Exploratory analyses of relief and development operations using social networks

We use social networks to explore how structural factors affect humanitarian organizations’ performance in relief and development operations. Analyses of two recent humanitarian disasters show that having pre-established partnerships among implementers, a central coordinator, high connectivity, and few structural holes facilitates coordination and improves performance. Similarly, cost efficiency analyses of 757 development programs reveal that (i) high performance of donors and beneficiaries is positively related to the amount of implementers they interact with, and (ii) programs connected by common actors are more cost efficient. Finally, short path lengths and frequent connections among actors or programs improve performance in humanitarian operations.     

Balancing provision of relief and recovery with capacity building in humanitarian operations

Several humanitarian organizations today find themselves thinly stretched in multiple protracted relief and recovery operations around the world. At the same time, the need for humanitarian relief and recovery operations is forecasted to increase dramatically in the next decades. Hence, humanitarian organizations will face increased challenges to provide assistance (e.g., assessing needs, moving the displaced, tending the wounded, restoring water and sewage systems) while trying to build and maintain capacity (e.g., hiring and training people, capturing lessons learned, structuring organizational processes). In this paper we develop a formal simulation model that quantifies the tradeoff that exists between providing assistance and building capacity in humanitarian organizations. We explore in our model the performance of two polar resource allocation strategies: one focusing on relief and recovery efforts and another focusing on capacity building. When humanitarian organizations cannot retain the knowledge gained in the field, a strategy that emphasizes relief and recovery is not enduring and leads to a better-before-worse behavior. However, if humanitarian organizations can retain a large fraction of the lessons learned in the field, they can achieve more enduring performance with a relief and recovery strategy. Nevertheless, high stress levels, caused by relief requirements significantly above those which can be made available by the organization, increase personnel turnover and limit the fraction of learning that the organization can retain, imparing a relief and recovery strategy. Our work sheds light on the tradeoff that humanitarian organizations face between providing relief and building capacity in stressful and demanding environments.     

Understanding students' responses to university‐led charity campaigns: a study of a Haitian earthquake relief campaign

The primary focus of this paper is to understand determinants of behavioral intentions of individuals towards a university‐led charitable campaign. We build a comprehensive model of determinants of behavioral intentions of students towards a university‐led charitable campaign at an individual level. This study identified perceived importance of the cause, social value, and recognition as determinants of behavioral intentions. The results indicated that to increase donations, charitable campaigns should stress the importance of the cause to potential donors and publicly recognize volunteers and donors. Implications and recommendations such as leveraging the university's internal channels of communication to reinforce the importance of the cause are discussed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Operational planning of vehicles for rescue and relief operations considering the unavailability of the relocated vehicles

Rapid urbanization has led to increasing fire incidents and false alarms, increasing the response time of fire departments. When a call arrives, the current technology deploys and relocates the vehicles based on their immediate impact on the system's preparedness. However, the unavailability of the relocated vehicles is often ignored during the relocation, thus the system's preparedness is overestimated. This paper presents a novel mixed-integer programming (MIP) model developed for the relocation and deployment of emergency/fire vehicles. The proposed model incorporates the unavailability element, and estimates system preparedness for future incidents more accurately than current models. To confirm the efficiency of the proposed approach, the required simulations were conducted in Mashhad, Iran. The results demonstrated the ability of the proposed model to improve the performance of the fire department in several performance metrics. We also provide sensitivity analysis over the critical parameters to demonstrate the robustness of the model.     

The deployment of temporary production workers in assembly operations: a case study of the hidden costs of learning and forgetting

The dynamics of workforce skill levels has a considerable impact on plant-level performance that is commonly overlooked by managers of manufacturing operations. In this study, we present a discrete event simulation model inspired by and validated in an actual manufacturing setting that includes short product life cycles, mid-volume production quantities, and a production environment consisting of assembly, inspection and testing.The effect of worker skill dynamics is analyzed using a factorial experimental design that contrasts the use of temporary versus permanent workers on manufacturing cost performance. The manufacturing costs assessed include labor, inspection and testing. The cost of reworking a defect is captured as an increase in the labor consumption. Materials costs are not assessed. At the core of the analysis, it is assumed that temporary workers have relatively less skill and therefore have higher average production times, higher average defect rates associated with their assembly activity, and lower rates of learning. In addition, the variance of the production time is higher for the temporary workers. Despite these indicators of performance problems, temporary workers may be used because of the considerably lower wage rate compared to permanent employees.Our in-depth case analyses shows that assigning skilled permanent workers to upstream build operations was superior to other policies deploying temporary workers, regardless of lot size or product complexity. Attesting to the importance of the labor mix component of manufacturing strategy, workforce deployment policies tended to dominate product switching frequency (a proxy variable for lot size and product mix) in impacting costs.     

Forgive or buy back: an experimental study of debt relief

In recent years, debt relief has once again been pushed to the forefront of political and economic interest. The general consensus is that with less debt burden poor countries suffering from debt overhang will be able devote more resources towards investment thereby promoting their own growth and thus benefit their creditors in the long run. An open question is which mechanism is best to relieve debt burden. In this paper, we adopt experimental methods to study the effectiveness and efficiency of debt forgiveness and debt buyback. We find that creditors tend to reduce more debt under Forgiveness than Buyback. Debtors under Forgiveness are not significantly more reciprocal than under Buyback. After controlling for the amount of debt relief, creditors are significantly worse off under Forgiveness whereas debtors are indifferent between the two schemes. From the viewpoint of promoting debt relief, debt forgiveness appears to be a more effective tool to achieve this goal. Nevertheless, if one is to maximize the overall efficiency, debt buyback is superior to debt forgiveness in making best of each relief dollar.     

Non-parametric, unconditional quantile estimation for efficiency analysis with an application to Federal Reserve check processing operations

This paper examines the technical efficiency of US Federal Reserve check processing offices over 1980–2003. We extend results from Park et al. [Park, B., Simar, L., Weiner, C., 2000. FDH efficiency scores from a stochastic point of view. Econometric Theory 16, 855–877] and Daouia and Simar [Daouia, A., Simar, L., 2007. Nonparametric efficiency analysis: a multivariate conditional quantile approach. Journal of Econometrics 140, 375–400] to develop an unconditional, hyperbolic, α-quantile estimator of efficiency. Our new estimator is fully non-parametric and robust with respect to outliers; when used to estimate distance to quantiles lying close to the full frontier, it is strongly consistent and converges at rate root-n, thus avoiding the curse of dimensionality that plagues data envelopment analysis (DEA) estimators. Our methods could be used by policymakers to compare inefficiency levels across offices or by managers of individual offices to identify peer offices.     

配送中心选址方法研究综述

系统分析了配送中心选址的常用方法,将所收集方法分为连续模型与离散模型、单目标模型与多目标模型、静态模型与动态模型、确定型模型与不确定型模型、定性方法与定量方法等五类.以定性和定量方法为研究重点,详细介绍其中的解析法、最优化规划法、智能启发式方法、仿真法和多准则决策法,并总结了这些方法的优缺点及其适用范围,以期为实际选址决策提供理论参考.     

配送中心选址方法研究综述

系统分析了配送中心选址的常用方法,将所收集方法分为连续模型与离散模型、单目标模型与多目标模型、静态模型与动态模型、确定型模型与不确定型模型、定性方法与定量方法等五类。以定性和定量方法为研究重点,详细介绍其中的解析法、最优化规划法、智能启发式方法、仿真法和多准则决策法,并总结了这些方法的优缺点及其适用范围,以期为实际选址决策提供理论参考。     

9308房屋建筑的震害预测方法

随着城市建设的发展和人口密度的增大,地震对人类的危害越来越大,因此,做好房屋建筑震害预测工作,具有重要的现实意义,文章用结构易损性分析方法分别对房屋建筑的几种常见的结构的震害进行了预测分析。     

Towards an operations strategy model of servitization: the role of sustainability pressure

Servitization requires an important strategic shift to drive changes in the operations of manufacturing firms. Using a large-scale survey, the purpose of this paper is (1) to build and validate an operations strategy model of servitization confirming previous case study findings on servitization as a strategic action and (2) to explore the role of sustainability pressures in, and the sustainability performance effects of, pursuing service-based operations strategies. To reach these objectives, a dataset including the responses of 735 manufacturing plants from 21 different countries is analyzed using the PLS-SEM method. The results indicate that the sustainability pressures of stakeholders can push manufacturers to adopt a service-based operations strategy, materializing in the provision of both basic (product-oriented) and advanced (customer-oriented) services (BAS and ADS). Our analysis further indicates that while offering BAS is a precondition for ADS provision, only ADS can offer a competitive edge for manufacturers, both in terms of service and sustainability-related operational performance.     

Case study in disaster relief: A descriptive analysis of agency partnerships in the aftermath of the January 12th, 2010 Haitian earthquake

This study analyzes the disaster response and recovery efforts following the January 12th, 2010 Haitian earthquake through the eyes of 18 different relief agencies. Focusing on the formation and maintenance of partnerships after the catastrophic earthquake, this paper explores the concepts of cooperation, mutual understanding, and connectivity among agencies responding to the earthquake. The case study is based on results from interviews and interactions with 18 agencies during a month-long trip to Haiti in the summer of 2010. Of the agencies interviewed, it was found that agencies that had no partnerships or presence in Haiti prior to the earthquake were most likely to build new clinics, orphanages, and schools. Additionally, we found that agencies were more likely to develop new partnerships from new contacts rather than dormant contacts. By studying the partnerships between local and international agencies, it was found that their relationships were less stable than partnerships between international agencies. This study hopes to increase understanding and applicability of research in disaster relief networks by providing a new perspective into how agencies work together.     

遗传算法在配送中心选址中的应用

配送中心是现代物流的重要组成部分,它在整个物流系统中起着承上启下的作用,如何合理的选择配送中心就显得尤为关键.本文提出了一种新的二进制和浮点数混合编码的改进遗传算法.该算法对种群初始化函数和遗传操作做相应的改进,使得表示配送中心选址的决策变量只能在0或1这两个离散变量上选择,解码更加方便,大大提高了运算效率,改进的遗传算法能够很好的解决物流配送中心的选址问题.     

用Excel规划求解报亭选址问题

报亭的选址问题是一类目标优化问题,从采用精确重心方法来求解的数学模型来看,此目标问题是一个迭代型规划问题,不能直接用常规的Excel规划方法来求解。文中通过引入过渡变量来逐步进行迭代求解。在每一步通过比较前后2对坐标之间的误差,在有限的时间与迭代次数内,求解到了地址目标。求解结果与手工计算的相吻合。     

模糊层次分析法在物流园区选址中的应用

物流园区选址是关系物流网络整体效益的重要环节。考虑到传统的层次分析法在选址应用中的局限性,引入模糊层次分析法。通过分析影响物流园区选址的主要因素,建立了选择方案的评价指标体系,运用模糊层次分析法,得到各影响因素的重要性权重,为具体方案的评价选优提供依据。模糊层次分析法的应用,使物流园区的选址过程高效、合理,具有一定的实用性。     

Alignment of strategic priorities and performance: an integration of operations and strategic management perspectives

In theory, strategic priorities at the functional level align with and support business level strategies. Alignment of priorities is presumed to contribute to enhanced organizational performance, just as misalignment is expected to undermine performance. This study further develops and tests these theoretical conventions by examining the perceptions of general managers and manufacturing managers regarding manufacturing priorities of their business units. Based on a sample of matched pairs of manufacturing managers and general managers from 98 manufacturing plants, the hypotheses regarding the alignment–performance relationship are tested. Specifically, we tested whether the performance of the manufacturing unit is enhanced when general managers and manufacturing managers agree on strategic priorities. Furthermore, the influence of organizational factors on the relationship between alignment and performance of the manufacturing unit is studied. Results support our hypotheses that certain organizational variables moderate the relationship between alignment of priorities and manufacturing performance.     

The response of prices,sales, and output to temporary changes in demand

We determine empirically how automakers accommodate shocks to demand. Using data on production, sales, and transaction prices, we estimate a dynamic profit maximization model of the firm. We demonstrate that when an automaker is hit with a vehicle‐specific demand shock, sales respond immediately and prices respond very modestly. Further, when accounting for non‐convexities in the cost function, production responds with a delay. Over time, shocks are absorbed almost entirely through adjustments in sales and production rather than prices. We examine two recent demand shocks: the Ford Explorer/Firestone tire recall of 2000, and the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Laying the groundwork-an analysis of how to get started with operations analysis

To make operations analysis a pervasive force in education, it is as important to be systematic and disciplined in deciding which projects to undertake as it does to show these virtues once we have selected a problem and are pressing for a solution. Progress means thinking about objectives, including the objective of demonstrating that operations analysis is relevant for education and of establishing a climate of acceptance for the new methods. Progress means concern for people and politics and an eye for initial projects that are hard to bungle. We have little to gain in pitting scarce talent and betting the reputation of operations analysis on situations which we can do little to improve. Meaningful solutions, for the administrator, are solutions that he can manage politically and that do not require impossible increases in staff or budgets to implement. Shrewdness in choosing projects that fit what we can do with operations analysis, though, does not mean picking insignificant problems. Operations analysis must understand the larger issues in American education and set its priorities to fit. We can better afford honest failure than irrelevance.