After the 911 tragedy, the American society began to build a mechanism that can prevent, mitigate, or recover quickly the damage caused by external shock. This has been achieved is by creating a risk management system called Business Continuity Planning(BCP) and the capability of this risk management is “resilience”. On other hand, European countries have tried to cope with extremely large-scale shock by integrating nationwide systems. Finland's seven shocks test is a pioneer project for increasing national resilience, and the project‘s achievement provided a set of robust portfolio action plans to the Finnish government. However, the definition of resilience is different in different documents, and components of resilience are different in each reports and research papers, even they deal with same nationwide problem, or organizational problem. In Japan, the term resilience is translated into the word “DAN RYOKU SEI” in Japanese, which could be inversely translated to “elasticity” in English; and this causes confusion when further researching resilience and its structure. In this research, we aim to subtract a common component of resilience from Japanese documents and construct a resilience structure model for the purpose of providing guidance or a clue for enhancing the resiliency of an organization. The text mining technique is used to analyze ten Japanese language documents, and we concluded that the term resilience consists of three major components( i.e., diversity, redundancy and robustness). We further analyzed each component and found that: (1) the diversity consists of scale, functions, design, and strategy of a system (or organization), (2) the redundancy consists of facility duplication, system duplication, scale and strategy of a system, and (3) the robustness consists of earthquake-proofing, facility toughening, security software, system environment, BCP capability, BCP training and risk management. According to an analysis of the text mining data, we constructed a two-layer structure model of resilience. The model can be applied or provide clue to risk management of a company, as well as resilience evaluation of a company.

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In this paper, we applied a metaheuristic method to a mixed-model assembly line problem for minimizing makespan. In order to calculate the makespan including line stop time, the work progress of semi-finished products needs to be formulated. The formulations become difficult, so the conditions for the assembly line problem increase. Therefore, simulation - step-by-step time processing - is used to check the work progress in complicated mixed-model assembly line problems. However, many repetitive calculations are needed in simulation methods and the metaheuristic method we used required much computational time to solve a problem. Then, we presented the use of approximate expression instead of the formulations of work progress, and used the approximate expression in the first stage and simulation in the last stage.

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Systems such as Twitter or Facebook that support users to share opinions and ideas are in wide use. However, they do not support converging opinions or making agreements. On the other hand in the field of public policy-making, workshops among civilians are active as an effective methodology to gather opinions or ideas and make agreements about public policy. In some workshops, only a limited number of experts discuss and agree on their opinions and ideas. However it is difficult convince non-experts and civilians to agree to these ideas. Additionally because of physical limitations, including time duration, number of participants and distance, another issue fased is about the cost to hold the workshops. What is required is an open workshop support system that enables people to easily participate with less physical limitations. Thus, we implemented a large-scale discussion support system called, Collagree, to satisfy these requirements. For such large-scale discussions, from the viewpoint of collective intelligence, some level of management or control is required. For example, in the Wikipedia project, some management-level people are confirming the newly created contents, and in the open source project for Linux, Linus Torvalds leads the Linux community. It is true that discussions often go into ”framing” without some level of management, like in the Wikipedia and Linux projects. Thus, we propose ”weakly structured” discussion, in which some human facilitators coordinate large-scale discussions while our system provides several supporting functions for those facilitators. In this paper, we present an implementation of Collagree and the experimental results of a large-scale discussion about sightseeing in Nagoya. The results demonstrate that Collagree enables users to participate easily, and is useful to gather novel ideas from the participants.

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This paper focuses on the reduction of product lead-time. The reduction of product lead-time is one of the issues facing the manufacturing industry. Resolving this issue is achieved by operational and kaizen approaches. In the operational approach, operational procedures are improved without changing the system design parameters in order to increase system efficiency. In the kaizen approach, system design parameters are changed through improvement activities in order to increase system efficiency. It is important that both operational and kaizen approaches are alternately conducted. Although scheduling methods or planning methods have been extensively studied as operational approaches, the kaizen approach method has been studied less. In the kaizen approach, many improvement cases have been shown. One reason is the difficulty to grasp an appropriate perception of the actual manufacturing environments where many factors are complexly intertwined. This means that the manufacturing environments could not been identified as the kaizen problem. This paper proposes a method for quantification of the kaizen problem. The proposed method is comprised of three procedures (i.e., visualization, representation and quantification). Finally, the validity of the proposed method is demonstrated using the real data of a medium-sized manufacturer that uses both make-to-order and make-to-stock production.

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In order to improve the production quality of information systems, we broke down a production process into modularization and integration, and sorted the architecture. Focusing on the importance of integration, we used each company's participation level as the index to quantify the degree of integration. We calculated the participation level using the actual case and investigated the correlation with the number of problems that occurred. As the participation level to attain improved quality and control problems, we extracted the customer company's participation level in the decision process for functions and accessibility, and the prime contractor's participation level in the production process. Focusing on each participation level, we took the case of a peculiar project with an especially large number of problems for its size. As the result, the participation level of the case was different from other average cases, and we established the effectiveness of the participation levels we extracted.

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In clinical hemodialysis, medical staff are expected to adjust or change the contents of operation depending on situational change, i.e. situation awareness and adjustment when the patient is undergoing medical treatment, such as each patient's condition or diseases. On the other hand, the present education of novice staff covers only technical skills, such as procedures of puncture and operation of the hemodialysis device. Staff, therefore, carry out situation awareness and adjustment based on their long-time experience, so novices cannot perform as well as experts. This is one of the educational problems of novice staff during hemodialysis treatment.  Therefore, the purpose of this study is to clarify the contents of situation awareness and adjustment that experts use and the internalized knowledge necessary for it. The method was to analyze the differences between experts and novices by observing experts' and novices' performance, and conducting a hearing survey of experts. As a result, this study revealed that experts were able to perform 25 items of situation awareness and adjustment. In order to perform those, experts had internalized knowledge of 69 items related to medical characteristics of each operation, awareness of their own skills, each patient's disease and characteristics of each patient's satisfaction. When a patient is undergoing medical treatment, however, expert staff refer to the checklist which shows the contents of operation less number of times than novice staff. Such behaviors contribute to shortening the time of operation, but we think that staff perform situation awareness and adjustment that is unsuitable for the situation. We believe that methods to educate the novice staff can be improved based on these results, and consequently, medical satety and the quality of hemodialysis treatment can rise.

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