In the past decades, a number of researchers have made their significant contributions to develop different approaches for solving a very challenging problem of commercial off-the shelf (COTS) selection. The development of software with high quality and minimum development time has always been a difficult job for the software developers. Therefore, in today’s scenario, software developers move towards the implementation of component based software engineering that relies on the integration of small pieces of code namely (COTS). In this study, we present a comprehensive descriptive explanation of the various COTS evaluation and selection approaches developed by various researchers in the past to understand the concept of COTS selection. The advantages and disadvantages of each COTS selection approach are also provided, which will give a better prospect to the readers to understand the various existing COTS evaluation and selection approaches.

This paper presents a numerical analysis of free vibration of thin circular and annular plate using finite element method. The first five natural frequencies are presented for uniform annular plates of various inner-to-outer radius ratios, with nine possible combinations of free, clamped and simply supported boundary conditions at the inner and outer edges of plates. The accuracy of the method is established by comparing the results available in the literature. Results show that natural frequency parameter increases as the inner-to-outer radius ratio increases except in case of free boundary condition, for which it decreases with the inner-to-outer radius ratio. This result provides benchmark values that can be used to validate result obtained by other approximate approaches such as finite difference method, differential quadrature method and boundary element method.

Force measurement is very vital in various scientific applications and its precise measurement is very necessary for reliability of the measurement process. There are several types of simple shaped force transducers, which may range from ring shaped force transducers to cantilever type or beam type force transducers. Ring shaped force transducers are one of most commonly used type of force transducers are developed on the basis of theory of thin rings. Till today, some of the modifications of ring shaped force transducers have been reported, the present investigation discusses the development of elliptical shaped force transducer as a modification of ring shaped force transducers and its preliminary investigation on metrological characterization based on the calibration procedures according to standards ISO 376-2011. The force transducer has been developed for the nominal capacity of 20 kN and strain gauges have been applied over the optimum locations to minimize cross sensitivity. The force transducer is developed exclusively for static force measurement related applications to serve as a link in providing the traceability to the user industries and calibration laboratories or serve as force transfer standard. The force transducer has been evaluated for suitability as a precision force transducer with the help of the 50 kN Dead Weight force machine traceable to national standard of force. The elliptical shape force transducers are found to have comparable metrological characteristics as compared to other ring shape force transducers.

This paper considers the economic order quantity (EOQ) model over a finite horizon, in which demand rate follows a two-parameter Weibull time-dependent, shortages are allowed and completely backlogged. Mathematical formulations are derived under two different circumstances i.e. case I: The permissible delay is less than or equal time to finish positive inventory for settling the account, and case II: The permissible delay period is greater than time to finish positive inventory for settling the account. Based on the optimal solutions some important results are derived and numerical examples are provided to validate the proposed model. Finally, sensitivity analysis is provided to analyze the effect of changes with the variation in one parameter at a time on the optimal solution.

Supply chain provides continual turbulence with unpredictable disruptions potential for enterprises with complex network infrastructure. Supply chain in enterprises needs to be resilient and sustain-able to provide effective response, removing vulnerabilities and minimizing the impact of negative disturbances. This review article is based on evaluating the role of supply chain management in automobile sector of India. The overall findings derived from review of refined articles state that, in countries like India, automobile industry needs to have appropriate management commitment for sustainability and resilience of supply chain rather than rules and regulations of government. The review article examined 914 articles related to evaluating supply chain management practices in automobile sector of India. Through the analysis of the collected articles, it is evident that DEMATEL is effective technique for providing inter-relationship in automobile industry in India. Rather than economic influence in automobile sector, managerial activity is a major concern for effective sustainable and resilience practices in automobile industry of India.

In this paper, a supply chain inventory model is developed in inflationary environment by incorporating some realistic features such as ramp type demand, deterioration, partial backlogging, inflation, and trade credit. Here, rate of deterioration is linear and partial backlogging rate is variable and dependent on the waiting time for the next replenishment. Depending on the trade credit period, three different situations arise. For each model the optimal replenishment policy is determined. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the proposed inventory model and sensitivity analyses of optimal solutions are given for each case of trapezoidal demand function.

In real world multi criteria decision making (MCDM) problem, it is tough to solve a decision matrix with vague and imprecise data. The degree of impreciseness depends on the kind of data avail-able. For interval valued data this impreciseness is less and interval-valued MCDM methods can be effectively used to solve the problem. A flexible manufacturing system (FMS) selection prob-lem was taken into consideration to find the best FMS among available alternatives. An interval extension of CODAS method is proposed in this paper which was used to solve the problem along with two other interval-valued decision-making methods i.e. interval-valued TOPSIS, interval-valued EDAS. All the three methods are distance-based approaches and it was found that the interval-valued CODAS method gave the exact same ranking with that of interval-valued TOPSIS and interval-valued EDAS.

Green supply chain is a new concept in recent literature. The purpose of the study is to identify the importance of different factors related to green practice, performance and pressure during manufacturing in Indian manufacturing industries. The approach of this research includes in depth literature review, experts interviews and questionnaire surveys. The questionnaires are developed and data are collected through mail and two rounds of data collection were carried out to obtain more reliable responses. The major activities of the green supply chain; namely internal environmental management system, green packaging, green purchasing, eco designing, cooperation with customers, internal recovery, environmental, positive economic, negative economic, regulatory, competition are covered throughout the research. Factor analysis is performed using IBM SPSS 21 statistical software to understand the importance of green supply chain. Factor analysis is used to obtain the relative importance of various factors of green practice, green performance, and pressure. The collected data are analyzed by applying “mean score” method and the graphs are designed in SPSS software to compare the different factors.

In this paper, a deterministic inventory model with depletion rate dependent holding cost is developed. The demand rate is a power function of the on-hand inventory behind to a certain stock level, at which the demand rate becomes a constant. Shortages are allowed and partially backlogged with the function of waiting time of next replenishment. It is also proved in this model that the optimal replenishment policy not only exists but also is unique. Furthermore, it is provided a simple solution procedure for finding the maximum total profit per unit time. Numerical examples have also been given to illustrate the model and real managerial fact in inventory holding for stock dependent demand.

Non-traditional machining (NTM) refers to a variety of thermal, chemical, electrical and mechanical material removal processes, developed to generate complex and intricate shapes in advanced engineering materials with high strength-to-weight ratio. Selection of the optimal NTM process for generating a desired feature on a given material requires the consideration of several factors among which the type of the work material and shape to be machined are the most significant ones. Presence of a large number of NTM processes along with their complex characteristics and capabilities, and lack of experts in NTM process selection domain compel for development of a structured approach for NTM process selection for a given machining application. Thus, the objective of this paper is set to develop a decision-making model in Visual BASIC 6.0 to automate the NTM process selection procedure with the help of graphical user interface and visual decision aids. It is also integrated with quality function deployment technique to correlate the customers’ requirements (product characteristics) with technical requirements (process characteristics). Four illustrative examples are also provided to demonstrate the potentiality of the developed model in solving NTM process selection problems.