How Infrastructure Investments Support the U.S. Economy

The U.S. system of public infrastructure has deteriorated badly over the past generation. The breaching of New Orleans’ water levees in 2005 and the collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis in 2007 offered tragic testimony to this long-acknowledged reality. The project of rebuilding our infrastructure now needs to be embraced as a first-tier economic policy priority, and not simply to prevent repetitions of the disasters in New Orleans and Minneapolis. Infrastructure investments—particularly core economic infrastructure in t energy, transportation, and water and sewerage—are essential for the functioning of the U.S. economy. With the deterioration of economic conditions in recent months, public investment is back on the policy agenda, as a job-creation program linked to the need to revitalize the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. In this report, Robert Pollin, James Heintz and Heidi Garrett-Peltier examine the employment impacts of an expanded infrastructure investment program and what it would take to create millions of jobs. They examine the long-run impacts of such a program on productivity and economic growth, and offer brief observations on U.S. competitiveness and environmental sustainability that emerge from the findings.

A framework for smart production-logistics systems based on CPS and industrial IoT

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has received increasing attention from both academia and industry. However, several challenges including excessively long waiting time and a serious waste of energy still exist in the IIoT-based integration between production and logistics in job shops. To address these challenges, a framework depicting the mechanism and methodology of smart production-logistics systems is proposed to implement intelligent modeling of key manufacturing resources and investigate self-organizing configuration mechanisms. A data-driven model based on analytical target cascading is developed to implement the self-organizing configuration. A case study based on a Chinese engine manufacturer is presented to validate the feasibility and evaluate the performance of the proposed framework and the developed method. The results show that the manufacturing time and the energy consumption are reduced and the computing time is reasonable. This paper potentially enables manufacturers to deploy IIoT-based applications and improve the efficiency of production-logistics systems

Machine-Part cell formation through visual decipherable clustering of Self Organizing Map

Machine-part cell formation is used in cellular manufacturing in order to process a large variety, quality, lower work in process levels, reducing manufacturing lead-time and customer response time while retaining flexibility for new products. This paper presents a new and novel approach for obtaining machine cells and part families. In the cellular manufacturing the fundamental problem is the formation of part families and machine cells. The present paper deals with the Self Organising Map (SOM) method an unsupervised learning algorithm in Artificial Intelligence, and has been used as a visually decipherable clustering tool of machine-part cell formation. The objective of the paper is to cluster the binary machine-part matrix through visually decipherable cluster of SOM color-coding and labelling via the SOM map nodes in such a way that the part families are processed in that machine cells. The Umatrix, component plane, principal component projection, scatter plot and histogram of SOM have been reported in the present work for the successful visualization of the machine-part cell formation. Computational result with the proposed algorithm on a set of group technology problems available in the literature is also presented. The proposed SOM approach produced solutions with a grouping efficacy that is at least as good as any results earlier reported in the literature and improved the grouping efficacy for 70% of the problems and found immensely useful to both industry practitioners and researchers.Comment: 18 pages,3 table, 4 figure

Reconciling visions and realities of virtual working: findings from the UK chemicals industry

The emergence of advanced technologies such as Grid computing will, some suggest, allow the final realisation of visions of virtual organisations. This will, according to its advocates, have entirely positive impacts, creating communities of experts, increasing flexibility, reducing the need for travel and making communications more efficient by crossing boundaries of time and space. Such predictions about future patterns of virtual working are, unfortunately, rarely grounded in real working practices, and often neglect to account for both the rich and varied interpretations that may exist of what constitutes virtual working and the constraints and concerns of those who would do it. This chapter gives attention to the consequences of different views over what virtuality might mean in practice and, in particular, considers virtuality in relation to customer and supplier relationships in a competitive and commercial context. The discussion is based upon a three year study that investigated contrasting visions of what was technically feasible and might be organisationally desirable in the UK Chemicals industry. Through interviews with managers and staff of companies both large and small that research provided insights into the different meanings that organisations attribute to the virtuality of work and to the acceptability of potential implementations of a middleware technology. It was found that interpretations of virtuality amongst the potential users and participants were strongly influenced by established work practices and by previous experiences of relationships-at-a-distance with suppliers and customers. There was a sharp contrast with the enthusiastic visions of virtual working that were already being encapsulated in the middleware by the technical developers; visions of internet-only interaction were perceived as rigid, alienating from well-established ways of working with suppliers and customers and unworkable. In this chapter we shall capture these differences by making a distinction amongst compet

A survey of simulation techniques in commerce and defence

Despite the developments in Modelling and Simulation (M&S) tools and techniques over the past years, there has been a gap in the M&S research and practice in healthcare on developing a toolkit to assist the modellers and simulation practitioners with selecting an appropriate set of techniques. This study is a preliminary step towards this goal. This paper presents some results from a systematic literature survey on applications of M&S in the commerce and defence domains that could inspire some improvements in the healthcare. Interim results show that in the commercial sector Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) has been the most widely used technique with System Dynamics (SD) in second place. However in the defence sector, SD has gained relatively more attention. SD has been found quite useful for qualitative and soft factors analysis. From both the surveys it becomes clear that there is a growing trend towards using hybrid M&S approaches

Preparing the Workforce for a "Green Jobs" Economy

Identifies the types of jobs and skills that will be in demand in clean energy economy and the factors that are driving the new energy economy and the growth of its workforce. Also considers strategies for building competitive, flexible workforce systems that can respond to emerging employer needs and highlights best practices occurring around the nation

Clean Power Players: Landing a Job in Clean Energy

A new, first-of-its-kind guidebook by Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) offers practical, how-to advice for young people seeking careers in clean energy