Should you believe in the Shanghai ranking?

This paper proposes a critical analysis of the "Academic Ranking of World Universities", published every year by the Institute of Higher Education of the Jiao Tong University in Shanghai and more commonly known as the Shanghai ranking. After having recalled how the ranking is built, we first discuss the relevance of the criteria and then analyze the proposed aggregation method. Our analysis uses tools and concepts from Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM). Our main conclusions are that the criteria that are used are not relevant, that the aggregation methodology is plagued by a number of major problems and that the whole exercise suffers from an insufficient attention paid to fundamental structuring issues. Hence, our view is that the Shanghai ranking, in spite of the media coverage it receives, does not qualify as a useful and pertinent tool to discuss the "quality" of academic institutions, let alone to guide the choice of students and family or to promote reforms of higher education systems. We outline the type of work that should be undertaken to oer sound alternatives to the Shanghai ranking.Shanghai ranking; multiple criteria decision analysis; evaluation models; higher education.

: An MCDM view

43 pagesInternational audienceThis paper proposes a critical analysis of the "Academic Ranking of World Universities", published every year by the Institute of Higher Education of the Jiao Tong University in Shanghai and more commonly known as the Shanghai ranking. After having recalled how the ranking is built, we first discuss the relevance of the criteria and then analyze the proposed aggregation method. Our analysis uses tools and concepts from Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM). Our main conclusions are that the criteria that are used are not relevant, that the aggregation methodology is plagued by a number of major problems and that the whole exercise suffers from an insufficient attention paid to fundamental structuring issues. Hence, our view is that the Shanghai ranking, in spite of the media coverage it receives, does not qualify as a useful and pertinent tool to discuss the "quality" of academic institutions, let alone to guide the choice of students and family or to promote reforms of higher education systems. We outline the type of work that should be undertaken to oer sound alternatives to the Shanghai ranking

Should you believe in the Shanghai ranking? An MCDM view

This paper proposes a critical analysis of the "Academic Ranking ofWorld Universities", published every year by the Institute of Higher Education of the Jiao Tong University in Shanghai and more commonly known as the Shanghai ranking. After having recalled how the ranking is built, we first discuss the relevance of the criteria and then analyze the proposed aggregation method. Our analysis uses tools and concepts from Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM). Our main conclusions are that the criteria that are used are not relevant, that the aggregation methodology is plagued by a number of major problems and that the whole exercise suffers from an insufficient attention paid to fundamental structuring issues. Hence, our view is that the Shanghai ranking, in spite of the media coverage it receives, does not qualify as a useful and pertinent tool to discuss the "quality" of academic institutions, let alone to guide the choice of students and family or to promote reforms of higher education systems. We outline the type of work that should be undertaken to offer sound alternatives to the Shanghai ranking

New scheduling problems with interfering and independent jobs

33 pages. Paper submitted to Journal of scheduling the 8 September 2009.We consider the problems of scheduling independent jobs, when a subset of jobs has its own objective function to minimize. The performance of this subset of jobs is in competition with the performance of the whole set of jobs and compromise solutions have to be found. Such a problem arises for some practical applications like ball bearing production problems. This new scheduling problem is positioned within the literature and the differences with the problems with competing agents or with interfering job set problems are presented. Classical and regular scheduling objective functions are considered and epsilon-constraint approach and linear combination of criteria approach are used for finding compromise solutions. The study focus on single machine and identical parallel machine environments and for each environment, the complexity of several problems is established and some dynamic programming algorithms are proposed

A tabu search heuristic for a dynamic transportation problem of patients between care units

29 pagesThe ambulance central station of the Hospital Complex of Tours (France) has to plan the transportation demands between care units which require a vehicle. Some demands are known in advance and the others arrive dynamically. Each demand requires a specific type of vehicle and a vehicle can transport only one person at a time. Moreover, transportations are subject to particular constraints: priority of urgent demands, disinfection of a vehicle after the transportation of a patient with contagious disease, respect of the type of vehicle, etc. This problem is related to the \emph{Dial A Ride Problem}. For solving the dynamic version of this problem, we propose a tabu search algorithm inspired by \cite{Gendreau99}. This method supports an adaptive memory which stores routes and consists in running a tabu search algorithm several times: one for improving the set of initial solutions, one for the neighborhood exploration and finally for improving the final solution. Computational experiments show that the method can provide high-quality solutions for this dynamic transportation problem

New scheduling problems with perishable raw materials constraints

International audienceIn production manufacturing systems, raw materials that are required for the production process are supposed to be present in sufficient quantities. The ordering of these products is given by an inventory management policy. We consider in this paper raw materials, that are present in sufficient quantities and that can be stored for a long time in containers under specific conditions (temperature, pressure, ...). The peculiarity is that the quality of these raw materials decreases as soon as they are open for being used. At this moment, the product has to be used before a given deadline, or it is lost. Two types of objective functions are associated to the use of such raw materials: the total cost of lost products (economic objective) and the total quantity of lost products (environmental objective). We present in this paper this new scheduling framework , which brings new constraints and new objective functions. We show that the single machine problem with equal-length jobs and only one product is already NP-hard and we propose mathematical formulations for two single-machine problems and an MIP model, which is briefly evaluated