Lean Manufacturing in Public Services: Prospects for Value Creation

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the utilization of lean manufacturing systems in public service operations for poten- tial added value. A case study of lean manufacturing implementation at a UK city council was carried out using in-depth interviews with key personnel coupled with documents collection. The Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (OCQ) was administered among front-line employees. Results show that lean manufacturing systems could create signi cant added value to the business and employees. A strong relation- ship was demonstrated between the lean manufacturing implementation and the a ective commitment level of employees. This paper is one of a few studies that demonstrate the applicability of manufacturing systems in other settings and that they can generate significant added value for the service department and its employees

Highly-parallelized simulation of a pixelated LArTPC on a GPU

The rapid development of general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) is allowing the implementation of highly-parallelized Monte Carlo simulation chains for particle physics experiments. This technique is particularly suitable for the simulation of a pixelated charge readout for time projection chambers, given the large number of channels that this technology employs. Here we present the first implementation of a full microphysical simulator of a liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) equipped with light readout and pixelated charge readout, developed for the DUNE Near Detector. The software is implemented with an end-to-end set of GPU-optimized algorithms. The algorithms have been written in Python and translated into CUDA kernels using Numba, a just-in-time compiler for a subset of Python and NumPy instructions. The GPU implementation achieves a speed up of four orders of magnitude compared with the equivalent CPU version. The simulation of the current induced on 10^3 pixels takes around 1 ms on the GPU, compared with approximately 10 s on the CPU. The results of the simulation are compared against data from a pixel-readout LArTPC prototype

Motivation and work behavior

xii, 658 p.; 24 cm