Simulating Online Business Models

The online content market for news and music is changing rapidly with the spread of technology and innovative business models (e.g. the online delivery of music, specialised subscription news services). It is correspondingly hard for suppliers of online content to anticipate developments and the effects of their businesses. The paper describes a prototype multiagent simulation to model possible scenarios in this market. The simulation is intended for use by business strategists and has been developed using a participatory, rapid prototyping methodology. The implications of the method and the characteristics of the domain for the design are considered.agent-based modelling, market simulation

Openness and scientists' everyday research processes

Science policy increasingly focuses on maximising societal benefits from science and technology investments, but often reduces those benefits to activities involving codifying and selling knowledge, thereby idealising best practice academic behaviours around entrepreneurial superstars. This paper argues that societal value depends on knowledge being used, making knowledge’s eventual exploitation partly dependent upon on whether other users ‐ societal or scientific ‐ can use that knowledge, i.e. on how far new knowledge is cognate with users’ existing knowledge. When scientists incorporate user knowledge in their research processes, what we call ‘open research behaviours’, their knowledge may be more usable. We develop a set of hypotheses concerning whether researchers’ personal and professional characteristics are associated with open research behaviour, finding evidence suggesting whilst personal characteristics are not associated with open research behaviours; researchers that experience professional signals validating open research behaviours are more likely to demonstrate open research behaviour

Queue scheduling the Alan Cousins Telescope

The Alan Cousins Telescope is a 0.75-m automatic photoelectric telescope situated at the South African Astronomical Observatory, in Sutherland. The telescope was designed and built to execute a range of photometry programmes, but is used mainly for the long-term monitoring of variable stars. In addition, there is the potential for target-of-opportunity observations of unanticipated events, such as gamma ray bursts, and anticipated events such as occultations. Ultimately the telescope is intended to be a fully robotic telescope with limited operational support needs. Some advance toward this goal has been made by a full hardware interface to allow queue executions of observations. The next phase is the implementation of an automated scheduler that will generate a queue of valid observations for each night of observation. Queue scheduling algorithms are widely used in astronomy and the aim of this dissertation is to present a strawman scheduler that will generate the nightly observation queue. The main design of the scheduler is based on a merit-based system implemented at the STELLA robotic observatory, paired with the scheduling algorithms used by SOFIA. The main drawback of the telescope is that it does not currently accommodate dynamically changing weather conditions. As a consequence, the main scheduling constraints are observation parameters, instrument ability, and for monitoring type observations, observation time window constraints

Improving decision making for incentivised and weather-sensitive projects

The field of project management has originated from the domain of operational research, which focuses on the mathematical optimization of operational problems. However, in recent decades an increasingly broad perspective has been applied to the field of project management. As such, project management has spawned a number of very active sub- domains, which focus not solely on the scheduling of the project’s baseline, but also on the analysis of risk, as well as the controlling of project execution. This dissertation focuses on two areas where existing literature is still lacking. The first area is the use of incentivised contractual agreements between the owner of a project, and the contractor who is hired to execute the project. Whereas this area has received growing attention in recent years, the majority of studies remained strongly descriptive. Hence, the aim of the first part of this dissertation is to develop a more prescriptive approach from both the owner’s and the contractor’s perspective. The second part of this dissertation investigates the use of dedicated weather models to improve operational performance of weather-sensitive projects. During recent decades, significant effort has been made to improve the quality of weather simulation models. Moreover, the amount of available weather data has been steadily increasing. This opens up a lot of new possibilities for using more precise weather models in order to support operational decision making. In spite of this, the number of applications of these weather models in operational research has remained rather limited. As such, the aim of the second part of this dissertation is to leverage these weather models to improve the scheduling of offshore construction projects, as well as preventive maintenance of offshore wind turbines

Four archetypes of process improvement: a Q-methodological study

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in International Journal of Production Research on 11/07/2014, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00207543.2013.867086This paper explores the process improvement approaches of organisations. It seeks to identify process redesign principles and the combinations of these principles that are used successfully in industry. We use Q-methodology to explore the viewpoints of a range of highly-experienced process experts about the success of 16 improvement practices. Q-methodology enables the examination of the similarities and differences in the success of the improvement principles used by organisations in order to inform archetypes of process improvement. Overall, our findings suggest that process improvement is determined through the application of two foundational principles combined with one of four archetypes. ‘Remove non-value-adding tasks’ and ‘re-sequence tasks’ are described as foundational principles of process improvement, whilst outsourcing needs to be approached with caution. Furthermore, we articulate four distinctive archetypes comprising unique configurations of improvement principles that can be used to redesign operational processes. Based on this evidence we propose a typology of process improvement. This work suggests that rather than adopting generic improvement frameworks, managers should consult the typology to determine the archetype in closest proximity to their specific requirements. This study has several limitations including the small number of items populating the concourse and the fact that implementation problems are not taken into account

Methodology for the Assessment of Spatial Economic Impacts of Transport Projects and Policies

In this study we develop an integrated econometric and CGE modelling framework for transport projects and transport policies at the European level by integrating network, regional economic and macro-economic impacts. The paper presents the formal structure of the integrated econometric and CGE modelling framework, explains the calibration and applies it to the policy evaluation. The effects of infrastructure investments are modelled by simulating trade cost changes in a comparative static analysis, using estimates of trade cost changes due to new infrastructure links, obtained from a transport network model. By performing a systematic and quantitative analysis of the spatial, network and socio-economic impacts of transport investments and policy and carrying out scenario simulations we improve the under-standing of the impact of transportation policies on short- and long-term spatial development in the EU.Transport Policy, Impact analysis, Spatial CGE Model