Tramp Ship Scheduling Problem with Berth Allocation Considerations and Time-dependent Constraints

This work presents a model for the Tramp Ship Scheduling problem including berth allocation considerations, motivated by a real case of a shipping company. The aim is to determine the travel schedule for each vessel considering multiple docking and multiple time windows at the berths. This work is innovative due to the consideration of both spatial and temporal attributes during the scheduling process. The resulting model is formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming problem, and a heuristic method to deal with multiple vessel schedules is also presented. Numerical experimentation is performed to highlight the benefits of the proposed approach and the applicability of the heuristic. Conclusions and recommendations for further research are provided.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figures, 5 tables, proceedings paper of Mexican International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (MICAI) 201

ASSOCIATIVE SUSTAINABILITY BUSINESS MODELS IN THE SPECIALTY COFFEE NICHE A Mixed-Method Study Assessing the Impact of ASBMs to Quality and Sustainability Challenges Within the SCN Actors in Norway and Uganda.

Executive Summary Purpose The coffee industry is traditionally known for ethical and sustainability challenges at the upstream. Specialty coffee is likely to make a difference through ethical sourcing strategies, more effective production practices, and higher quality products. This requires business models which rely on collaboration, association, and partnership. Problem statement How can associative sustainable business models solve sustainability challenges within the specialty coffee sector? Design/methodology/approach Using a mixed-method, we collected data from 184 Ugandan coffee farmers via questionnaires, Focus Group Discussions, key informant interviews, and transect walks. Furthermore, we conducted semi-structured interviews with one trader, one exporter, two estates from Uganda, and three roasters, one importer from Norway to examine the impacts of relationships between coffee producers and processors on sustainability and quality. Findings Our findings showed that specialty coffee is based on direct relationships between upstream and downstream. This is also in line with the existing literature. However, relationships in different forms make it complicated. We found that connective businesses play an important role, especially where the farms are of small sizes, like in Uganda. The core of the specialty coffee niche is that actors rely on building and maintaining long-term relationships to increase quality. The findings indicated that collaboration, cooperation, and partnerships in sustainable business models within the specialty coffee niche can lead to socio-economic sustainability. Especially when stakeholders are acknowledged beyond elements. Keywords: Environmental, Social, and economic, Stakeholder theory, Business model innovation, Relationships, Collaboration and Partnerships, Agricultural value chains, sustainability challenges, Specialty coffee Niche, Smallholder farmers, SDG

A distributed multi-agent framework for shared resources scheduling

Nowadays, manufacturers have to share some of their resources with partners due to the competitive economic environment. The management of the availability periods of shared resources causes a problem because it is achieved by the scheduling systems which assume a local environment where all resources are on the same site. Therefore, distributed scheduling with shared resources is an important research topic in recent years. In this communication, we introduce the architecture and behavior of DSCEP framework (distributed, supervisor, customer, environment, and producer) under shared resources situation with disturbances. We are using a simple example of manufacturing system to illustrate the ability of DSCEP framework to solve the shared resources scheduling problem in complex systems

Beyond Extractive: Advancing Abstractive Automatic Text Summarization in Norwegian with Transformers

Automatic summarization is a key area in natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning which attempts to generate informative summaries of articles and documents. Despite its evolution since the 1950s, research on automatically summarising Norwegian text has remained relatively underdeveloped. Though there have been some strides made in extractive systems, which generate summaries by selecting and condensing key phrases directly from the source material, the field of abstractive summarization remains unexplored for the Norwegian language. Abstractive summarization is distinct as it generates summaries incorporating new words and phrases not present in the original text. This Master's thesis revolves around one key question: Is it possible to create a machine learning system capable of performing abstractive summarization in Norwegian? To answer this question, we generate and release the first two Norwegian datasets for creating and evaluating Norwegian summarization models. One of these datasets is a web scrape of Store Norske Leksikon (SNL), and the other is a machine-translated version of CNN/Daily Mail. Using these datasets, we fine-tune two Norwegian T5 language models with 580M and 1.2B parameters to create summaries. To assess the quality of the models, we employed both automatic ROUGE scores and human evaluations on the generated summaries. In an effort to better understand the model's behaviour, we measure how a model generates summaries with various metrics, including our own novel contribution which we name "Match Ratio" which measures sentence similarities between summaries and articles based on Levenshtein distances. The top-performing models achieved ROUGE-1 scores of 35.07 and 34.02 on SNL and CNN/DM, respectively. In terms of human evaluation, the best model yielded an average score of 3.96/5.00 for SNL and 4.64/5.00 for CNN/Daily Mail across various criteria. Based on these results, we conclude that it is possible to perform abstractive summarization of Norwegian with high-quality summaries. With this research, we have laid a foundation that hopefully will facilitate future research, empowering others to build upon our findings and contribute further to the development of Norwegian summarization models

Bruk av engelsk språk i barnehagekvardagen

Det engelske språket har ei særeigen rolle i dagens moderne verd, der ein dagleg får engelske innflytelsar frå forskjellige plan, anten det er frå songar på radioen, seriar på nettbrettet eller spel på datamaskinen. Med eit samfunn så omringa av slike engelske påverknadar, har det ikkje berre innverknad for kvardagen til oss vaksne, men også i stor grad kvardagen til barna. Gjennom ei kvalitativ oppgåve ønskjer eg derfor å rette søkelyset mot korleis engelsken kan komme til uttrykk og bli brukt i barnehagekvardagen, som barna er aktive i. For å undersøkje tema, arrangerte eg semistrukturerte intervju av tre pedagogiske leiarar på storbarnsavdelingar i forskjellige barnehagar om deira erfaringar med det engelske språket i praksis. Etter gjennomførte intervju, kom det fram at engelsken hadde særleg tre bruksområde: Som kommunikasjon mellom personalet og framandspråklege foreldre og barn, som støttespråk og verktøy for inkludering av framandspråklege barn, og gjennom uttrykksformer i barns rolleleik og samspel. Følgjeleg vart resultata drøfta opp mot tre hovudtema i form av fem teoretiske omgrep og perspektiv. Først granska eg miljøets påverknad for barns læring og utvikling, gjennom Bronfenbrenners økologiske systemteori og barnehagens ressursperspektiv på språkleg mangfald. Deretter barna sine eigne språklege oppførslar og handlingar, gjennom den språklege akkomodasjonsteorien og omgrepa transspråking og språkblanding, etterfølgt av korleis engelsk som eit globalt språk kan påverke arbeidet i barnehagen

Politireform og samarbeid. Ei komparativ casestudie av to kommunar i Vest Politidistrikt

Postponed access: the file will be accessible after 2021-06-03Masteroppgåve i administrasjon og organisasjonsvitskapAORG350MASV-AOR

En komparativ studie av styrers beslutningsatferd i møte med kjønnsmangfold og markering av pride i barnehager

Kjønnsmangfold og pridemarkering har de siste årene fått et større fokus i samfunnet. Lovverket hegner om inkludering, mangfold og respekt uavhengig av kjønn, legning og kjønnsidentitet. Hvordan barnehagene skal møte denne tematikken skaper debatt og engasjement. Innenfor kristne fellesskap vektlegges i tillegg en åndelig dimensjon og bibeltolkning kan være avgjørende for synspunkter og beslutninger. Alle barnehager bygger på verdigrunnlag og formål fastsatt i lovverk og internasjonale konvensjoner. Barnehageloven åpner opp for at private barnehager kan ha et «særlig formål» der det blant annet kan vektes et særlig kristent verdigrunnlag. Formålet med masteroppgaven er å øke innsikten og forståelsen av hvordan styrere i «kristne barnehager» har ulik beslutningsatferd i møte med kjønn, kjønnsidentitet og kjønnsuttrykk. Problemstillingen er: Hvordan opplever styrere i barnehage med ulikt «formål» kjønnsmangfold og beslutninger om markering av pride? Hvilke faktorer påvirker beslutningsatferden? Det er gjennomført kvalitative intervjuer med seks styrere, tre styrere fra barnehager med særlig kristent formål og tre styrere fra barnehager med det ordinære formålet. Intensjonen med dette er å se etter likheter og forskjeller mellom formålsgruppene og hvilke forhold som påvirker styreres beslutningsatferd. Funnene viser at det er lite som skiller styrerne i møte med kjønnsmangfold og markering av pride i barnehagen. Forskjellene kommer likevel til uttrykk i hvordan verdigrunnlag og formål påvirker beslutningene. Det er lite markering av pride i barnehagene, men der de har fokus på temaet flettes det inn i hverdagspraksisen eller i mangfoldsuker. På generelt grunnlag forholder styrerne seg lojale til eiers mål for virksomheten, samtidig viser de evne til å uttrykke seg ved behov og etter tråd med gjeldende lovverk. Foreldrenes påvirkningskraft er et viktig trekk i beslutningsatferden og blir vektlagt fra styrerne. Bruk av regnbueflagg som symbol har i noen grad fått innpass i barnehagene, men det er få barnehager i min studie som flagger med flagget utenfor barnehagebygget

Babybrems: En kvalitativ studie av den fallende fødselsraten i Norge

Master i samfunnsvitenskap med fordypning i sosiologi - Nord universitet, 202

Heuristics for dynamic and stochastic routing in industrial shipping

Maritime transportation plays a central role in international trade, being responsible for the majority of long-distance shipments in terms of volume. One of the key aspects in the planning of maritime transportation systems is the routing of ships. While static and deterministic vehicle routing problems have been extensively studied in the last decades and can now be solved effectively with metaheuristics, many industrial applications are both dynamic and stochastic. In this spirit, this paper addresses a dynamic and stochastic maritime transportation problem arising in industrial shipping. Three heuristics adapted to this problem are considered and their performance in minimizing transportation costs is assessed. Extensive computational experiments show that the use of stochastic information within the proposed solution methods yields average cost savings of 2.5% on a set of realistic test instances

Attaching DNA to Nanoceria: Regulating Oxidase Activity and Fluorescence Quenching

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of a Published Work that appeared in final form in Applied Materials and Interfaces copyright © American Chemical Society after peer review and technical editing by publisher. To access the final edited and published work see Pautler, R., Kelly, E. Y., Huang, P.-J. J., Cao, J., Liu, B., & Liu, J. (2013). Attaching DNA to Nanoceria: Regulating Oxidase Activity and Fluorescence Quenching. ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 5(15), 6820–6825. https://doi.org/10.1021/am4018863Cerium oxide nanoparticles (nanoceria) have recently emerged as a nanozyme with oxidase activity. In this work, we present a few important interfacial properties of nanoceria. First, the surface charge of nanoceria can be controlled not only by adjusting pH but also by adsorption of simple inorganic anions. Adsorption of phosphate and citrate gives negatively charged surface over a broad pH range. Second, nanoceria adsorbs DNA via the DNA phosphate backbone in a sequence-independent manner; DNA adsorption inhibits its oxidase activity. Other anionic polymers display much weaker inhibition effects. Adsorption of simple inorganic phosphate does not have the inhibition effect. Third, nanoceria is a quencher for many fluorophores. These discoveries provide an important understanding for further use of nanoceria in biosensor development, materials science, and nanotechnology.University of Waterloo || Canadian Foundation for Innovation || Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council || Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation |