Large emergency-response exercises: qualitative characteristics - a survey

Exercises, drills, or simulations are widely used, by governments, agencies and commercial organizations, to simulate serious incidents and train staff how to respond to them. International cooperation has led to increasingly large-scale exercises, often involving hundreds or even thousands of participants in many locations. The difference between ‘large’ and ‘small’ exercises is more than one of size: (a) Large exercises are more ‘experiential’ and more likely to undermine any model of reality that single organizations may create; (b) they create a ‘play space’ in which organizations and individuals act out their own needs and identifications, and a ritual with strong social implications; (c) group-analytic psychotherapy suggests that the emotions aroused in a large group may be stronger and more difficult to control. Feelings are an unacknowledged major factor in the success or failure of exercises; (d) successful large exercises help improve the nature of trust between individuals and the organizations they represent, changing it from a situational trust to a personal trust; (e) it is more difficult to learn from large exercises or to apply the lessons identified; (f) however, large exercises can help develop organizations and individuals. Exercises (and simulation in general) need to be approached from a broader multidisciplinary direction if their full potential is to be realized

Competitive and Cooperative Degree in Supply Chain: Supplier Selection between Competitors and Third-Party Suppliers

Part 5: Modelling and SimulationInternational audienceThis work explores the firm’s supplier selection question that the competitor firm and the third-party supplier can supply the substitutable component. We consider a supply chain with two competing original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and two third-party suppliers. The two OEMs produce the competing products which are comprised by two main components. Each OEM only can produce one component in-house and each third-party supplier only supplies one component. The OEMs must decide whether to outsource the other component to the competing OEM or to a third-party supplier. We discuss the different supplier selection strategies and compare the OEMs profits in different decision. We find that there are conditions where, while one of the OEMs should outsource to the competing firm, outsourcing to a third-party supplier is the optimal strategy for the other OEM even when the cost of the third-party supplier is more expensive and the competition is intense