Designing Facilities to Improve Flexibility: Zone-based Dynamic Facility Layout with Embedded Input/Output Points

This paper considers solving the unequal area Dynamic Facility Layout Problem (DFLP) using a zone-based structure. Zone-based layouts have significant advantages, such as being easily transferable to a detailed layout with innately included possible aisle structures; therefore, they can be fitted to the unique needs of the layout designers. The unequal area DFLP is modeled and solved using a zone-based structure, which is referred to as ZDFLP, where the dimensions of the departments and material handling system input/output (I/O) points are decision variables. A two-phase matheuristic, which directly operates on Problem ZDFLP without requiring an encoding scheme of the problem, is proposed to solve the ZDFLP with promising results

Building Inclusive Student Innovation Competitions, Exhibitions, and Training Programs

There has been an emerging trend of expanding entrepreneurship educational programs/events to broader student populations. Similarly, the focus of this paper is broadening participation in student innovation competitions, exhibitions, and training programs. Therefore, through student surveys, factors and barriers affecting student participation in these co-curricular programs were explored, with a particular interest being students who are underrepresented in entrepreneurship. The survey items were crafted based on the known scales and theories in the literature, such as the Expectancy-Value-Cost Scale and Self-Determination Theory. The findings revealed that the time commitment and lack of awareness were significant barriers to participation in these activities. To make student innovation competitions, exhibitions, and training programs more accessible and relatable to all students, higher education institutions should consider reframing these events and developing them, requiring less time commitment. The Expectancy-Value-Cost-based framework used in this study is also promising to study students’ engagement with entrepreneurship and innovation-focused co-curricular activities

Information Systems and Technology Education: Perspectives from USA Community Colleges

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, at least 57 percent of job openings in the United States (US) in 2006-2016 will require some post secondary education, jobs for community college graduates are expected to grow at twice the national average and the highest paying jobs will be in the Information Technology (IT) sector. Yet studies of preparation of IT professionals typically explore four-year institutions rather than community colleges. Given the percentage of the USA population that attends community college, exploring information systems and technology education in community colleges and students’ readiness for the IT workforce are important subjects to investigate. In this paper, community college students’ perceptions are examined to identify how students perceive the importance of specific IT skills, how confident students are about their ability to learn and engage with the specific IT skills, and how the gender of respondents affect gender stereotyping of these IT skills

Simulation-based Flexible Layout Planning Considering Stochastic Effects

Layout planning is an important practical problem for manufacturing companies. In today's market conditions - characterized with continuously changing product portfolio and shortening product lifecycles - frequent reconfiguration is requested if the primary goal for the company is to remain competitive. The key to win customers is to widen the product portfolio and customize the products, however, this leads to the problem that the manufacturing system has to be re-organized several times during its life cycle that requires solving design problems frequently. In the paper, a novel layout planning method is introduced that can be applied efficiently to solve real industrial problems. The method applies automated simulation model building to create the different layouts. It focuses on minimizing the objective function that is specified according to the predefined key performance indicators (KPI). The solution is a hybrid optimization method, in which evaluation of the lay out alternatives is done by simulation and the improvement of the solution is performed by a near-to-optimal search algorithm. The optimization is separated from the simulation model in order to boost the computations. Important advantage of the solution is the efficiency consideration of stochastic parameters that improve the applicability of the results