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Today's challenge for manufacturing companies is the fulfillment of constantly growing heterogeneous customer requirements by simultaneously delivering highest quality standards within shortest time. One way to face this challenge is the highly iterative product development approach. Its objective is the distribution of the current development process in many short and iterative sub-processes. This...
Our knowledge of what determines intuitive decision making is still in its early stages, although there is an increasing interest in intuition in the last decade. In order to fill this gap, this study examines the differential contribution made by different perspectives on context (decision, environment and firm) toward explaining intuition. The results indicate that the characteristics specific to...
To achieve competitive advantage, companies have been driven to improve their supply chain by outsourcing their non-core business. However, this increases the external risks, such as the demand and supply risks. Companies face challenges in defining effective supply chain topology to mitigate supply chain risks. In this research, we design supply chain network topologies to mitigate the demand and...
This present paper focuses on the mitigation of uncertainty-driven cost increases specific to the sourcing of transportation services, impacted by spot price volatility, uncertainty of demand and unreliability of carriers. We investigate the value of a specific mitigation strategy, namely the possibility to contract an alternative carrier (AC), which would take care of extra/emergency shipments, at...
Simulation-based optimisation is popularly employed to determine the best system configuration of complex simulation models. However, it is assumed that the input distribution and parameters are known. In this paper, the input distribution parameter is assumed to be unknown and the impact of the same on the optimal system configurations obtained is investigated. Bootstrapping of the sample data is...
The airline catering industry is one of the most complex operational systems since caterers need to serve an average of one hundred thousand meals daily with the challenge of unavailability of exact order numbers right up until departure time. Typically, an optimally planned operation schedule is issued that seeks to utilize resources usage, e.g. manpower and machines. Due to the existence of schedule...
Despite the progress that has been made over recent years, reverse logistics (RL) remains a challenge to many developed and specially developing countries. The overall purpose of this work is to identify and evaluate the main barriers that impede or hinder the implementation of reverse logistics in Tunisian companies in order to help overcome it, to find out the interaction among identified barriers...
In a deregulated electricity market, the most important purpose of each generating company (GENCO) is to find its optimal bid at each trading period. This paper proposes a new algorithm to determine optimal prices and quantities for the GENCO using a new context named dominating demand. The proposed method considers transmission constraints as a determining factor to construct optimal bids. The method...
Computational intelligence, fuzzy systems, and machine learning have become very popular in different academies around the globe, including mathematics, statistical, computer science, philosophy departments, etc. While a large body of academic research has been done in the last 50 years, industrial and real world applications are incipient when compared to the amount of people involved in academic...
This exploratory study investigates design expertise through the lens of Robust Design. Robust Design is typically applied to manufacturing processes. Robust Design has the objective of minimizing the effects of uncontrollable noise factors on the output of the process or product. Designers achieve robustness through the control of design variables. A coding scheme was developed from the conceptual...
Bad water resource management can increase the amount of problems caused by the scarcity. Situations involving water resources generally have many stakeholders who might not understand the complex situation and the decision made on it has outcomes and effect on people that will only be seen over time. Using soft Operational Research as the Problem Structuring Method we can structure a problem and...
In today's increasingly risky and uncertain business and industrial environments, supply chains need to be more flexible and more robust to improve their performance. During the last decade supply chain risk management has emerged as a challenge on the strategic and operational supply chain issues. A deeply analysis of a case study has revealed that modern retail industry needs decision support tools...
In an increasingly volatile, globalized, and demanding market, Lean is the differential factor that could increase companies' competitiveness and efficiency. In spite of the abundant literature addressing Lean system's technical aspects, there has been little discussion on the importance of national culture in Lean's implementation process. It has been proven that the implementation of lean practices...
We formulate an integrated design and evaluation mechanism applying techniques in the field of flexible engineering design and real options analysis to build a liquefied natural gas production and fueling system for a Singapore oil & gas company. The proposed methodology consists of four main steps: 1) design and evaluation under deterministic demand, 2) uncertainty characterization and performance...
The Demand-Driven MRP (DDMRP) is a recent method focusing on manufacturing and distribution flows that is supposed to manage uncertainties better than traditional Manufacturing Resources Planning (MRP). Nevertheless, this assertion has never been scientifically demonstrated. In this paper, a case study is investigated in order to objectively and quantitatively compare these two systems. A Discrete-Event...
Intelligence analysts are faced with a complex information fusion problem that is characterised by the volume, velocity, variety and veracity of the observed data and information. That is, there are large quantities of data and information (volume) arriving at a high rate (velocity) which are, in general, highly heterogeneous (variety) and of inconsistent fidelity (veracity). Making sound decisions...
The novel theory of investment portfolio optimization under uncertainty is presented based on fuzzy set theory and efficient forecasing methods. The direct problem of fuzzy portfolio optimization and dual problem are considered. In the direct problem structure of a portfolio is determined which provides the maximum profitableness at the given risk level. In dual problem the portfolio structure is...
Flexibility and adaptability of production systems are still some of the most discussed characteristics of production systems within the traditional manufacturing industry. Because of increasing complexity and dynamics within the corporate environment, some approaches to optimize these traditional characteristics are no longer sufficient to achieve competitive advantages. The ongoing paradigm shift...
This study analyzes the Fuzzy Front End (FFE) management process of a multinational company of high-tech services. We evaluate the adherence of the enablers reported in the literature of FFE management in this company's innovation process. We choose, from literature, a framework of FFE's management in order to guide the interviews with managers. The interviews provide information could be possible...
To reduce carbon emission in domestic buildings, UK Government launched the Green Deal (GD) programme to incentivise the people to install energy efficient building system in their buildings by "ensuring" them the new installation's saving would cover the investment. However, only 1,787 measures were installed in the first year and some argue that the programme would cause financial risk...
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