Search results for "operation"
showing 10 items of 2969 documents
Discovering web services in social web service repositories using deep variational autoencoders
2020
Abstract Web Service registries have progressively evolved to social networks-like software repositories. Users cooperate to produce an ever-growing, rich source of Web APIs upon which new value-added Web applications can be built. Such users often interact in order to follow, comment on, consume and compose services published by other users. In this context, Web Service discovery is a core functionality of modern registries as needed Web Services must be discovered before being consumed or composed. Many efforts to provide effective keyword-based service discovery mechanisms are based on Information Retrieval techniques as services are described using structured or unstructured textdocumen…
Skilled workforce scheduling in Service Centres
2009
Abstract The Skilled Workforce Project Scheduling Problem (SWPSP) is a complex problem of task scheduling and resource assignment that comes up in the daily management of many company Service Centres (SC). The SWPSP considers many real characteristics faced daily by the SC: client-company service quality agreements that establish maximum dates for the beginning and the end of tasks with penalties for delays, criticality levels indicating the client-priority in processing each task, generalized precedence relationships that can produce cycle structures, time period and percentage time lags and variable task durations depending on the worker executing the task. Furthermore, the SC workforce i…
Integrating Variability Management in Data Center Networks
2017
International audience; Data centers have an important role in supporting cloud computing services (i.e. checking social media, sending emails, video conferencing,..). Hence, data centers topologies design became more important and must be able to respond to ever changing service requirements and application demands. An ultimate challenge in this research is the design of data center network that interconnects the massive number of servers, and provides efficient and fault-tolerant routing algorithm. Several topologies such as DCell, FlatNet and ScalNet have been proposed. However, these topologies generally seek to improve the scalability without taking into consideration the energy usage …
DINESERV along with fuzzy hierarchical TOPSIS to support the best practices observation and service quality improvement in the restaurant context
2019
Abstract The present work proposes a new Multi-Criteria-Decision-Analysis (MCDA)-based approach integrating the DINESERV model along with the hierarchical TOPSIS method as measurement tool for evaluating quality in the restaurant services context. More in detail, on the basis of the DINESERV theoretical framework of the restaurant service quality, hierarchical TOPSIS is applied to compare quality of restaurant services. Actually, due to the prioritization process of hierarchical TOPSIS, investigated services providers are consistently and effectively assessed against criteria and sub-criteria of DINESERV, so allowing the identification of both best practices and weaknesses of delivered serv…
Hospital performance: Efficiency or quality? Can we have both with IT?
2015
This paper explores influence of IT investment on hospital efficiency and quality.There is a direct effect of IT investment on service quality in hospitals.There is a moderating effect of quality on operational efficiency in hospitals.There is a U-shaped relationship between IT investments and operational efficiency.IT investments have diminishing returns beyond a certain point. The influence of IT investment on hospital efficiency and quality are of great interest to healthcare executives as well as insurers. Few studies have examined how IT investments influence both efficiency and quality or whether there is an optimal IT investment level that influences both in the desired direction. De…
The Rail Quality Index as an Indicator of the “Global Comfort” in Optimizing Safety, Quality and Efficiency in Railway Rails
2012
AbstractThe proposed model uses the stochastic dynamic programming and in particular Markov decision processes applied to the Rail Quality Index (RQI - Italian Indice di Qualità del Binario, IQB).By performing the integrated analysis of the classes of variables which characterize the overall service quality (in terms of comfort and safety), the proposed mathematical approach allows to find the solutions to the decision-making process in function of the probability of deterioration of the state variables of the infrastructure over time and of the flow of available resources.
Asymmetry in inter-municipal cooperation in health services - How does it affect service quality and autonomy?
2021
Throughout Europe, local health services are increasingly being provided through various forms of inter-municipal cooperation (IMC). One of the most common forms of IMC is when small municipalities delegate the operational responsibility for providing health services to a larger host municipality. However, despite the size asymmetry usually inherent in this type of IMC, this aspect has largely been neglected in the existing literature, which mainly focuses on the size of individual municipalities. Based on data from 97 partner municipalities and 25 host municipalities in Norway, this study examines how varying degrees of size asymmetry between them affect the perceived service quality and l…
Service quality and the optimum number of members in intermunicipal cooperation: The case of emergency primary care services in Norway
2021
Intermunicipal cooperation (IMC) is often used as a mean to reap scale benefits. Most studies on the effects of IMC focus on cost savings, while service quality is overlooked. In this study, the focus is set on input quality in a service characterized by high asset specificity and need for redundancy: emergency primary care. We analyze how mode of governance affect performance by (1) measuring whether IMC versus single-municipal production affects input quality and (2) identifying optimum scale of operation; effect of the number of participants in the cooperation on input quality. The findings indicate that cooperation weakens the input quality of medical workforce, but that this negative e…
Economic Allocation in Life Cycle Assessment The State of the Art and Discussion of Examples
2012
Summary This article examines methods for analyzing allocation in life cycle assessment (LCA); it focuses on comparisons of economic allocation with other feasible alternatives. The International Organization for Standardization's (ISO) guideline 14044 indicates that economic allocation should only be used as a last resort, when other methods are not suitable. However, the LCA literature reports several examples of the use of economic allocation. This is due partly to its simplicity and partly to its ability to illustrate the properties of complex systems. Sometimes a price summarizes complex attributes of product or service quality that cannot be easily measured by physical criteria. On th…
The role of trust in cruise passenger behavioral intentions : The moderating effects of the cruise line brand
2014
Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a framework to investigate the relationship between perceived value, satisfaction, trust and behavioral intentions and the moderator effect of the cruise line on cruise passengers’ perceptions.Design/methodology/approach– A structural model was developed. In order to verify the hypotheses, a total of 729 cruise passengers were sampled. The study of the data used structural equation models by means of a multi-group analysis.Findings– The results of this study suggest significant paths to increase behavioral intentions: perceived service quality? satisfaction? trust?. In addition, it has been proved that the cruise line moderates the r…