When a scheduling environment is static and system attributes are deterministic, a manufacturing schedule can be obtained by applying analytical tools such as mathematical modelling technology, dynamic programming, the branch- and-bound method or other developed searching algorithms. Unfortunately, a scheduling environment is usually dynamic in a real manufacturing world. A production system may vary with time and require production managers to change schedule repeatedly. Therefore, the main aim here was to find a scheduling method that could reduce the need for rescheduling. An approach called Functional Virtual Population was proposed as assistance to learn robust scheduling knowledge for manufacturing systems under rationally changing environments. The used techniques include machine learning with artificial neural networks and IF-THEN scheduling rules. To illustrate the study in detail, a simulated flexible manufacturing system consisting of four machines, four parts, one automatic guided vehicle and eight buffers was built as the foundation for learning the concept. Also, Pythia software (a back-propagation-based neural networks) was employed as the learning tool in the learning procedure.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the sales of fast-food businesses have dropped sharply. Customer satisfaction has always been one of the key factors for the sustainable development of enterprises. However, in the fast-food restaurant business, gaining the knowledge of customer satisfaction is one of the critical tasks. Moreover, text reviews in social media have become one of important reference sources for customers’ decisions in buying services and products. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to explore whether customer voices from social media reviews are different during the COVID-19 outbreak and to propose a new method to reduce interpersonal contact when collecting data. A text mining scheme which includes least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) and decision trees (DT) are presented to discover the essential factors for customers to increase their satisfaction from unstructured online customer reviews. Finally, three real world review sets were employed to validate the effectiveness of the presented text mining scheme. Experimental results can help companies to properly adapt to similar epidemic situations in the future and facilitate their sustainable development.

First-year students’ learning performance has received much attention in educational practice and theory. Previous works used some variables, which should be obtained during the course or in the progress of the semester through questionnaire surveys and interviews, to build prediction models. These models cannot provide enough timely support for the poor performance students, caused by economic factors. Therefore, other variables are needed that allow us to reach prediction results earlier. This study attempts to use family background variables that can be obtained prior to the start of the semester to build learning performance prediction models of freshmen using random forest (RF), C5.0, CART, and multilayer perceptron (MLP) algorithms. The real sample of 2407 freshmen who enrolled in 12 departments of a Taiwan vocational university will be employed. The experimental results showed that CART outperforms C5.0, RF, and MLP algorithms. The most important features were mother’s occupations, department, father’s occupations, main source of living expenses, and admission status. The extracted knowledge rules are expected to be indicators for students’ early performance prediction so that strategic intervention can be planned before students begin the semester.

The theory of attractive quality (the Kano model) can offer a better understanding of how customers evaluate products, and helps practitioners to focus on the most important quality attributes to improve. However, in practice, users of the Kano model usually cannot find an attractive or one-dimensional quality element due to an improperly-designed questionnaire, poorly-defined quality attributes or lifecycle of quality attributes. Kano also indicated that attractive quality creation to bring a must-be product back to an attractive product is a tough task. To solve these issues, this study proposed a novel Creativity-based Kano model (C-Kano model) which integrates the creativity techniques, TRIZ and SCAMPER, into the traditional Kano model. The proposed C-Kano model not only discovers customer needs, but also creates attractive quality elements. In this study, an actual quality survey of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the C-Kano model. Compared with the traditional Kano model, the experimental results show that our proposed model is superior in discovering attractive quality elements.

The development of social media has changed the way that travelers visit sightseeing spots. The social Internet of Things (IoT) allows products to automatically generate posts, share content and location information, and help build an online community of users based on their company’s products, so that marketing personnel can also get useful feedback and understand the user’s opinions. In tourism and hospitality industry, to enhance the revisit intention of passengers is an important issue for the purpose of increasing margin. In recent years, related researches had focused on the customers’ revisit behaviors and factors. However, few studies have investigated the related issues that travelers do not want to visit again. Failure to revisit may bring a great damage to the company’s revenue in the future. To avoid this situation, a text mining based approach will be proposed to identify non-revisit factors from online textual reviews in social media. Because it is impossible to determine whether a passenger has intention to revisit, this study proposed a text mining based approach which uses sentiment of text reviews to identify the passenger’s motivations (negative for revisit and non-negative for revisit). Then, feature selection methods, decision tree (DT), Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO), and Support Vector Machines Recursive Feature Elimination (SVM-RFE) will be utilized to discover the important factors of non-revisit factor set. Back-propagation Neural Networks (BPN) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) will be employed to evaluate the effectiveness of selected feature sets. Finally, experimental results could be provided to travel service providers to improve service quality and effectively avoid non-revisit behaviors in the future.