Manpower planning in hierarchical organisations: a mixed integer programming approach

Manpower planning is concerned with planning the use of human resources. In this thesis, manpower planning is defined as the process of determining manpower policies which ensure that suitable numbers of qualified people are in appropriate positions at the right times in order to meet organisational goals, while taking account of the career development opportunities of the individuals within the organisation.A number of different mathematical models have been developed for manpower planning. These models are reviewed and it is noted that a weakness of the optimisation models which have been proposed is that promotion rates, i.e. the proportion of staff promoted per year, can vary substantially from year to year because of the limitations of the techniques used. Since staff morale is likely to be affected if promotion rates vary significantly from one year to another, the results from these models may be unacceptable to management. In this thesis a mixed integer programming (MIP) manpower planning model is developed for determining minimum cost manpower policies in which promotion rates remain stable over time, and which satisfy specified staffing level requirements. In this MIP model promotion rates are treated as decision variables by using a binary variable representation. An iterative procedure is developed for solving this MIP model.The computational aspects of using the MIP manpower planning model are investigated. A demonstration decision support system based on this MIP model is developed, and the use of this system is illustrated using representative data for a military manpower system. The experience with this demonstration system suggests that the approach could be developed to produce a practical tool to aid management decision making

Solving the Traffic Problem by Using A Simulation Model

This paper presents a traffic light simulation model, which is composed of 6 submodels coded in Arena to help analyze the traffic problem. The model adopts average arrival time and average departure time to simulate the arrival and leaving number of cars on roads. In the experiment, each submodel represents a road that has 3 intersections. The simulation results show that different traffic light duration policies will cause different effects on traffic congestion. Therefore, we can use this model to obtain a good traffic light duration policy for solving the traffic problem

Manufacture of Radio Frequency Micromachined Switches with Annealing

The fabrication and characterization of a radio frequency (RF) micromachined switch with annealing were presented. The structure of the RF switch consists of a membrane, coplanar waveguide (CPW) lines, and eight springs. The RF switch is manufactured using the complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) process. The switch requires a post-process to release the membrane and springs. The post-process uses a wet etching to remove the sacrificial silicon dioxide layer, and to obtain the suspended structures of the switch. In order to improve the residual stress of the switch, an annealing process is applied to the switch, and the membrane obtains an excellent flatness. The finite element method (FEM) software CoventorWare is utilized to simulate the stress and displacement of the RF switch. Experimental results show that the RF switch has an insertion loss of 0.9 dB at 35 GHz and an isolation of 21 dB at 39 GHz. The actuation voltage of the switch is 14 V

Rapid (<5 min) identification of pathogen in human blood by electrokinetic concentration and surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy.

This study reports a novel microfluidic platform for rapid and long-ranged concentration of rare-pathogen from human blood for subsequent on-chip surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) identification/discrimination of bacteria based on their detected fingerprints. Using a hybrid electrokinetic mechanism, bacteria can be concentrated at the stagnation area on the SERS-active roughened electrode, while blood cells were excluded away from this region at the center of concentric circular electrodes. This electrokinetic approach performs isolation and concentration of bacteria in about three minutes; the density factor is increased approximately a thousand fold in a local area of ~5000 μm(2) from a low bacteria concentration of 5 × 10(3) CFU/ml. Besides, three genera of bacteria, S. aureus, E. coli, and P. aeruginosa that are found in most of the isolated infections in bacteremia were successfully identified in less than one minute on-chip without the use of any antibody/chemical immobilization and reaction processes

5-(4-Bromo­anilinomethyl­ene)-2,2-dimethyl-1,3-dioxane-4,6-dione

In the title compound, C13H12BrNO4, the dihedral angles between the amino­methyl­ene group and the dioxane ring and between the benzyl ring and the amino­methyl­ene unit are 7.96 (4) and 12.15 (4)°, respectively. The dioxane ring shows a half-boat conformation, in which the C atom between the dioxane ring O atoms is 0.460 (8) Å out of the plane through the remaining ring atoms. An intra­molecular N—H⋯O hydrogen bond may stabilize the planar conformation of the mol­ecule. An inter­molecular C—H⋯O inter­action is also present