On the Interface Between Operations and Human Resources Management

Operations management (OM) and human resources management (HRM) have historically been very separate fields. In practice, operations managers and human resource managers interact primarily on administrative issues regarding payroll and other matters. In academia, the two subjects are studied by separate communities of scholars publishing in disjoint sets of journals, drawing on mostly separate disciplinary foundations. Yet, operations and human resources are intimately related at a fundamental level. Operations are the context that often explains or moderates the effects of human resource activities such as pay, training, communications and staffing. Human responses to operations management systems often explain variations or anomalies that would otherwise be treated as randomness or error variance in traditional operations research models. In this paper, we probe the interface between operations and human resources by examining how human considerations affect classical OM results and how operational considerations affect classical HRM results. We then propose a unifying framework for identifying new research opportunities at the intersection of the two fields

Stirling cycle cryogenic cooler

A long lifetime Stirling cycle cryogenic cooler particularly adapted for space applications is described. It consists of a compressor section centrally aligned end to end with an expansion section, and respectively includes a reciprocating compressor piston and displacer radially suspended in interconnecting cylindrical housings by active magnetic bearings and has adjacent reduced clearance regions so as to be in noncontacting relationship therewith and wherein one or more of these regions operate as clearance seals. The piston and displacer are reciprocated in their housings by linear drive motors to vary the volume of respectively adjacent compression and expansion spaces which contain a gaseous working fluid and a thermal regenerator to effect Stirling cycle cryogenic cooling

Reengineering the process of manufacturing thermal-cryogenics tanks

Includes bibliographical references

A Business Process Management System based on a General Optimium Criterion

Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) provide a broad range of facilities to manage operational business processes. These systems should provide support for the complete Business Process Management (BPM) life-cycle (16): (re)design, configuration, execution, control, and diagnosis of processes. BPMS can be seen as successors of Workflow Management (WFM) systems. However, already in the seventies people were working on office automation systems which are comparable with today’s WFM systems. Recently, WFM vendors started to position their systems as BPMS. Our paper’s goal is a proposal for a Tasks-to-Workstations Assignment Algorithm (TWAA) for assembly lines which is a special implementation of a stochastic descent technique, in the context of BPMS, especially at the control level. Both cases, single and mixed-model, are treated. For a family of product models having the same generic structure, the mixed-model assignment problem can be formulated through an equivalent single-model problem. A general optimum criterion is considered. As the assembly line balancing, this kind of optimisation problem leads to a graph partitioning problem meeting precedence and feasibility constraints. The proposed definition for the "neighbourhood" function involves an efficient way for treating the partition and precedence constraints. Moreover, the Stochastic Descent Technique (SDT) allows an implicit treatment of the feasibility constraint. The proposed algorithm converges with probability 1 to an optimal solution.BPMS, control assembly system, stochastic optimisation techniques, TWAA, SDT

Automotive Stirling engine: Mod 2 design report

The design of an automotive Stirling engine that achieves the superior fuel economy potential of the Stirling cycle is described. As the culmination of a 9-yr development program, this engine, designated the Mod 2, also nullifies arguments that Stirling engines are heavy, expensive, unreliable, demonstrating poor performance. Installed in a General Motors Chevrolet Celebrity car, this engine has a predicted combined fuel economy on unleaded gasoline of 17.5 km/l (41 mpg)- a value 50% above the current vehicle fleet average. The Mod 2 Stirling engine is a four-cylinder V-drive design with a single crankshaft. The engine is also equipped with all the controls and auxiliaries necessary for automotive operation

Tackling Exascale Software Challenges in Molecular Dynamics Simulations with GROMACS

GROMACS is a widely used package for biomolecular simulation, and over the last two decades it has evolved from small-scale efficiency to advanced heterogeneous acceleration and multi-level parallelism targeting some of the largest supercomputers in the world. Here, we describe some of the ways we have been able to realize this through the use of parallelization on all levels, combined with a constant focus on absolute performance. Release 4.6 of GROMACS uses SIMD acceleration on a wide range of architectures, GPU offloading acceleration, and both OpenMP and MPI parallelism within and between nodes, respectively. The recent work on acceleration made it necessary to revisit the fundamental algorithms of molecular simulation, including the concept of neighborsearching, and we discuss the present and future challenges we see for exascale simulation - in particular a very fine-grained task parallelism. We also discuss the software management, code peer review and continuous integration testing required for a project of this complexity.Comment: EASC 2014 conference proceedin