Earticle

This paper will present the results of a study which included the development of a quality management model, based on an extensive literature survey, and the empirical validation of the model. The study was designed to address two major research questions: 1. What is a plausible model of the quality management process? Specifically, the study aimed to determine which quality management constructs or practices should be included in a model of quality management. Additionally, the study identified or hypothesized a set of relationships among the underlying constructs, and 2. Which of the hypothesized relationships included in the model were supported empirically by real world data? A review of the literature provided the basis for the answers to both parts of question one. A model consisting of eight quality management practices, and five performance measures was developed. The literature review provided support for a proposed set of relationships among the thirteen constructs included in the quality management model. The proposed relationships formed the basis of a set of nine hypotheses tested in the study. A survey instrument was developed, from published indicators, to collect perceptual data about the utilization of quality management practices in companies and the perceived impact of these practices on performance measures. Structural equation modelling was employed to analyze the data collected from two hundred and ninety five respondents at organizations throughout the United States. The resulting model has utility for quality practitioners and researchers since it serves as an organizing framework for understanding the quality management process.

The paper develops a systematic method for kinematics modeling of multi-legged robots for walking on rough terrain. An extended D-H table is proposed for characterizing the robot joints and linkages parameters that capture the motion. The equations of motions are set up using this table for different frames starting from the robot reference frame, going through individual legs and finally reaching feet-terrain contact frames. The composite equation of motion is formed from those of individual legs. The formulation allows determining actuations to various joints for achieving a desired robot motion, while optimizing a performance index such as a stability measure. For illustration, the method is applied to SILO4, an articulated quadruped.

The access control system is a very important step in the implementation of the security policy of an information system. Access control checks what a user can do directly, as well as what programs executing on behalf of the users are allowed to do. In this way the access control seeks to prevent the activities which will be able to endanger the safety of the system. The aim of this paper is to try to model the access control system in the operating systems of the type UNIX. The modeling will be based on a combining of the UNIX access control system, namely Super-User model, and RBAC1 model [1, 11, 12]. In order to get a model nearest possible at reality, we will use the notion of roles and the privileges graph to build our graph. The properties of graph theory well are used in order to evaluate the stability and the robustness of our model.

The focus of this paper is on the design of a decentralized state observer based decentralized guaranteed cost control for a class of large scale nonlinear interconnected systems whilst the nonlinear part is norm bounded. Sufficient conditions for the asymptotic stability of the developed feedback control scheme are proposed in terms of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) constraints, which can be efficiently solved by the LMI optimization techniques, to compute the control and the observation gains of the overall system, to maximize the domain of nonlinearity which leave the overall system stable and to minimize the upper bound of a given performance index. The efficiency of the proposed control approach is highlighted by numerical simulation dealing with the robust stabilization of a power system with three interconnected machines.