The 5th International Asia Conference on Industrial Engineering and Management Innovation is sponsored by the Chinese Industrial Engineering Institution and organized by Xi’an Jiaotong University. The conference aims to share and disseminate information on the most recent and relevant researches, theories and practices in industrial and system engineering to promote their development and application in university and enterprises.

This handbook covers recent advances in the integration of three areas, namely, cloud computing, cyber-physical systems, and the Internet of things which is expected to have a tremendous impact on our daily lives. It contains a total of thirteen peer-reviewed and edited chapters. This book covers topics such as context-aware cyber-physical systems, sustainable cloud computing, fog computing, and cloud monitoring; both the theoretical and practical aspects belonging to these topics are discussed. All the chapters also discuss open research challenges in the areas mentioned above. Finally, the handbook presents three use cases regarding healthcare, smart buildings and disaster management to assist the audience in understanding how to develop next-generation IoT- and cloud-enabled cyber-physical systems. This timely handbook is edited for students, researchers, as well as professionals who are interested in the rapidly growing fields of cloud computing, cyber-physical systems, and the Internet of things.

This book reports four structural equation models (SEM) for quantifying the relationship between the most important lean manufacturing (LM) practices applied to the manufacturing industry. The SEMs are evaluated using 220 responses to a survey applied to manufacturing companies applying LM principles in the production system and are related to: distribution and maintenance, production process and quality system, supply chain and quality, and an integrator model. The findings identify the most important activities for every LM practices and how they are related. These relationship’ values will help administrators, managers, engineers to focus their efforts on these most important activities, facilitating the decision-making process.

Decision support systems (DSS) are widely touted for their effectiveness in aiding decision making, particularly across a wide and diverse range of industries including healthcare, business, and engineering applications. The concepts, principles, and theories of enhanced decision making are essential points of research as well as the exact methods, tools, and technologies being implemented in these industries. From both a standpoint of DSS interfaces, namely the design and development of these technologies, along with the implementations, including experiences and utilization of these tools, one can get a better sense of how exactly DSS has changed the face of decision making and management in multi-industry applications. Furthermore, the evaluation of the impact of these technologies is essential in moving forward in the future. The Research Anthology on Decision Support Systems and Decision Management in Healthcare, Business, and Engineering explores how decision support systems have been developed and implemented across diverse industries through perspectives on the technology, the utilizations of these tools, and from a decision management standpoint. The chapters will cover not only the interfaces, implementations, and functionality of these tools, but also the overall impacts they have had on the specific industries mentioned. This book also evaluates the effectiveness along with benefits and challenges of using DSS as well as the outlook for the future. This book is ideal for decision makers, IT consultants and specialists, software developers, design professionals, academicians, policymakers, researchers, professionals, and students interested in how DSS is being used in different industries.

Stochastic global optimization methods and applications to chemical, biochemical, pharmaceutical and environmental processes presents various algorithms that include the genetic algorithm, simulated annealing, differential evolution, ant colony optimization, tabu search, particle swarm optimization, artificial bee colony optimization, and cuckoo search algorithm. The design and analysis of these algorithms is studied by applying them to solve various base case and complex optimization problems concerning chemical, biochemical, pharmaceutical, and environmental engineering processes. Design and implementation of various classical and advanced optimization strategies to solve a wide variety of optimization problems makes this book beneficial to graduate students, researchers, and practicing engineers working in multiple domains. This book mainly focuses on stochastic, evolutionary, and artificial intelligence optimization algorithms with a special emphasis on their design, analysis, and implementation to solve complex optimization problems and includes a number of real applications concerning chemical, biochemical, pharmaceutical, and environmental engineering processes.

Martin Leichtman's The Rorschach is a work of stunning originality that takes as its point of departure a circumstance that has long confounded Rorschach examiners. Attempts to use the Rorschach with young children yield results that are inconsistent if not comical. What, after all, does one make of a protocol when the child treats a card like a frisbee or confidently detects "piadigats" and "red foombas"? A far more consequential problem facing examiners of adults and children alike concerns the very nature of the Rorschach test. Despite voluminous literature establishing the personality correlates of particular Rorschach scores, neither Hermann Rorschach nor his intellectual descendants have provided an adequate explanation of precisely what the subject is being asked to do. Is the Rorschach a test of imagination? Of perception? Of projection? In point of fact, Leichtman argues, the two problems are intimately related. To appreciate the stages through which children gradually master the Rorschach in its standard form is to discover the nature of the test itself. Integrating his developmental analysis with an illuminating discussion of the extensive literature on test administration, scoring, and interpretation, Leichtman arrives at a new understanding of the Rorschach as a test of representation and creativity. This finding, in turn, leads to an intriguing reconceptualization of all projective tests that clarifies their relationships to more objective measures of ability.

The 77th Annual International Meeting of the Psychometric Society (IMPS) brought together quantitative researchers who focus on methods relevant to psychology. The conference included workshops, invited talks by well-known scholars, and presentations of submitted papers and posters. It was hosted by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and took place between the 9th and 12th of July, 2012. The chapters of this volume are based on presentations from the meeting and reflect the latest work in the field. Topics with a primarily measurement focus include studies of item response theory, computerized adaptive testing, cognitive diagnostic modeling, and psychological scaling. Additional psychometric topics relate to structural equation modeling, factor analysis, causal modeling, mediation, missing data methods, and longitudinal data analysis, among others. The papers in this volume will be especially useful for researchers (graduate students and other quantitative researchers) in the social sciences who use quantitative methods, particularly psychologists. Most readers will benefit from some prior knowledge of statistical methods in reading the chapters.