In the 1990s, the UK construction industry directed considerable effort at improving productivity and reducing costs by harmonising relationships among clients, contractors, sub-contractors, specialist contractors and designers. Opportunities to accrue further benefits should be explored and capitalised upon from all areas of construction projects. Management of construction materials on well grounded logistics and supply chain management principles has the potential to yield results and augment efforts being made in other areas at making construction more efficient. The overall aim of this thesis was to develop a systematic supplier management decision-support process model that contractors can use for both short and long-term management of suppliers in the implementation of construction materials supply logistics. Such a process model would benefit construction companies by identifying essential elements that lead to improved supply of construction materials. The research findings were based upon a literature survey, two `minor-image' questionnaires (one sent to 71 UK contractors and the other to 76 UK construction materials suppliers); structured interviews with nine UK contractors and five UK construction materials suppliers; and a supplier management process model validation exercise with six UK contractors. From these, the research produced the following outcomes: systematic supplier management decision-support process map that contractors can use for short and long-term management of suppliers in the implementation of construction materials supply logistics; an understanding of the supply of construction materials into construction processes from the wider perspective of logistics and supply chain management as opposed to traditional materials management; the identification of the performance indicators against which the performance of suppliers can be evaluated and the quantification of the relative contribution of the performance indicators to improvements in customer service; the identification of factors which enable suppliers to improve levels of customer service and quantification of the relative extent to which the factors enable suppliers to contribute to improvements in their levels of customer service in the delivery of construction materials; identification of the extent to which both performance indicators and enablers were used in supplier evaluation and selection; evaluation and comparison of the extent to which contractors and suppliers used information and communication technologies in internal and external materials supply logistics processes; and evaluation of the nature of relationships between contractors and suppliers.

Neuromuscular diseases are difficult to diagnose, requiring specialized equipment and training. A decision support system facilitates this by visualizing the data produced by a classification system, allowing users to make a diagnosis. This thesis explores the development of a specific component of the decision support system; a comparison tool which allows the user to explore the visualization by making comparisons between assertions derived from the underlying classification system. After studying the impact of the comparison tool upon the performance of volunteer users, we provide recommendations on the utility of a particular decision exploration strategy and give guidance for the correct course for the future development of this system. This document illustrates some of the unique challenges associated with the evaluation of a decision support system which relies not only upon the computational power of the computer, but also upon a human’s innate ability to solve problems.

In group decision support systems, understanding the roles, dynamics and relationships between participants is imperative to streamlining the decision-making process. This is especially true when decision makers have varying interests. Research has shown that decision-making processes amongst groups with varying interests will often reach bottlenecks with issues, such as unwillingness to share information, or a limited ability of the participants to share ideas at the same time. We explored this research territory of group decision-making by implementing collaboration software to support Ocean Summits, a new approach that uses real-time simulations as part of the decision-making process for stakeholders to explore fisheries management policies. The research reported in this thesis has three goals: (1) to better understand the decision-making process in fisheries management, (2) to build a prototype system to tackle the major issues in the decision-making process and (3) to determine the best way to share and display information critical to the stakeholders' decision-making process by exploring the use of shared screens and information in comparison to private displays. We discovered that the use of shared screens with shared information yielded the best results, as opposed to private screens with shared information or private screens with private information. It was observed that sharing information allowed participants to explore more alternative solutions.

In group decision support systems, understanding the roles, dynamics and relationships between participants is imperative to streamlining the decision-making process. This is especially true when decision makers have varying interests. Research has shown that decision-making processes amongst groups with varying interests will often reach bottlenecks with issues, such as unwillingness to share information, or a limited ability of the participants to share ideas at the same time. We explored this research territory of group decision-making by implementing collaboration software to support Ocean Summits, a new approach that uses real-time simulations as part of the decision-making process for stakeholders to explore fisheries management policies. The research reported in this thesis has three goals: (1) to better understand the decision-making process in fisheries management, (2) to build a prototype system to tackle the major issues in the decision-making process and (3) to determine the best way to share and display information critical to the stakeholders' decision-making process by exploring the use of shared screens and information in comparison to private displays. We discovered that the use of shared screens with shared information yielded the best results, as opposed to private screens with shared information or private screens with private information. It was observed that sharing information allowed participants to explore more alternative solutions.

In group decision support systems, understanding the roles, dynamics and relationships between participants is imperative to streamlining the decision-making process. This is especially true when decision makers have varying interests. Research has shown that decision-making processes amongst groups with varying interests will often reach bottlenecks with issues, such as unwillingness to share information, or a limited ability of the participants to share ideas at the same time. We explored this research territory of group decision-making by implementing collaboration software to support Ocean Summits, a new approach that uses real-time simulations as part of the decision-making process for stakeholders to explore fisheries management policies. The research reported in this thesis has three goals: (1) to better understand the decision-making process in fisheries management, (2) to build a prototype system to tackle the major issues in the decision-making process and (3) to determine the best way to share and display information critical to the stakeholders' decision-making process by exploring the use of shared screens and information in comparison to private displays. We discovered that the use of shared screens with shared information yielded the best results, as opposed to private screens with shared information or private screens with private information. It was observed that sharing information allowed participants to explore more alternative solutions. / Science, Faculty of / Computer Science, Department of / Graduate

In the automotive industry, assembly lines are used to produce vehicles. These assembly lines improve throughput, and need to be carefully planned. Planning, or balancing, an assembly line constitutes identifying precedence relationships between tasks in the assembly line, and assigning tasks to stations to fit some criteria. This procedure is costly to do by hand, and is well-suited for some level of automation. The problem of balancing assembly lines has been researched since the 1950’s, but modern assembly lines largely rely on engineers to balance the line by hand. This thesis proposes that the work flow of engineers planning the assembly line would be improved by a group decision support system. This group decision support system could supply engineers with proposals for assembly lines, which the engineers can choose to modify further, either by hand or with the decision support system. The group decision support system is realized with a distributed system, consisting of a front-end, a back-end, an application programming interface to balance assembly lines, and two databases. The front-end is a website, where the users can create problems with a precedence graph. The back-end allows data to be permanently stored in the two databases, and allows communication with the application programming interface. The contribution of this thesis is a proof of concept of a group decision support system that can solve two basic types of assembly line balancing problems, SALBP-1 and SALBP-2. During development it was found that the developed system was generic enough to support different types of tasks, such as planning cooking. Further development is needed to use the system in an industrial setting, as real assembly lines need more complex models than the current version support.

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Shipping industry belongs to an international business. It plays an extremely important role in the economic and trade development of a country, so it can be regarded as a symbol of extension of the national strength of a country. Besides, it earns a lot of foreign capital for the country, but never creates any negative effects to the society domestically, such as environmental protection, noise, congestion, and so on. This is something that other manufacturing industries are incomparable with. Especially that Taiwan is an island, Taiwan should be engaged in the studies of shipping business through the rich marine resources. Then, unlimited business opportunities and vitality must be brought to Taiwan, achieving the aspiration of and confidence in standing in Taiwan but looking far to the world. International marine transportation business can be divided into irregular bulk shipping and regular container shipping. Between them, irregular bulk shipping is mostly the loading of the bulk cargoes by one or two consignors in one whole vessel. It is almost a completely competitive market. In order to obtain the greatest profit through the unlimited shipping lines and cargo loading, the best business operation ways and the best vessel allocation should be selected. For regular container shipping, services are provided to a great number of consignors with fixed shipping lines, fixed anchoring harbors and fixed rate. The cost of refueling of shipping industry occupies an extremely high proportion of the variable cost of marine transportation. When the price of the international fuel rises continuously, the cost of fuel increases accordingly. Taking the international vessel-use fuel MF-180 for example, the market quotation of oil in Taiwan on Jan. 6, 1999 was US$74/MT. After that, the price rose continuously. Down to Oct. 2007, there appeared the market quotation of oil at above US$500/MT. According to the ¡§Medium Term Oil Market Report of International Energy Agency (IEA)¡¨ announced on Jul. 9, 2007, the whole world would face the shortage of oil supply in five years, and the oil price was estimated to be rising continuously. Bulk marine transportation is irregular shipping without the fixing of any regular shipping lines and cargo loading. If refueling is to be made to vessels, there should be more efficient estimation and decision on the refueling harbor, refueling volume and refueling cost so as to achieve the minimum variable cost and acquire the greatest profit. Through review of the literature about the refueling of voyages as well as the interviews with experts, the paper investigates the literature of the decision support system, and uses the prototype development method to complete the model construction and the analytical design of system, practically establish a prototype of refuel decision support system for bulk shipping, and provide the solutions of average sailing speed of voyages, refueling volume and refueling harbor. After the results are compared with those of the actual cases, the paper evaluates the effects of the decision support system. Through the users¡¦ feedback, the prototype is revised to increase the completeness of the system, which provides a reference for the bulk shipping proprietors in constructing a refueling decision support system in future.