Search results for " economico"
showing 10 items of 556 documents
Negotiation in Distributed Production Planning Environments
2006
Mass customization and global competition push enterprises to adopt proper business models able to capture all the opportunities arising from emerging competition rules. An increasing number of industrial enterprises distribute their production capacity world wide to achieve lower production costs, lower distribution costs (due to the closer proximity to customers), and deeper knowledge of customer needs. As a drawback, coordination of the different production plants and the balance among plants and enterprise goals represent a critical issue in the network management. In this context the paper looks at the production planning problem, adopting a traditional hierarchical time-based perspect…
Business Process-oriented design of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems for small and medium enterprises
2006
In the last few years, many organizations have used business process modelling as an effective tool for managing organizational changes. However, process modelling has rarely been exploited for supporting the entire business process management life cycle. This includes the design of business processes as well as their implementation and control. The adoption and implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems is a crucial issue if referred to small and medium-sized enterprises. The main problem is that the cost of implementation of ERP, intended as the process of customization of the ERP system towards the actual enterprise business processes, overtakes the cost of ERP acquisit…
Strengthening of steel-reinforced concrete structural elements by externally bonded FRP sheets and evaluation of their load carrying capacity
2014
Abstract The paper proposes a preliminary design tool for reinforced concrete (RC) elements strengthened by fiber-reinforced-polymer (FRP) sheets to be used in civil engineering applications and in particular in medical buildings. The design strategy is based on limit analysis theory and utilizes a numerical procedure which provides a direct method to determine peak load, failure mode and critical zones of the structural elements of interest.
A strategic framework for firm networks in manufacturing industry: An empirical survey
2009
Firm networking is becoming more and more the most important competitive strength in nowadays competitive environment. Such an evidence is partially neglected by the classical strategic analysis of firms competitiveness which mainly looks at the firm strength and weakness not in relationship with its capacity to build competitive networks. For such a reason, in the last years, many theoretical approaches have stressed the importance of networks to gain competitive advantage. In this paper, the most significant theories on firm networking are reviewed and an innovative strategic framework that mainly underlies at firm networks organisation is proposed. Very briefly, it is argued that network…
High Level Planning of Reconfigurable Enterprises: a Game Theoretic Approach
2006
Reconfigurable Enterprises (REs) represent production networks made of different and geographically dispersed plants that, in case of unpredictable market changes, can be reconfigured in order to gather a specific production objective. However, REs effectiveness and efficiency depend on the extent to which global performance is obtained. Basically two approaches are available to reach coordination: centralised or decentralised planning tools. In this paper, the authors propose a novel cooperative game theoretical approach for distributed production planning at high level of a RE; the proposed approach has been benchmarked in front of both a distributed one, based on negotiation, and a centr…
Distributed intelligent control of exceptions in reconfigurable manufacturing systems
2003
In order to react to the continuous and unpredictable changes in product demand, in product variety, and in process technologies, reconfigurable manufacturing systems allow quick adjustment of production capacity and functionality by rearranging or changing their modular components. In this kind of system, operation management issues, such as exception handling policies, become more complex since correct reconfiguration strategies have to be selected. This paper explores the potential of the reconfigurability feature to be a basis for the development of new strategies to handle out-of-the-ordinary events in the production process; in particular, maintaining production flow when machine brea…
Reconfigurable control of robotized manufacturing cells
2007
This paper investigates the field of manufacturing system control. The addressed subject is indeed very fascinating, due to the importance that it has reached in the last decades both at research and industrial level. On the other hand, it seems to the author that most of the complexity intrinsic to the subject itself relies on the different meanings or levels of abstraction that both the terms ''manufacturing system'' and ''control'' may symbolize. The presented research aims to face the topic in a concrete fashion, i.e., by developing a control software system for a specific, although easy to be generalized, robotized manufacturing cell. Two different development methodologies, from the c…
EUGENICS AND SOCIALIST THOUGHT IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA: THE CASE OF JAMES MEDBERY MACKAYE
2018
The aim of this essay is to assess James Medbery MacKaye’s contribution to socialist thought during the Progressive Era. Largely forgotten today, MacKaye proposed a special version of socialism, which he called “Pantocracy,” based on a peculiar blend of utilitarian and eugenic assumptions. Specifically, MacKaye held that biological fitness mapped to the capacity for happiness—biologically superior individuals possess a greater capacity for happiness—and saw the eugenic breeding of “a being or race of beings capable in the first place of happiness” as a possibility open by the advent of Pantocracy. Incidentally, this essay provides further evidence that the influence of eugenic and racialist…
Guest editorial
2016
The 21st International EurOMA (EurOMA, 2014) Conference was hosted by Università degli Studi di Palermo. The conference theme was Operations Management in an Innovation Economy. According to innovation economists what primarily drives economic growth in today’s knowledge-based economy is not capital accumulation but innovative capacity spurred by appropriable knowledge and technological externalities. Economics growth in innovation economics is the end- product of knowledge, R&D expenditures, licenses, technological spillovers, and externalities between collaborative firms, i.e. supply chains and networks of innovation. When firms do not explicitly acknowledge and manage their operations as…
The interplay of reciprocity propensity and inequality aversion in two-person games
2020
Economic normative models assume that economic actors are fully rational and selfish while recent studies acknowledge the emotional influence of an economic decision and call for further investigation of biases in decision making. Most decisions involve multiple actors who make decisions following a sequential path as reflected by decision trees; this contingency makes a call for the game theory contribution in the economic decision field. Two-person games are widely used to represent a typical framework of economic decisions. This study aims at further investigating psychological biases affecting decisions in a two-person sequential game. So far similar studies have focused on the principa…