Mercedes-Benz USA Labor Planning Dashboard

Mercedes-Benz USA specializes in producing high-quality vehicles that exceed customer expectations at a cost-effective rate. The company utilizes a labor planning dashboard that predicts the daily use of their lines at their part distribution centers by allocating their employees to different zones in inbound, outbound, or both. The supervisors manually input all the data to designate employees to various sections within those zones. Our team was tasked with improving and proposing an updated version of the labor planning dashboard by meeting their requirements while making it effective, responsive, and user-friendly. Through trial and error, the new labor planning dashboard combats these issues by eliminating an excessive amount of manual input and creates an automated dashboard by implementing a linear program solver known as an Assignment Problem

Covid-19 Impact on the Healthcare Industry

The coronavirus disease has had a crucial impact on almost every part of everyday life since coming into circulation in the U.S in the beginning of 2020. The healthcare industry has witnessed these changes first hand as they work to efficiently provide support for those infected and learn more about the virus. This study investigates how different work factors such as shifts worked, type of daily exposure to the virus, and homelife impact worker’s overall risk perception of the virus. Four hundred and forty healthcare workers were surveyed and data was collected about their occupation, daily work conditions, risk perception, and concern level about the virus. Work conditions were compared to risk perception in excel in order to determine how different factors either raise or lower the worker’s risk perception. Initial results suggest that 1) healthcare workers who have spouses and children indicated a higher risk perception of contracting the virus than those who lived alone; 2) workers who witnessed Covid-19 effect friends, family, or co-workers marked a higher level of risk perception; 3) the majority of workers who dealt with direct exposure of the virus indicated a higher risk perception than those who worked with indirect exposure. These results suggest that the there are several other factors other than just the virus that impact worker’s risk perception about the virus. The outcome of this study will be used to assist healthcare systems in establishing customized interventions to reduce stress levels on healthcare professionals

Fractional derivative and Midpoint rules

The fractional derivative has a long history in mathematics dating back further than integer-order derivative, but it did not gain traction until recently. In recent years, fractional derivative has been shown to describe physical and biological phenomena better than integer-order derivatives. Fractional derivative generalize integer derivative to an arbitrary (non-integer) order. While the integer derivative is defined at a point, the fractional derivative is determined on an interval, and there is an integral involved in the definition of the fractional derivative. To develop the computation model in fractional calculus, we need to find an approximation of the integral. There are various definitions of fractional derivative. The widely used definition of a fractional derivative is the Caputo definition. In this research, we have used the Midpoint rules to find the approximation of the Caputo fractional derivative