Search results for "Operations"
showing 10 items of 1692 documents
Economical evaluations of reactive power supply as an ancillary service offered by distributors
2006
Reactive power supply is one of the most important ancillary services in the field of transmission systems safety. In the current market assets, at international level, this service is differently regulated and sometimes with criteria that are not market driven. The present work is focused on the perspective to realise a reactive power market to which also the distributors can take part injecting reactive power into HV/MV connection bus bar. Under this hypothesis, the paper proposes a methodology to evaluate the economic convenience limits that the system operator would have buying the capacitive reactive power offered by distributors.
An Innovative Pricing Method for Telecommunication Services Pricing through American Options
2009
With the evolution of telecommunication networks and of their services the role of service provider is changed, so nowadays there is a coexistence of Network Operators and Virtual Operators. The difference between these players is not in the way they offer a service but primarily in their economic objectives and risk attitudes. Essentially, Network Operators own their infrastructures and typically have to sustain both fixed costs (CAPEX) and recurrent costs (OPEX), while Virtual Operators may have a simpler cost structure, mainly consisting of OPEX for the hire of network resources. Since these two operators can provide the same service in two different markets, their objectives differ subs…
American Options Based Service Pricing For Virtual Operators
2008
In the recent years, the role of service provider has split into two broad categories: Network Operators, offering services over their networks, and Virtual Operators, providing services over leased resources. What differentiates these players is to a minor extent a matter of enhanced service offer, and primarily a matter of economic objectives and risk attitudes. Essentially, Network Operators own their infrastructures and typically have to sustain both fixed costs (CAPEX) and recurrent costs (OPEX), while Virtual Operators may have a simpler cost structure, mainly consisting of OPEX for hiring the network. Correspondingly, the objectives of these players may differ profoundly: on one hand…
Unit-level fairness and quality within the health care industry: A justice–quality model
2014
We test a justice–quality model in which peer justice and justice climate are related to the service quality provided by the work unit. Based on the effort–reward imbalance model, we propose that units perceiving fair treatment provide better delivery of the core service (functional service quality) and better relational service beyond the core service (relational service quality). We also test whether the cross-level relationship of high service quality delivered by work units translates into high customer ratings of the service quality they receive. Furthermore, we propose that high service quality increases the work unit’s influence on their customers’ quality of life (QoL). We test thes…
Vehicle scheduling for rental-with-driver services
2021
Abstract In this paper, we introduce a new vehicle scheduling problem (VSP) with driver consistency faced by rental-with-driver companies. A weekly time-horizon is considered and a set of potential customers, each one associated with a list of required tasks, is assumed. The company can choose to accept or reject a customer, but if accepted, all required tasks must be performed by the same driver. A profit is associated with each customer. The goal is to maximize the company’s total profit, by respecting a list of daily and the weekly drivers’ workload limitations imposed by drivers’ contracts. We propose a mathematical formulation of the problem and design an exact solution method based on…
Handling stakeholder uncertain judgments in strategic transport service analyses
2013
Abstract The quality level of services has to be constantly controlled, especially under conditions of competition increasing and limited resources. However, considering that service performance analyses are based on stakeholders' judgments, they can be characterized by possible uncertainties related to incompleteness for partial ignorance, imprecision for subjectivity and even vagueness. Therefore, under these conditions, unreliable results can be obtained by widely used service analysis methodologies. In the present paper, a methodology based on a recent extension of the SERVQUAL model, and that uses in combined manner the fuzzy set theory and the analytic hierarchy process method is prop…
An effective opportunistic maintenance policy for a global service
2010
The aim of the present paper is to develop a model for an effective maintenance policy with refer to a global service contract between a services provider company and a company for the waste management. The contract requires, with fixed performance levels of the service, the supplying of a mandatory set of maintenance services on a set of waste compactors vehicles of the outsourcer company. In particular, the service provider (SP) must perform corrective maintenance actions and the replacement of the fault parts. The tackled problem concerns the determination of an effective opportunistic maintenance policy in order to assure the required service performance levels at the minimum global mai…
Fuzzy ServPerf model combined with ELECTRE III to comparatively evaluate service quality of international airports in Sicily
2015
In this paper a new approach was proposed so as to comparatively evaluate the quality of service alternatives. In particular, a fuzzy extension of the ServPerf service conceptual model was considered to estimate quality scores of fundamental service criteria, whereas the non-compensative multi-criteria decision-making ELECTRE III method was employed to point out the quality ranking of service alternatives on the basis of which the comparative service quality analysis was performed. In order to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, an empirical study concerning service quality evaluation of the three international airports in Sicily (Italy) was conducted with detailed proposals fo…
A combined fuzzy-SEM evaluation approach to identify the key drivers of the academic library service quality in the digital technology era: An empiri…
2017
A conceptual model of the Academic Library (AL) service quality is hypothesized in the present article, and then validated and analyzed by a novel evaluation approach. Specifically, the conceptual model integrates the fundamental attributes of the canonical AL service together with those more relevant of the new and widely considered AL Electronic Service (e-services). As concerns the evaluation approach, it incorporates the Fuzzy Sets Theory (FST) so as to deal with the students' uncertainty over their own judgments on the AL service quality and a Structural Equation Model (SEM) to validate the conceptual model and to determine the key drivers of the AL service quality. The effectiveness o…
Modeling Ordinal Item Responses via Binary GLMMs and Alternative Link Functions: An Application to Measurement of a Perceived Service Quality
2010
Evaluation of a service on the basis of consumer opinion is a widespread practice in many fields. The assessment of perceived quality [7] of a service is generally carried out through administration of a questionnaire, composed of several items with responses posed on an ordinal scale, whereby each item represents an important feature of the evaluated service [3, 7]. In this context, the aim is to evaluate something similar to the external effectiveness, that is the part of efficacy related to the satisfaction expressed by the service users for the provided service. A particular and important example of service users is represented by students’ responses measuring the perceived quality of s…