Fire and rescue service reconfiguration: a case study in Nottinghamshire

The Fire Cover Review in Nottinghamshire arises out of the Integrated Risk Management Planning process introduced in the UK by the Fire and Rescue 2004 Act,. It is intended to provide the evidence and analysis for the reconfiguration of services and the future deployment of resources in in the short, medium and long terms. Any future reconfigurations of services must be based on contemporary and comprehensive risk assessments of the areas affected.(ODPM 2004). The need to undertake the review pre-dated the current financial crises, the general election and the need for significant reductions in public expenditure in the UK, although these circumstances made the review more challenging and politically sensitive. This paper evaluates the practical implementation of the Integrated Risk Management Planning process and the Fire Cover Review in Nottinghamshire to identify good practice and to generate recommendations for improving the process and its implementation

A matter of (good) faith?:Understanding the interplay of power and the moral agency of managers in healthcare service reconfiguration

Previous studies of service reconfiguration in healthcare have explored the influence of power on processes and outcomes. However, in these accounts the moral agency of managers is often underemphasised. This paper draws on the theoretical tools provided by the sociology of morality to help deepen understanding of the interaction between power and moral agency in service reconfiguration in healthcare. It presents results from a qualitative study of a pan-organisational service reconfiguration in the NHS in England, involving nineteen in-depth interviews with those leading the change and the analysis of twelve programme documents. We combine concepts of the moral background and epistemic governance to interpret participants' conviction that the service change was 'the right thing to do'. The paper shows how epistemic work carried out by service change regulations shaped the moral background within which participants worked. This, in turn, channelled their moral agency - specifically their commitment to patient care - in a way that also reflected central priorities. The paper adds to sociological understandings of service reconfiguration through considering the interaction of structure, agency and power, while also developing the concept of the moral background to show how power relations can influence moral beliefs.</p

An agent-based approach for the dynamic and decentralized service reconfiguration in collaborative production scenarios

Future industrial systems endorse the implementation of innovative paradigms addressing the continuous flexibility, reconfiguration, and evolution to face the volatility of dynamic markets demanding complex and customized products. Smart manufacturing relies on the capability to adapt and evolve to face changes, particularly by identifying, on-the-fly, opportunities to reconfigure its behavior and functionalities and offer new and more adapted services. This paper introduces an agent-based approach for service reconfiguration that allows the identification of the opportunities for reconfiguration in a pro-active and dynamic manner, and the implementation on-the-fly of the best strategies for the service reconfiguration that will lead to a better production efficiency. The developed prototype for a flexible manufacturing system case study allowed to verify the feasibility of greedy local service reconfiguration for competitive and collaborative industrial automation situations.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Service Reconfiguration in the DANAH Assistive System

International audienceSmart Homes are pervasive systems that interact with the user using a service offer paradigm to provide fully automated daily repetitive tasks. When services are augmented with semantic relationships, one can build adaptive services and systems. In this paper we deal with service failures and propose a recovering method, which we call service reconfiguration, to ensure service availability in smart homes. Both off-line and on-line reconfigurations are considered. This method has been implemented in the DANAH assistive system

Service delivery

Nottingham Business School reports on its involvement in a county-wide review of community risk and frontline fire service cover, involving public consultation

Automated Web Service Reconfiguration

Brazier, F.M.T. [Promotor]Langen, P.H.G. van [Copromotor

Fire risk assessment – from property to people

Two studies sponsored by the Nottinghamshire Fire and Rescue Service, one into the assessment and management of risk, and the other on effective communication, picked up the top two prizes in this year’s Fire Related Research and Developments Conference (RE13)