Manpower planning optimization in three different real world areas: container terminals, hospitals and retail stores

Problems related to the optimization of human resources in working areas have been extensively studied in the literature with the major goal of guaranteeing the greatest benefits from the efforts of workers, while taking into account their personal skills and requirements. In particular, in this thesis we focus on short-term and long-term manpower planning problems. The main goal consists in appropriately assigning shifts to workers in a given time horizon, taking into account their own requirements, their contractual rules, and the quality and efficiency of the work environment. In this thesis the manpower planning problem is studied in three different working areas, namely container terminals, hospitals and retail stores. Different solutions are proposed based on mathematical models that allow to describe in linear algebraic terms the set of feasible solutions. An optimal scheduling is then computed using linear integer programming. The proposed policies have been validated on three different real case studies in Cagliari, Italy

Leeway for the loyal: a model of employee discretion

This article examines the factors underlying task discretion from an economist's perspective. It argues that the key axis for understanding discretion is the trade-off between the positive effects of discretion on potential output per employee and the negative effects of greater leeway on work effort. In empirical analysis using matched employer-employee data, it is shown that discretion is strongly affected by the level of employee commitment. In addition, discretion is generally greater in high-skilled jobs, although not without exceptions, and lower where employees are under-skilled. Homeworking and flexitime policies raise employee discretion. The impact of teamworking is mixed. In about half of cases team members do not jointly decide about work matters, and the net effect of teams on task discretion in these cases is negative. In other cases, where team members do decide matters jointly, the impact is found to be neutral according to employees' perceptions, or positive according to managers' perceptions. There are also significant and substantial unobserved establishment-level factors which affect task discretion

Beyond Surveys: Analyzing Software Development Artifacts to Assess Teaching Efforts

This Innovative Practice Full Paper presents an approach of using software development artifacts to gauge student behavior and the effectiveness of changes to curriculum design. There is an ongoing need to adapt university courses to changing requirements and shifts in industry. As an educator it is therefore vital to have access to methods, with which to ascertain the effects of curriculum design changes. In this paper, we present our approach of analyzing software repositories in order to gauge student behavior during project work. We evaluate this approach in a case study of a university undergraduate software development course teaching agile development methodologies. Surveys revealed positive attitudes towards the course and the change of employed development methodology from Scrum to Kanban. However, surveys were not usable to ascertain the degree to which students had adapted their workflows and whether they had done so in accordance with course goals. Therefore, we analyzed students' software repository data, which represents information that can be collected by educators to reveal insights into learning successes and detailed student behavior. We analyze the software repositories created during the last five courses, and evaluate differences in workflows between Kanban and Scrum usage

Probabilistic priority assessment of nurse calls

Current nurse call systems are very static. Call buttons are fixed to the wall, and systems do not account for various factors specific to a situation. We have developed a software platform, the ontology-based Nurse Call System (oNCS), which supports the transition to mobile and wireless nurse call buttons and uses an intelligent algorithm to address nurse calls. This algorithm dynamically adapts to the situation at hand by taking the profile information of staff and patients into account by using an ontology. This article describes a probabilistic extension of the oNCS that supports a more sophisticated nurse call algorithm by dynamically assigning priorities to calls based on the risk factors of the patient and the kind of call. The probabilistic oNCS is evaluated through implementation of a prototype and simulations, based on a detailed dataset obtained from 3 nursing departments of Ghent University Hospital. The arrival times of nurses at the location of a call, the workload distribution of calls among nurses, and the assignment of priorities to calls are compared for the oNCS and the current nurse call system. Additionally, the performance of the system and the parameters of the priority assignment algorithm are explored. The execution time of the nurse call algorithm is on average 50.333 ms. Moreover, the probabilistic oNCS significantly improves the assignment of nurses to calls. Calls generally result in a nurse being present more quickly, the workload distribution among the nurses improves, and the priorities and kinds of calls are taken into account

Allocating Resources and Creating Incentives to Improve Teaching and Learning

Offers insights from scholarly literature, related theory, and practical activities to inform the efforts of policymakers, researchers and practitioners to allocate resources and create incentives that result in powerful, equitable learning for all

Taxonomic classification of planning decisions in health care: a review of the state of the art in OR/MS

We provide a structured overview of the typical decisions to be made in resource capacity planning and control in health care, and a review of relevant OR/MS articles for each planning decision. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, to position the planning decisions, a taxonomy is presented. This taxonomy provides health care managers and OR/MS researchers with a method to identify, break down and classify planning and control decisions. Second, following the taxonomy, for six health care services, we provide an exhaustive specification of planning and control decisions in resource capacity planning and control. For each planning and control decision, we structurally review the key OR/MS articles and the OR/MS methods and techniques that are applied in the literature to support decision making

Situated and distributed cognition in artifact negotiation and trade-specific skills: A cognitive ethnography of Kashmiri carpet weaving practice

This article describes various ways actors in Kashmiri carpet weaving practice deploy a range of artifacts, from symbolic, to material, to hybrid, in order to achieve diverse cognitive accomplishments in their particular task domains: information representation, inter and intra-domain communication, distribution of cognitive labor across people and time, coordination of team activities, and carrying of cultural heritage. In this repertoire, some artifacts position themselves as naïve tools in the actors’ environment to the point of being ignored; however, their usage-in-context unfolds their cognitive involvement in the tasks. These usages-in-context are shown through artifact analysis of their routine, improvised, and opportunistic uses, where cognitive artifacts like talim—the central artifact of this practice—are shown to play not only multifunctional roles beyond representation, but are also complemented by trade-specific skills bearing strong cognitive implications in a task