A large number of scheduling systems for steel production processes have been developed so far. However, many of the systems have not been used because of their failure to satisfy the operators. This failure was caused by so many illogical operational constraints and objective functions to be considered that it was difficult to present a schedule to meet the needs of the operators. In order to develop a successful scheduler for a steel production process, it is essential to design an easy-touse user interface and an optimization engine which can promptly prepare a high quality schedule. This interactive scheduler needs to provide a huge amount of information in response to the user requirements and also improve the schedule step by step upon obtaining the user'’s consent. We demonstrated the effect of this interactive scheduler by applying it to a cast scheduling at real works.

This paper describes a gas consumption monitoring system with a conventional camera. In it,this system captures the image and extracts the meter area. Next, it recognizes the number by fuzzy inference. Finally, it evaluates the gas consumption by interpolation of the lacked or unsuccessfully recognized numbers. The experimental result shows that this system successfully identified the gas consumption in the various conditions and shows high recognition rate in 24 hours measurement in real situation. These facts show the system is available for elderly home alone to care the life through the gas consumption monitoring.

Facility layout planning (FLP) is one of the most important stages in the design of manufacturing systems. A major approach is to define an evaluation index based on distance and find a layout which minimizes it. In this approach, temporal efficiency is not considered in this stage but in the stage of production scheduling performed after completing FLP. The resultant temporal efficiency may not be optimal enough, since the scheduling is performed under the fixed layout. From this point of view, integration of FLP and production scheduling have been discussed in some works. However, detailed position and size of facilities were not considered. This paper provides an integrated method using continuous representation by which those factors can be dealt with. The problems of FLP and production scheduling are formulated as a mixed integer programming and a 0-1 integer programming, respectively. By assuming that transportation speed is constant, these problems are correlated by an equation. This correlation enables formulation of FLP considering temporal efficiency as a mixed integer programming. This method was applied to an example, and it was shown that facilities which are significant for production scheduling are located close enough and better temporal efficiency can be achieved.

Ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) is a power generation system which uses temperature difference between warm surface seawater and cold deep seawater．In this paper，a Web application of remote monitoring (a data acquisition system) for OTEC plant is developed．Since OTEC plants may be located near the ocean or over the ocean，it is necessary to perform remote monitoring of them．A Web application of remote monitoring is developed for the OTEC plant using Rankine cycle．Some important indexes for the performance evaluation of the OTEC plant are also calculated by data obtained from the OTEC plant．Furthermore，a function to detect the abnormality of some pressures is implemented．The effectiveness of the remote monitoring system developed in this research is verifed through simulation．

In this study, we examine an income replacement rate of each prefecture in Japanese public pension system using an agent-based simulation. The income replacement rate is a ratio of an individual’'s pension and the average income. On the basis of the statistics of each prefecture, we calculate the amount of pension, wage structure and marriage behavior using a proposed agent-based model. From simulation results, we try to see circumstances of current pensioners in each prefecture based on the population change, the income replacement rate and the wage growth rate. We visualize differences of income replacement rates among 47 prefectures for pensioners to see the value of their pension benefit by comparing to the average income in each prefecture. The proposed method helps pensioners to design their lives with pension benefits.