The full potential of e-learning, a trend that is of growing importance lately, will not be reaped unless the users fully utilize the system, triggering extensive research to be conducted in order to provide valuable insight on a myriad of variables influencing user acceptance in e-learning systems. The main purpose of the study is to determine the factors that affect the intention of users to use e-learning and to get results which can guide system developers and researchers. In accordance with this purpose, 203 studies investigating the e-learning acceptance of the users through the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) were found in the literature. In those studies, variables which are suggested to determine Perceived Usefulness (PU) and Perceived Ease of Use (PEOU) and results of related hypotheses are analyzed. Finally, a model is proposed. In this model, the most widely accepted hypotheses, affecting PU and PEOU according to the literature are included in the original TAM. As a result; it determines Self Efficacy-PEOU, Subjective Norm-PU, Self Efficacy-PU, Interaction-PU, Enjoyment-PEOU, Anxiety-PEOU, Enjoyment-PU, Compatibility-PU, Subjective Norm-PEOU and Interaction-PEOU as variables that have statistical significance in users’ PU and PEOU, respectively. Moreover, the study examines the relationship between the User Satisfaction and original TAM variables, and proposes the Acceptance and Satisfaction Model for E-Learning (ASME) as a model to best explain the dependent variables described above.

With the rapid progress of network technologies and sensors, monitoring the sensor data such as pressure, temperature, current, vibration and other electrical, mechanical and chemical variables has become much more significant. With the arrival of Big Data and artificial intelligence (AI), sophisticated solutions can be developed to prevent failures and predict the equipment’s remaining useful life (RUL). These techniques allow for taking maintenance actions with haste and precision. Accordingly, this study provides a systematic literature review (SLR) of the predictive maintenance (PdM) techniques in transportation systems. The main focus of this study is the literature covering PdM in the motor vehicles’ industry in the last 5 years. A total of 52 studies were included in the SLR and examined in detail within the scope of our research questions. We provided a summary on statistical, stochastic and AI approaches for PdM applications and their goals, methods, findings, challenges and opportunities. In addition, this study encourages future research by indicating the areas that have not yet been studied in the PdM literature.

The wide usage of information technologies in production has led to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which has enabled real data collection from production tools that are capable of communicating with each other through the Internet of Things (IoT). Real time data improves production control especially in dynamic production environments. This study proposes a decision support system (DSS) designed to increase the performance of dispatching rules in dynamic scheduling using real time data, hence an increase in the overall performance of the job-shop. The DSS can work with all dispatching rules. To analyze its effects, it is run with popular dispatching rules selected from the literature on a simulation model created in Arena^®. When the number of jobs waiting in the queue of any workstation in the job-shop falls to a critical value, the DSS can change the order of schedules in its preceding workstations to feed the workstation as soon as possible. For this purpose, it first determines the jobs in the preceding workstations to be sent to the current workstation, then finds the job with the highest priority number according to the active dispatching rule, and lastly puts this job in the first position in its queue. The DSS is tested under low, normal, and high demand rate scenarios with respect to six performance criteria. It is observed that the DSS improves the system performance by increasing workstation utilization and decreasing both the number of tardy jobs and the amount of waiting time regardless of the employed dispatching rule.

In a production environment, scheduling decides job and machine allocations and the operation sequence. In a job shop production system, the wide variety of jobs, complex routes, and real-life events becomes challenging for scheduling activities. New, unexpected events disrupt the production schedule and require dynamic scheduling updates to the production schedule on an event-based basis. To solve the dynamic scheduling problem, we propose a multi-agent system with reinforcement learning aimed at the minimization of tardiness and flow time to improve the dynamic scheduling techniques. The performance of the proposed multi-agent system is compared with the first-in–first-out, shortest processing time, and earliest due date dispatching rules in terms of the minimization of tardy jobs, mean tardiness, maximum tardiness, mean earliness, maximum earliness, mean flow time, maximum flow time, work in process, and makespan. Five scenarios are generated with different arrival intervals of the jobs to the job shop production system. The results of the experiments, performed for the 3 × 3, 5 × 5, and 10 × 10 problem sizes, show that our multi-agent system overperforms compared to the dispatching rules as the workload of the job shop increases. Under a heavy workload, the proposed multi-agent system gives the best results for five performance criteria, which are the proportion of tardy jobs, mean tardiness, maximum tardiness, mean flow time, and maximum flow time.