, the performance of Net-CONWIP with conventional CONWIP systems that use first come, first served priority rule was compared. The results show that the Net-CONWIP priority rule significantly reduced customer wait time in all cases relative to FCFS.

Previous research suggests there is considerable value in creating data-driven environments. This study provides a simulation framework that guides the construction of a digital transformation environment. The suggested framework facilitates the inclusion and analysis of relevant smart manufacturing principles in production systems and enables the design and testing of new heuristics that employ real-time data to improve operational performance. An approach that can guide the structuring of data-driven environments in production systems is currently lacking. This paper bridges this gap by proposing a framework to facilitate the design of digital transformation activities, explore their impact on production systems and improve their operational performance.

Within team-oriented approaches, tasks are assigned to teams before being assigned to workstations as a reality of industry. So it becomes clear, which workers assemble which tasks.

Team numbers of the assembly line can increase with the number of tasks, but at the same time, due to physical situations of the stations, there will be limitations of maximum working team numbers in a station. For this purpose, heuristic assembly line balancing (ALB) procedure is used and mathematical model is developed for the problem.

Well-known assembly line test problems widely used in the literature are solved to indicate the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed approach in practice.

This paper draws attention to ALB problem in which workers have been assigned to teams in advance due to the need for specialized skills or equipment on the line for the first time.