Standards, which mean not only standards but also technical regulations and conformity assessment procedures, are now the vital issue in the global business, mainly because of the advent of WTO/TBT agreement in 1995, where standards have an essential power to integrate the global market. The major countries, such as U.S.A., EU and China, are very enthusiastic about using standards as a tool to boost their competitiveness. Even developing countries are now recognizing the importance of standards to export their products to developed countries. While JISC published the action plan for international standards June last year, Japanese businesses should strengthen their commitment to international standards.

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ISO is a network of the national standards institutes of 148 countries. Its members play active roles in the international standardization activities, and many new initiatives have been exercised this year. ISO General Assembly has approved the new Strategic Plan for the next five-year period, following a comprehensive consultation of its stakeholders all over the world. A new policy has been approved by the ISO Technical Management Board (TMB) to ensure the global relevancy of the standards it develops. The participations of developing countries are promoted in various ways. ISO Code of Ethics has been issued for the all stakeholders in the ISO system. ISO and its members have realized standards play a critical role in ensuring security. The cooperation between ISO, IEC and ITU-T has been strengthened with many new initiatives. One of the most popular issues this year was SR ; ISO has decided to step forward in the standard development regarding social responsibility. In 2005, strategy development for management system standards and guide/standard development regarding second hand goods will be attracting attentions. Japanese Standards Association will be providing assistances regarding international standardization activities for national mirror committees and ISO/IEC through new supporting center which will be established in JSA.

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To ensure that Japan is active in getting its national technologies adopted as international standards, it is essential that companies change their attitudes and proactively promote international standardization activities. A system for the Smooth operation of patent pools should be put into effect. International standardization organizations should draw up rules to enforce patent rights that take into consideration the existence of such patent pools. The legal system should be updated in order to allow for the smooth operation of patent pools in Japan. It is vital that the government give active assistance to international standardization activities in the industrial sector in prioritized technical fields. It will be of great importance to ensure that there is a linkage with science and technology policy. It is particularly important with respect to major Japanese technologies for the government and the private sector to work together to include these technologies in international standards.

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With the enactment of the WTO/TBT Agreement and other developments, international standards have come to play an increasing number of roles. Maintenance and development of competitiveness of Japanese industry require international standardization activities aimed at securing international standards originating from Japan. Industry also needs to actively participate in such proposal-oriented international standardization activities. A key requisite for enabling such participation is thorough understanding of the value of these activities among top management of industry. Accordingly, to show industry the appeal of these activities, we have launched study on their economic effect. In fact, the study was implemented in a Working Group (WG) established as a part of the national project entrusted to JSA (Japanese Standards Association) by METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry). Here, I will focus on the idea of economic effect and on some case studies obtained by the WG.

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In cooperation with Europe, the United States and Asian countries, JSMA had proposed to establish a new ISO/TC for springs and JISC had offered to undertake the secretariat of the committee. As a result of the vote at ISO, the proposal has been accepted and the new technical committee will be designated as ISO/TC 227. Now I am going to report on the strategy of the standardization of springs as mechanical elements and its aims.

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Recently, industry competitiveness has been discussed in our country. In the field of standardization, standards from the aspect of competitive advantage, business continuity and sustainability as well as quality assurance are now underdevelopment. In ISO, it was decided to review ISO 9000s and issue an amendment for ISO 9001 and a revision for ISO 9004 by 2008. In the revision of ISO9004, incorporating key concepts of JIS/TR Q 0005, such as learning and innovation, creation of customer value and adaptation to the changing business environment to attain sustainable growth and competitive advantage, is under consideration. On the other hand, there is a new movement in ISO. Standards from the aspect of consumer, society as well as quality assurance have now been actively discussed in ISO. It shows the fact that the voice of stakeholders including consumer and their active engagement are becoming nonignorable in the field of standardization. Besides, ISO/CASCO is now revising and issuing standards which provide directions to users and consumers to chose products and/or services, and confidence that the purchased products or/and services meet their certain requirements. In addition, they can lead to quality assurance, competitive advantage and sustainability. This article explains the current movement in the field of standardization from a standpoint of quality assurance, competitive advantage and sustainability.

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In statistical decision theory, Karlin and Rubin derived a sufficient condition for an optimum policy to be given by a "monotone procedure" for a loss function that has one sign change at most. This paper derives a necessary and sufficient condition for an optimum policy to be given by a monotone procedure where there are a general number of actions. This condition is given by the conditional probability of a monitor given the state of the system has a property of TP_2 (total positivity of order 2). That is, the TP_2 property is the only condition with which one can identify the optimal action based on a monotone procedure. If the optimum policy can be limited to monotone procedures, the tremendous amount of calculation time required to find the optimum procedure can be reduced. This enables the best decision to be selected in a much shorter period of time.

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In cases where sensitivity-elements are considered important, one approach to creating designsis to set up a suitable design concept and reflect the image of that concept in the designs. When creating designs using the above approach, designers do not rely only on their own experience and sensibility ; they also need to identify the potential customers' image of the set concept and reflect them in their designs. However, the methodology used to investigate and analyze the potential customers' image and to present them in a form that is useful to designers has not yet been established. In this paper, a method to measure the potential customers' image of a concept, and to support the designers' efforts to create designs that reflect this image by presenting the designers a variety of information about that concept in a form that can be utilized in the way of thinking of designs is proposed. Moreover, designs related to the image of "cities" could actually be created using the proposed method, and the usefulness of those designs is verified. The proposed method makes it possible to create designs that not only consider the designers' subjectivity but also the potential customers' viewpoint regarding a concept.

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A lot of troubles caused by poor process design occur chronically. This situation is mainly caused by the problem that knowledge on failures possessed by process designers/engineers is not properly managed and that the quality of process design has not reached the level that it could inherently do. This paper focuses on the way of acquiring and representing the knowledge on quality troubles caused by poor process design. (1) Four fundamental models of unit process model, element work model, process element model, and product element model are proposed for obtaining knowledge for prediction and prevention of the failures. (2) The concept of element work that is modeled as 3 modes of objective-state mode, transientstate mode, and measure mode of work is proposed. (3) The flow chart that represents the knowledge of causal chain of process failures reusable for future process design is proposed. We also demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposal through constructing an actual knowledge base and applying it to the design of components of magnetic card readers, time switches and industrial motors.

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This paper deals with statistical comparison between two kinds of binary input-output systems having the same objective function. This problem is formulated by the statistical test of the equality of two odds ratios between the corresponding 2×2 contingency tables. Consider the case where the same set of test items is assigned to both two systems so that observed frequencies of two contingency tables are dependent. The likelihood ratio test is formulated and the method of obtaining the maximum likelihood estimates for expected frequencies under null hypothesis is shown. The influence of dependencies on the efficiencies is investigated by obtaining the asymptotic variance of another test statistics. As a result, it is shown that assigning the same set to two systems is almost more efficient than using independent sets.

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　For the sustainable growth, most of the corporations try to improve and to innovate on their management systems. They must grasp the situation of the corporations, extract the critical management problems, and make prescriptions for management innovation. Many assessment indexes for the corporations are developed and many third-party consultants are available, but methodology of self-assessment is not clear and self-diagnosis is not easy to realize. We need a methodology of self-diagnosis for sustainable management innovation.
　One of the main objectives of this paper is to propose a methodology of self-assessment and self-diagnosis for sustainable management innovation. In this paper, we first propose sets of questionnaires for self-assessment, which helps us to evaluate the situations of the corporations by themselves. Next we propose a methodology for self-diagnosis by the use of self-assessment. This methodology consists of self-assessment for sustainable management innovation, common recognition of the critical management problems, SWOT analysis, and proposal of prescriptions for the problems. Based on this methodology we propose e-diagnosis system for sustainable management innovation.

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　Prevention of human errors like missing-information or jumping-to-conclusion is one of key success factors in the design of the operation manuals or operation/function descriptions used in an emergency. Therefore, it is necessary to identify the parts in which these errors are apt to occur beforehand based on the assessment of the drafted sentences. In this paper, an experiment on panels using samples of short sentences was carried out, with the applicability and merits/demerits of the following two methods of evaluating the possibility of the occurrence of missinginformation and jumping-to-conclusion being examined :
　 (a) The evaluation method using physical characteristics calculated from sentences,
　(b) The evaluation method using images that readers receive from sentences.
　 As the result, it was concluded that the method using average and SN ratio of the images received from sentences is more accurate in the case of evaluating various types of sentences, and the effects of the time limit in an emergency can also be predicted using the average and SN ratio of the images.

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　In order to perform a process of designing and developing new products effectively and efficiently, standardizing the process is essential. However, the standardization of new product design and development processes is not easy because each product is different one by one, and try-and-error approaches can not be eliminated. This paper investigated a method of standardizing design and development processes focusing on information flows. A framework of the method was shown, and then the detailed procedures for each step of the method were described. The method was applied to two different design end development processes, and it was found that the method can be applied to various types of process.

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