A survey on measuring the effect of website on customer satisfaction

During the past few years, there has an increasing trend on using internet facilities to do different personal banking. People transfer money, pay their bills and even purchase shares of different companies using internet. There is also an increasing competition among banks and other financial institutions through providing new web based facilities. There is no doubt that a bank with no online banking can easily lose market share. The primary purpose of this paper is to investigate how a bank website can impact customer loyalty. The proposed study is implemented for one of governmental Iranian banks called Bank of Industry and Mine. The study distributes a questionnaire among 330 people who use the internet banking of this bank. We then analyze their feedback using structural equation system and all the hypothesis are confirmed

Design and evaluation of a real-time fuel-optimal control system for series hybrid electric vehicles

Razavian, R. S., Taghavipour, A., Azad, N. L., & McPhee, J. (2012). Design and evaluation of a real-time fuel-optimal control system for series hybrid electric vehicles. International Journal of Electric and Hybrid Vehicles, 4(3), 260. Final version published by Inderscience Publishers, and available at: https://doi.org/10.1504/IJEHV.2012.050501We propose a real-time optimal controller that will reduce fuel consumption in a series hybrid electric vehicle (HEV). This real-time drive cycle-independent controller is designed using a control-oriented model and Pontryagin's minimum principle for an off-line optimisation problem, and is shown to be optimal in real-time applications. Like other proposed controllers in the literature, this controller still requires some information about future driving conditions, but the amount of information is reduced. Although the controller design procedure explained here is based on a series HEV with NiMH battery as the electric energy storage, the same procedure can be used to find the supervisory controller for a series HEV with an ultra-capacitor. To evaluate the performance of the model-based controller, it is coupled to a high-fidelity series HEV model that includes physics-based component models and low-level controllers. The simulation results show that the simplified control-oriented model is accurate enough in predicting real vehicle behaviour, and final fuel consumption can be reduced using the model-based controller. Such a reduction in HEVs fuel consumption will significantly contribute to nationwide fuel saving.The authors would like to thank the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada, Toyota, and Maplesoft for their support of this research

Orbit Estimation Using a Horizon Detector in the Presence of Uncertain Celestial Body Rotation and Geometry

This paper presents an orbit estimation using non-simultaneous horizon detector measurements in the presence of uncertainties in the celestial body rotational velocity and its geometrical characteristics. The celestial body is modelled as a tri-axial ellipsoid with a three-dimensional force field. The non-simultaneous modelling provides the possibility to consider the time gap between horizon measurements. An unscented Kalman filter is used to estimate the spacecraft motion states and estimate the geometric characteristics as well as the rotational velocity of the celestial body. A Monte-Carlo simulation is implemented to verify the results. Simulations showed that using non-simultaneous horizon vector measurements, the spacecraft state errors converge to zero even in the presence of an uncertain geometry and rotational velocity of the celestial body.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in Acta Astronautic

Regional employment change - task change, occupations and industries

In this thesis, I study how routinization-the process of codifying and automating job tasks-influences regional employment change. I examine two questions. First, does routinization drive employment change in US metropolitan areas after controlling for occupation and industry mix? Second, does overall employment change occur more strongly through occupational change than industry change across US metropolitan areas? My analysis finds that routinization is a major determinant of both total and relative changes across industry-occupation employment groups; changes in industry group employment have been more important influences on overall employment change than changes in occupation group employment; the difference between occupation group and industry group effects are lessening over time; and joint industry and occupation effects are decreasingly less important in understanding employment change. These findings underscore the importance of task--change in determining employment change and in understanding industries versus occupations as categories for analyzing the evolution of regional economies

Measuring Purchase‐decision involvement ,

Nowadays, increasing competition is forcing businesses to pay more attention on customer satisfaction providing strong customer services. Increased competition has also increased marketing activities. This paper presents an empirical investigation to determine important factors influencing purchase decision involvement in food industry in city of Tehran, Iran. The study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale, distributes it among 270 experts in food industry and, using principle component (PCA) analysis, extracts important group of factors. The questionnaire consists of 27 questions, which is reduced to 23 questions because of sensitivity of the PCA to Skewness of data. Cronbach alpha is calculated as 0.81, which is well above the minimum acceptable level. The results indicate that there were four factors including individual differences, product validation, triggers and dependent behavior influencing purchasing decisions

Design and evaluation of a predictive powertrain control system for a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle to improve the fuel economy and the emissions

Taghavipour, A., Azad, N. L., & McPhee, J. Design and evaluation of a predictive powertrain control system for a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle to improve the fuel economy and the emissions. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part D: Journal of Automobile Engineering, 229(5), 624–640. Copyright © 2014 SAGE. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0954407014547925In this article, a power management scheme for a plug-in power-split hybrid electric vehicle is designed on the basis of the model predictive control concept of charge depletion plus charge sustenance strategy and the blended-mode strategy. The commands of model predictive control are applied to the powertrain components through appropriate low-level controllers: standard proportional–integral controllers for electric machines, and sliding-mode controllers for engine torque control. Minimization of the engine emissions is a key factor for designing the engine’s low-level controller. Applying this control scheme to a validated high-fidelity model of a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, developed in the MapleSim environment with a chemistry-based Lithium-ion battery model, results in considerable improvements in the fuel economy and the emissions performance.NSERCToyotaMaplesoft Industrial Research Chair progra

An optimal power management strategy for power split plug-in hybrid electric vehicles

Originally published by Inderscience: Taghavipour, A., Azad, N. L., & McPhee, J. (2012). An optimal power management strategy for power split plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. International Journal of Vehicle Design, 60(3/4), 286. doi:10.1504/ijvd.2012.050085Model Predictive Control (MPC) can be an interesting concept for designing a power management strategy for Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEVs) according to its capability of online optimisation by receiving current information from the powertrain and handling hard constraints on such problems. In this paper, a power management strategy for a power split plug-in HEV is proposed using the concept of MPC to evaluate the effectiveness of this method on minimising the fuel consumption of those vehicles. Also, the results are compared with dynamic programming

Real-time predictive control strategy for a plug-in hybrid electric powertrain

The final publication is available at Elsevier via https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mechatronics.2015.04.020 © 2015. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Model predictive control is a promising approach to exploit the potentials of modern concepts and to fulfill the automotive requirements. Since, it is able to handle constrained multi-input multi-output optimal control problems. However, when it comes to implementation, the MPC computational effort may cause a concern for real-time applications. To maintain the advantage of a predictive control approach and improve its implementation speed, we can solve the problem parametrically. In this paper, we design a power management strategy for a Toyota Prius plug-in hybrid powertrain (PHEV) using explicit model predictive control (eMPC) based on a new control-oriented model to improve the real-time implementation performance. By implementing the controller to a PHEV model through model and hardware-in-the-loop simulation, we get promising fuel economy as well as real-time simulation speed.NSERCToyotaMaplesoft Industrial Research Chair progra