Arbeitsbericht Nr. 2020-01, März 2020

Personnel scheduling is an important and challenging task that arises in a variety of application areas. Scheduling quality, however, strongly depends on the results of the preceding activities of staffing and shift design. This paper presents a novel approach that integrates staffing, shift design and scheduling into one optimization problem for the first time, providing a holistic view of the workforce planning process. By applying an evolutionary multi-objective bilevel algorithm, the three objectives staffing costs, number of shifts and scheduling quality are optimized simultaneously. The experimental results show that the presented holistic approach is suitable to support decision making regarding staffing as well as shift design by showing the decision maker tradeoffs between different solution alternatives. Furthermore, applying the holistic approach reveals new promising solution areas and valuable individual solutions, which would not have been found when optimizing sequentially

A Toolbox to Analyze Emergence in Multiagent Simulations

The field of complexity science often employs multiagent simulations to investigate complex and emergent behavior. Authors in complexity science have suggested that the discussion of complex systems could benefit from a more systematic approach and a more compact mathematical way to describe the behavior of such systems in addition to the common observations and interpretations taking place today. Regarding quantitative measures to capture emergent phenomena, several approaches have been published, but have not yet been put to wide systematic use in the research community. One reason for this could be the manual effort required to investigate multiagent systems in a quantitatively accurate form. Toward this end, there has so far been a lack of appropriate and easy-to-use IT-based tools. To eliminate this deficiency, we present a software library, which enables researchers to integrate emergence measurements into experiments with multiagent modeling tools such as Repast and NetLogo. The major benefit for researchers is that this toolbox enables them to make comparable, quantitatively well-grounded statements about the emergent behavior of the model at hand. The toolbox therefore provides researchers with a standardized artifact that can be employed in a systematic methodological approach to the analysis of multiagent systems

Effects of the Henry Hub price on U.S. LNG exports and on gas flows in Western Europe

Natural gas plays an important role in energy supply, and its fields of application are diverse. However, the world’s largest growth potential among fossil fuels is attributed to liquefied natural gas (LNG). In the last few years, the U.S. rapidly increased LNG exports, and it is expected that they will further increase the liquefaction capacities. The cost of the LNG value chain is composed of the natural gas price in the country of origin, and the LNG process costs for liquefaction, transportation, storage, and regasification. Thus, the Henry Hub (HH) price in the U.S. is important for U.S. LNG exports to Western Europe. In this paper, gas flows in Western Europe at the beginning of the 2030s are analyzed if the price at HH is higher or lower than expected. Furthermore, the effect of the HH price on monthly U.S. LNG exports are studied. For the calculations, the global gas market model WEGA is used. The results reveal that the price at HH has a significant effect on annual gas flows in Western Europe and also on U.S. LNG exports during the summer. Furthermore, it is shown that pipeline gas in Western Europe will absorb fluctuations of U.S. LNG exports between the presented scenarios

Measuring the Agility of the IT Application Systems Landscape

A company’s ability to change increasingly depends on the ability to change its IT, something referred to as “IT-agility” here. High IT-agility can contribute to increased business agility and thus create a competitive advantage. In this paper we focus on the IT application systems landscape, a resource of significant importance for the IT-agility and competitiveness of a company. To manage IT-agility it must be measurable. In our research, a goal hierarchy and a derived performance measurement (key figure) system was developed to measure and actively manage the agility of IT application systems landscapes. This measurement model is scalable from the measurement of individual domains to the entire IT application landscape. It has demonstrated its practicality in the context of several case studies

Arbeitsbericht Nr. 2020-02, März 2020

Determining size and structure of a company’s workforce is one of the most challenging tasks in human resource planning, especially when considering a long-term planning horizon with varying demand. In this paper an approach for integrated staffing and scheduling in a strategic long-term context is presented by applying evolutionary bilevel optimization. For demonstration, the example of determining the number of employees in different categories over the period of one year in a midsized call center of a utility is used. In doing so, two contrary objectives were optimized simultaneously: reduce the overall workforce costs and retain a high scheduling quality. The results show that the proposed approach could be used to support corporate decision making related to strategic workforce planning, not only for call centers but for any other kind of workforce planning involving personnel scheduling

Knowledge Goals as an Essential Component of Knowledge Management

Knowledge goals are one of the fundamental elements of knowledge management. They should be derived from corporategoals and define objectives for knowledge management in a company. Without the creation, use and verification of thesegoals, effective knowledge management is unthinkable. However, this is usually not well supported by informationtechnology. Holistic systems which can assist all processes in managing knowledge goals are virtually non-existent. In ourproject, we develop such a holistic approach termed Knowledge Valuation Management (KVM) system. In this paper, wepresent some key components of the system together with some examples

Forschungsbericht Nr. 2007-02, Oktober 2007

Anhand empirischer Daten wird der aktuelle Stand des Wissensmanagements für die Beratungsschwerpunkte der Strategieberatung und IT-orientierten Beratung gegenübergestellt. Die empirischen Befunde belegen eine relativ hohe Aufmerksamkeit in beiden Beratungsfeldern für das Thema, aber auch große Unterschiede in der Professionalität und Vollständigkeit der umgesetzten Wissensmanagement-Konzepte. Dabei ist die Zielerreichung generell unbefriedigend

Evolutionärer Algorithmus

Evolutionäre Algorithmen sind ein Teilgebiet des Soft Computing und beruhen als naturanaloge Heuristiken auf einer groben Abstraktion von Mechanismen der natürlichen Evolution. Bevorzugtes Anwendungsgebiet sind Optimierungsfragestellungen, die einer konventionell-analytischen Modellierung nicht zugänglich sind

Arbeitsbericht Nr. 2008-03, Oktober 2008

Ilmenauer Beiträge zur Wirtschaftsinformatik Nr. 2008-03 / Technische Universität Ilmenau, Fakultät für Wirtschaftswissenschaften, Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik, ISSN 1861-9223 ISBN 978-3-938940-21-