Search results for "OPERATION"

Business networking strategy: operations management and organizational economics different perspectives

2008

Circular economy and environmental protection

2022

<abstract> <p>The circular economy represents a form of corporate production with respect to environmental resources. In the past, these production systems were widespread on the basis of the non-removability of the production factors. The advent of economic growth, in capitalist economies, has led to the deconstruction of production cycles resulting to a food product being produced in one part of the world, whilst the raw materials and processing phases are carried out in several parts of the world, due to the low production costs there. While these economic systems, on the one hand, have led to a growth in the global economic system, on the other hand they have determined the …

A dynamic performance management approach to support local strategic planning

2015

In spite of efforts devoted in the last decades to local strategic planning, such field of research and practice has been frequently characterized by a lack of implementation. We argue here that this phenomenon is due to the limitations of the static and linear approach to local strategic planning in fostering the development of common shared view among policy makers on the relevant system's structure and behavior. By means of a case-study, we illustrate how an approach based on system dynamics modeling applied to Performance Management can be useful to overcome such weaknesses. The proposed approach enhances a better understanding of the causes and effects related to adopted policies, unde…

Simultaneous optimization of harvest schedule and measurement strategy

2013

In many recent studies, the value of forest inventory information in the harvest scheduling has been examined. Usually only the profitability of measuring simultaneously all the stands in the area is examined. Yet, it may be more profitable to concentrate the measurement efforts to some subset of them. In this paper, the authors demonstrate that stochastic optimization can be used for defining the optimal measurement strategy simultaneously with the harvest decisions. The results show that without end-inventory constraints, it was most profitable to measure the stands that were just below the medium age. Measuring the oldest stands was not profitable at all. It turned out to be profitable t…

Wastewater treatment: New insight provided by interactive multiobjective optimization

2011

In this paper, we describe a new interactive tool developed for wastewater treatment plant design. The tool is aimed at supporting the designer in designing new wastewater treatment plants as well as optimizing the performance of already available plants. The idea is to utilize interactive multiobjective optimization which enables the designer to consider the design with respect to several conflicting evaluation criteria simultaneously. This is more important than ever because the requirements for wastewater treatment plants are getting tighter and tighter from both environmental and economical reasons. By combining a process simulator to simulate wastewater treatment and an interactive mul…

E-NAUTILUS: A decision support system for complex multiobjective optimization problems based on the NAUTILUS method

2015

Interactive multiobjective optimization methods cannot necessarily be easily used when (industrial) multiobjective optimization problems are involved. There are at least two important factors to be considered with any interactive method: computationally expensive functions and aspects of human behavior. In this paper, we propose a method based on the existing NAUTILUS method and call it the Enhanced NAUTILUS (E-NAUTILUS) method. This method borrows the motivation of NAUTILUS along with the human aspects related to avoiding trading-off and anchoring bias and extends its applicability for computationally expensive multiobjective optimization problems. In the E-NAUTILUS method, a set of Pareto…

User experience targets as design drivers:A case study on the development of a remote crane operator station

2013

In recent years, the notion of user experience, or UX, as an essential aspect to be addressed in the design and development of technologies has been increasingly discussed. In this paper, we present a case study in which we have used UX targets as the main design drivers and focus areas in developing a new remote operator station user interface for container cranes. UX targets describe the experiential qualities to which the product design should aim at. However, taking UX targets into consideration during product design is challenging, because only little is known about how they would be best operationalized to serve the different phases of the design process. Through our case study, we de…

Role of Acquisition Intervals in Private and Public Cloud Storage Costs

2014

The volume of worldwide digital content has increased nine-fold within the last five years, and this immense growth is predicted to continue in the foreseeable future to reach 8 ZB by 2015. Traditionally, organizations proactively have built and managed their private storage facilities to cope with the growing demand for storage capacity. Recently, many organizations have instead welcomed the alternative of outsourcing their storage needs to the providers of public cloud storage services due to the proliferation of public cloud infrastructure offerings. The comparative cost-efficiency of these two alternatives depends on a number of factors, such as the prices of the public and private stor…

Interactive Multiple Criteria Decision Making based on preference driven Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimization with controllable accuracy

2012

Abstract We present an approach to interactive Multiple Criteria Decision Making based on preference driven Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimization with controllable accuracy. The approach relies on formulae for lower and upper bounds on coordinates of the outcome of an arbitrary efficient variant corresponding to preference information expressed by the Decision Maker. In contrast to earlier works on that subject, here lower and upper bounds can be calculated and their accuracy controlled entirely within evolutionary computation framework. This is made possible by exploration of not only the region of feasible variants – a standard within evolutionary optimization, but also the region of i…

An Information Systems Design Product Theory for Integrated Requirements, Test and Defect Management Systems

2012

Software companies need to develop high-quality products fast and with low cost. Development activities are typically distributed in different places and involve multiple stakeholders in different countries. Testing is an important way to ensure product quality but it is costly and takes ample time and resources. Sourcing testing services from specialized service providers is often the most viable option for software businesses. Flexible and effective test process management is especially vital to support the testing life-cycle when external testing service providers are involved. Yet, the extant literature provides little theoretical guidance for managing the testing life-cycle, including …