A review of system dynamics models applied in social and humanitarian researches

Over the past decades, the number of disasters has been on the rise, including earthquakes, war, flood and other incidents that cause destruction of society, such as education and health services. Forecasts show that over the next 50 years, natural and manmade disasters are expected to increase five-folds both in the number and impact. Therefore, there is a need for effective and efficient disaster support actions during emergencies. This compels humanitarian organizations to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their approaches and facilitate decision making in resolving such complicated problems characterized by numerous parameters. Besides, humanitarian organizations face situations with multiple critical events, inadequate funding, limited time to plan and react, and operating in increasingly challenging circumstances. Useful approaches for tackling problems in such dynamic conditions require methods and tools that take into account uncertainty and enable managers to evaluate the dynamic complexity of such systems, to facilitate decision making. Among the large amount of decision-aid tools for humanitarian organizations, System Dynamic (SD) is a method used for the evaluation of complex system behavior and for presenting the effect of decisions over time in an easy-to-use model. This method has been applied in humanitarian problems, and this paper aims to present a review of the most relevant humanitarian publications associated with system dynamics. This literature review is a structured review of the papers published since 2003 onwards. The finding of this research can be used to facilitate further research in developing the system dynamic methodology for humanitarian organizations and to present the essential requirement of SD tools for modeling complex environments

The Identification of Critical Conditions in Total Quality Management for Assembling Industry

The paper proposes the application of analysis techniques for the identification of critical conditions in quality control; the analysis is based on the application of design of experiments. By this approach, using simulation, it becomes possible to identify the source of quality loss and to improve the process

Modeling as Support for Maintenance Planning in Industrial Facilities

The paper proposes different simulation models for supporting maintenance. Experimental results related to real case studies are summarized and compared to estimate the convenience of this approach