Operational Research in Education

Operational Research (OR) techniques have been applied, from the early stages of the discipline, to a wide variety of issues in education. At the government level, these include questions of what resources should be allocated to education as a whole and how these should be divided amongst the individual sectors of education and the institutions within the sectors. Another pertinent issue concerns the efficient operation of institutions, how to measure it, and whether resource allocation can be used to incentivise efficiency savings. Local governments, as well as being concerned with issues of resource allocation, may also need to make decisions regarding, for example, the creation and location of new institutions or closure of existing ones, as well as the day-to-day logistics of getting pupils to schools. Issues of concern for managers within schools and colleges include allocating the budgets, scheduling lessons and the assignment of students to courses. This survey provides an overview of the diverse problems faced by government, managers and consumers of education, and the OR techniques which have typically been applied in an effort to improve operations and provide solutions

Bulk Scheduling with the DIANA Scheduler

Results from the research and development of a Data Intensive and Network Aware (DIANA) scheduling engine, to be used primarily for data intensive sciences such as physics analysis, are described. In Grid analyses, tasks can involve thousands of computing, data handling, and network resources. The central problem in the scheduling of these resources is the coordinated management of computation and data at multiple locations and not just data replication or movement. However, this can prove to be a rather costly operation and efficient sing can be a challenge if compute and data resources are mapped without considering network costs. We have implemented an adaptive algorithm within the so-called DIANA Scheduler which takes into account data location and size, network performance and computation capability in order to enable efficient global scheduling. DIANA is a performance-aware and economy-guided Meta Scheduler. It iteratively allocates each job to the site that is most likely to produce the best performance as well as optimizing the global queue for any remaining jobs. Therefore it is equally suitable whether a single job is being submitted or bulk scheduling is being performed. Results indicate that considerable performance improvements can be gained by adopting the DIANA scheduling approach.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figures. To be published in the IEEE Transactions in Nuclear Science, IEEE Press. 200

Quality Assessment for E-learning: a Benchmarking Approach (Third edition)

The primary purpose of this manual is to provide a set of benchmarks, quality criteria and notes for guidance against which e-learning programmes and their support systems may be judged. The manual should therefore be seen primarily as a reference tool for the assessment or review of e-learning programmes and the systems which support them. However, the manual should also prove to be useful to staff in institutions concerned with the design, development, teaching, assessment and support of e-learning programmes. It is hoped that course developers, teachers and other stakeholders will see the manual as a useful development and/or improvement tool for incorporation in their own institutional systems of monitoring, evaluation and enhancement

Formulation of consumables management models, executive summary

Future manned space programs that have increased launch frequencies and reusable systems require an implementation of new consumables and systems management techniques that relieve both the operations support personnel and flight crew activities. Analytical models and techniques were developed which consist of a Mission Planning Processor (MPP) with appropriate consumables data base, methods of recognizing potential constraint violations in both the planning and flight operations functions, and flight data files for storage/retrieval of information over extended periods interfacing with flight operations processors for monitoring of the actual flights. Consumables subsystems considered in the MPP were electrical power, environmental control and life support, propulsion, hydraulics and auxiliary power

Iowa Public Television’s Planning Targets 2011-2014

Agency Performance Plan, Iowa Public Televisio

Command/response protocols and concurrent software

A version of the program to control the parallel jaw gripper is documented. The parallel jaw end-effector hardware and the Intel 8031 processor that is used to control the end-effector are briefly described. A general overview of the controller program is given and a complete description of the program's structure and design are contained. There are three appendices: a memory map of the on-chip RAM, a cross-reference listing of the self-scheduling routines, and a summary of the top-level and monitor commands

An optimal-control based integrated model of supply chain

Problems of supply chain scheduling are challenged by high complexity, combination of continuous and discrete processes, integrated production and transportation operations as well as dynamics and resulting requirements for adaptability and stability analysis. A possibility to address the above-named issues opens modern control theory and optimal program control in particular. Based on a combination of fundamental results of modern optimal program control theory and operations research, an original approach to supply chain scheduling is developed in order to answer the challenges of complexity, dynamics, uncertainty, and adaptivity. Supply chain schedule generation is represented as an optimal program control problem in combination with mathematical programming and interpreted as a dynamic process of operations control within an adaptive framework. The calculation procedure is based on applying Pontryagin’s maximum principle and the resulting essential reduction of problem dimensionality that is under solution at each instant of time. With the developed model, important categories of supply chain analysis such as stability and adaptability can be taken into consideration. Besides, the dimensionality of operations research-based problems can be relieved with the help of distributing model elements between an operations research (static aspects) and a control (dynamic aspects) model. In addition, operations control and flow control models are integrated and applicable for both discrete and continuous processes.supply chain, model of supply chain scheduling, optimal program control theory, Pontryagin’s maximum principle, operations research model,