Fuzzy uncertainty modelling for project planning; application to helicopter maintenance

Maintenance is an activity of growing interest specially for critical systems. Particularly, aircraft maintenance costs are becoming an important issue in the aeronautical industry. Managing an aircraft maintenance center is a complex activity. One of the difficulties comes from the numerous uncertainties that affect the activity and disturb the plans at short and medium term. Based on a helicopter maintenance planning and scheduling problem, we study in this paper the integration of uncertainties into tactical and operational multiresource, multi-project planning (respectively Rough Cut Capacity Planning and Resource Constraint Project Scheduling Problem). Our main contributions are in modelling the periodic workload on tactical level considering uncertainties in macro-tasks work contents, and modelling the continuous workload on operational level considering uncertainties in tasks durations. We model uncertainties by a fuzzy/possibilistic approach instead of a stochastic approach since very limited data are available. We refer to the problems as the Fuzzy RoughCut Capacity Problem (FRCCP) and the Fuzzy Resource Constraint Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP).We apply our models to helicopter maintenance activity within the frame of the Helimaintenance project, an industrial project approved by the French Aerospace Valley cluster which aims at building a center for civil helicopter maintenance

Rural Development, Environmental Sustainability, and Poverty Alleviation: A Critique of Current Paradigms

Donors have developed new micro-level and local paradigms to address rural development, environmental sustainability, and poverty alleviation to bypass, ignore, and substitute for badly functioning and corrupt states. Yet, states still set the macro-economic, legal, and policy parameters or “rules of the game” within which other entities operate, and many non-state actors are only nominally independent. Hence, technical initiatives stemming from these paradigms, aimed at growth and equity are often theoretically misconceived and tend to fail when implemented. The paper critically discusses the new paradigms, including decentralization, civil society, microentrepreneurship, and capacity building, among others, mainly using African examples.economic development, formal and informal and insitutional arrangements, development planning and policy, economic development, regional urban and rural analyses, formal and informal sectors, institutional arrangements, institutional linkages to development.

Last Mile Delivery and Route Planning for Freight

This report analyzes anticipated list mile challenges in Indiana by using a scenario-based approach to develop forecasts of GDP growth and thus freight growth across industry clusters in Indiana counties; potential congestion implied by this growth; and a proactive plan to add capacity to alleviate the congestion. We use a quantitative approach to aggregate ramp level flows, industry cluster locations, county layout, and economic activity to develop our recommendations. We develop forecasts through the year 2050 based on long-term planning approaches used by other states (California, Ohio, and Utah). We use data from global databases that consider different possible geo-political scenarios and regulatory choices to scale it down to county-level impact. At the same time, we track industry cluster locations within each county, ramps from interstates, and distances to travel within the counties to reach freight destinations. The result is a report that combines macro trends with micro detail to develop potential capacity bottlenecks

An extensible manufacturing resource model for process integration

Driven by industrial needs and enabled by process technology and information technology, enterprise integration is rapidly shifting from information integration to process integration to improve overall performance of enterprises. Traditional resource models are established based on the needs of individual applications. They cannot effectively serve process integration which needs resources to be represented in a unified, comprehensive and flexible way to meet the needs of various applications for different business processes. This paper looks into this issue and presents a configurable and extensible resource model which can be rapidly reconfigured and extended to serve for different applications. To achieve generality, the presented resource model is established from macro level and micro level. A semantic representation method is developed to improve the flexibility and extensibility of the model

A systems approach to social entrepreneurship

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Goodbye to Projects? - A livelihoods-grounded audit of the Sustainable Management of the Usangu Wetland and its Catchment (SMUWC) project in Tanzania

NoApproaches to projects and development have undergone considerable change in the last decade with significant policy shifts on governance, gender, poverty eradication, and environmental issues. Most recently this has led to the adoption and promotion of the sustainable livelihood (SL) approach. The adoption of the SL approach presents challenges to development interventions including: the future of projects and programmes, and sector wide approaches (SWAPs) and direct budgetary support.This paper `A livelihoods-grounded audit of the Sustainable Management of the Usangu Wetland Catchment (SMUWC) project in Tanzania¿ is the eighth in the series of project working papers.Department for International Developmen

Goodbye to Projects? ¿ A livelihoods-grounded audit of the Sustainable Coastal Livelihoods Programme (SCLP) in South Africa

Approaches to projects and development have undergone considerable change in the last decade with significant policy shifts on governance, gender, poverty eradication, and environmental issues. Most recently this has led to the adoption and promotion of the sustainable livelihood (SL) approach. The adoption of the SL approach presents challenges to development interventions including: the future of projects and programmes, and sector wide approaches (SWAPs) and direct budgetary support. This paper `A livelihoods-grounded audit of the Sustainable Coastal Livelihoods Programme (SCLP)¿ is the twelfth in the series of project working papers.Department for International Developmen

Goodbye to Projects? A livelihoods-grounded audit of Community-Based Planning Project in South Africa

Approaches to projects and development have undergone considerable change in the last decade with significant policy shifts on governance, gender, poverty eradication, and environmental issues. Most recently this has led to the adoption and promotion of the sustainable livelihood (SL) approach. The adoption of the SL approach presents challenges to development interventions including: the future of projects and programmes, and sector wide approaches (SWAPs) and direct budgetary support. This paper `A livelihoods-grounded audit of the Community-Based Planning (CBP) Project in South Africa¿ is the sixth in the series of project working papers.Department for International Developmen

Goodbye to Projects? Working paper 1: Annotated bibliography on livelihood approaches and development interventions.

YesThis paper is one in a series of working papers prepared under a research project on Goodbye to Projects? The Institutional Impacts of a Livelihood Approach on Projects and Project Cycle Management. This is a collaborative project between the Bradford Centre for International Centre for Development (BCID) with the Economic and Policy Research Centre (EPRC), Uganda; Khanya ¿ managing rural change, South Africa; and, the Institute for Development Management (IDM), Tanzania. The project is supported by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) under their Economic and Social Research Programme (ESCOR).Department for International Developmen