Solar power is a type of renewable energy system that uses solar energy to produce electricity, and is regarded as one of the most important power sources in Taiwan. Since sunshine duration affects the amount of energy that can be generated by a solar power, the seasons of the year are important factors that should be considered for accurate solar power prediction. In the last decade, the use of artificial intelligence for forecasting systems have been quite popular, and the deep belief network (DBN) models started getting more attention. In this study, a seasonal deep belief network (SDBN) was developed to forecast monthly solar power output data. The SDBN was constructed by combining seasonal decomposition method and DBN. Further, this study used monthly solar power output data from the Taiwan Power Company. The results indicated that the proposed forecasting system demonstrated a superior performance in terms of forecasting accuracy. Also, the performance of autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), generalized regression neural network (GRNN), and DBN obtained from a separate study were compared to the performance of the proposed SDBN model and showed that the latter was better than the other three models. Thus, the SDBN model can be used as an alternative method for monthly solar power output data forecasting.
The Taguchi capability index, which reflects the expected loss and the yield of a process, is a useful index for evaluating the quality of a process. Several scholars have proposed a process improvement capability index based on the expected value of the Taguchi loss function as well as the corresponding cost of process improvement. There have been a number of studies using the Taguchi capability index to develop suppliers’ process quality evaluation models, whereas models for evaluating suppliers’ process improvement potential have been relatively lacking. Thus, this study applies the process improvement capability index to develop an evaluation model of the supplier’s process improvement capability, which can be provided to the industry for application. Besides, owing to the current need to respond quickly, coupled with cost considerations and the limits of technical capabilities, the sample size for sampling testing is usually not large. Consequently, the evaluation model of the process improvement capability developed in this study adopts a fuzzy testing method based on the confidence interval. This method reduces the risk of misjudgment due to sampling errors and improves the testing accuracy because it can incorporate experts and their accumulated experiences.
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