Informatica Economica Vol. 16 No. 2/2012

Issue Topic: Data Quality

Issue Editor: Cristian CIUREA, PhD

CONTENTS

Applications of Operational Research Techniques in Optimization to Visit Tourist Points of Viña del Mar
João CARDOSO NETO, Cleibson Aparecido de ALMEIDA, Giovani ROVEROTO, José Danilo Haick TAVARES 5
Chile is a country with great attractions for tourists in South America and the whole world. Among the many tourist Chilean attractions the city of Vina del Mar is one of the highlights, recognized nationally and internationally as one of the most beautiful places for summer. In Vina del Mar tourists have many options for leisure, besides pretty beaches, e.g. playa renaca, the city has beautiful squares and castles, e.g. Castillo Wulff built more than 100 (one hundred) years ago. It is noteworthy that already exist over there five (5) tourist itineraries, so this work was developed in order to determine the best routes to these existing itineraries, and create a unique route that includes all the tourist points in Vina del Mar, because in this way, the tourists visiting this city can minimize the time spent in traveling, as well as optimize their moments of leisure, taking the opportunity to know all the city attractions. To determine shorter ways to do it and then propose some suggestions for improvement of the quality of the tourist service offered, it had used the exact method, by solving the mathematical model of the TSP (Traveling Salesman Problem), and the heuristic method, using the most economic insertion algorithm.
Keywords: Tourism, Chile, Vina del Mar, Traveling Salesman Problem

Hierarchical Planning Methodology for a Supply Chain Management
Virna ORTIZ-ARAYA, Víctor M. ALBORNOZ 14
Hierarchical production planning is a widely utilized methodology for real world capacitated production planning systems with the aim of establishing different decision–making levels of the planning issues on the time horizon considered. This paper presents a hierarchical approach proposed to a company that produces reusable shopping bags in Chile and Perú, to determine the optimal allocation of resources at the tactical level as well as over the most immediate planning horizon to meet customer demands for the next weeks. Starting from an aggregated production planning model, the aggregated decisions are disaggregated into refined decisions in two levels, using a couple of optimization models that impose appropriate constraints to keep coherence of the plan on the production system. The main features of the hierarchical solution approach are presented.
Keywords: Supply Chain Management, Production Planning, Hierarchical Production Plan-ning

Initial Conditions to Implement a Process Redesign Methodology for Manufacturing Enterprises
Eliana PEÑA TIBADUIZA, María del Pilar DIAZ JAIMES, Néstor ORTIZ PIMIENTO 19
Process redesign methodologies have several conditions that enterprises must reach to obtain a more efficient implementation process. Up to now, there is not a clear definition of these re-quirements. This paper presents the conditions for manufacturing enterprises, based on a re-view of the maturity models that apply to these kinds of companies. These conditions include five organization aspects: strategy, process, people, control and information systems. After the review of the maturity models’ practices for the aspect “process”, ergonomics and maintenance were considered to complement this category.
Keywords: Initial Conditions, Manufacture Process Redesign, Maturity Models, Process Im-provement

Marriage in Honey Bees Optimization Algorithm for Flow-shop Problems
Pedro PALOMINOS, Francisco TOLEDO, Andrés VÉJAR, Miguel ALFARO 27
The objective of this work is to make a comparative study of the Marriage in Honeybees Op-timization (MBO) metaheuristic for flow-shop scheduling problems. This paper is focused on the design possibilities of the mating flight space shared by queens and drones. The proposed algorithm uses a 2-dimensional torus as an explicit mating space instead of the simulated an-nealing one in the original MBO. After testing different alternatives with benchmark datasets, the results show that the modeled and implemented metaheuristic is effective to solve flow-shop type problems, providing a new approach to solve other NP-Hard problems.
Keywords: Metaheuristics, Flow-Shop, Scheduling, Bio Inspired Optimization

Conceptual Analysis for the Strategic and Operational Knowledge Management of a Port Community
Claudia DURAN, Felisa CORDOVA 35
Ports working in a network-community that is composed of a group of associative enterprises and logistic chains require managing their strategic and operational knowledge for achieving the efficiency of their activities at both levels. A conceptual model is presented that allows the development of a strategy for a port community through a strategic planning approach using operational knowledge. The different actors that participate in the community, their roles, and the main processes in which they participate are characterized. Then the vision and the mission of the community, and the strategic objectives in the four perspectives of the Balanced Scorecard: financial, clients, processes, and learning and growth, are defined. Finally, a set of indicators oriented toward the knowledge management of the main actors participating in the community is designed.
Keywords: Strategy; Knowledge Management; Communities, Business Plan, Balanced Scorecard

Firefly Algorithm for Economic Power Dispatching with Pollutants Emission
Latifa DEKHICI, Khaled BELKADI, Pierre BORNE 45
Bio-inspired algorithms become among the most powerful algorithms for optimization. In this paper, we intend to provide one of the recent bio-inspired metaheuristic which is the Firefly Algorithm (FF) to optimize power dispatching. For evaluation, we adapt the particle swarm optimization to the problem in the same way as the firefly algorithm. The application is done in an IEEE-14 and on two thermal plant networks. In one of the examples, we neglect power loss and pollutant emissions. The comparison with the particle swarm optimization (PSO), demonstrate the efficiency of firefly algorithm to reach the best cost in less than one second.
Keywords: Firefly Algorithm, Economic Power Dispatching, Particle Swarm Optimization, Pollutant Emissions

Cyber Security Scenarios and Control for Small and Medium Enterprises
Nilaykumar Kiran SANGANI, Balakrishnan VIJAYAKUMAR 58
As the world advances towards the computing era, security threats keeps on increasing in the form of malware, viruses, internet attack, theft of IS assets / technology and a lot more. This is a major concern for any form of business. Loss in company’s status / liability / reputation is a huge downfall for a running business. We have witnessed the attacks getting carried out; large firm’s data getting breached / government bodies’ sites getting phished / attacked. These huge entities have technology expertise to safeguard their company’s interest against such attacks through investing huge amounts of capital in manpower and secure tools. But what about SMEs? SMEs enrich a huge part of the country’s economy. Big organizations have their own security measures policy which ideally is not applied when it comes to a SME. The aim of this paper is to come out with an Information Security Assurance Cyber Control for SMEs (ISACC) against common cyber security threats implemented at a cost effective measure.
Keywords: Information Security, Cyber Threats, Small and Medium Size Enterprises, Security Threats

Semantic Business Intelligence - A New Generation of Business Intelligence
Dinu AIRINEI, Dora-Anca BERTA 72
Business Intelligence Solutions represents applications used by companies to manage process and analyze data to provide substantiated decision. In the context of Semantic Web develop-ment trend is to integrate semantic unstructured data, making business intelligence solutions to be redesigned in such a manner that can analyze, process and synthesize, in addition to traditional data and data integrated with semantic another form and structure. This invariably leads appearance of new BI solution, called Semantic Business Intelligence.
Keywords: Business Intelligence, Semantic Business Intelligence, Semantic Web, Semantic In-tegration, Unstructured Data

Applying Supervised Opinion Mining Techniques on Online User Reviews
Ion SMEUREANU, Cristian BUCUR 81
In recent years, the spectacular development of web technologies, lead to an enormous quantity of user generated information in online systems. This large amount of information on web platforms make them viable for use as data sources, in applications based on opinion mining and sentiment analysis. The paper proposes an algorithm for detecting sentiments on movie user reviews, based on naive Bayes classifier. We make an analysis of the opinion mining domain, techniques used in sentiment analysis and its applicability. We implemented the proposed algorithm and we tested its performance, and suggested directions of development.
Keywords: Opinion Mining, Web Content, Mining, Sentiment Analysis, Naïve Bayes

Modernization Solution for Legacy Banking System Using an Open Architecture
Constantin Marian MATEI 92
Banks are still using legacy systems as the core of their business is comprised within such sys-tems. Since the technology and client demands are changing rapidly, the banks have to adapt their systems in order to be competitive. The issue is to identify correctly what are the bank users preferences in terms of software reliability and how modern is the system For instance, there are users who enjoy working using the old screen format, and there are users who enjoy working with newer layouts, Web interfaces, and so on. We need also to know the constraints generated by the usage of legacy systems, and how these systems can be improved or replaced. The scope of the article is to present a solution of modernizing a legacy banking system by using a SOA approach. The research is based on the modernization of a legacy system developed in COBOL/400 under IBM iSeries. The modernization process uses a SOA ap-proach using JAVA technologies.
Keywords: Legacy Systems, Architecture, Services, Front Office, Back Office, Server, Message Queue, SOA