Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Los Angeles, 1992. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 240-248).

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We present a study of conflict from an economic perspective. We start by reviewing the approach to conflict in the economic sciences. We model conflict as a process of allocation of resources into two main technologies, production and appropriation. Then we complement this framework by allowing participants to negotiate. We introduce models of bargaining with complete and incomplete information. We incorporate the cost of conflict and this ensures that negotiated settlements always produce a more efficient outcome. The possibility of conflict arises as a result of incomplete information, which takes the form of informational asymmetry about the cost of conflict. We find endogenous war equilibrium outcomes and compare the outcome of optimal resource equilibria with arbitrary non-equilibria allocations. We also present some empirical evidence in the literature supporting the choice of utility models of conflict and present new results showing support for our propositions.

Next generation wireless networks are expected to provide high data rate and satisfy the Quality-of-Service (QoS) constraints of the users. A significant component of achieving these goals is to increase the effi ciency of wireless networks by either optimizing current architectures or exploring new technologies which achieve that. The latter includes revisiting technologies which were previously proposed, but due to a multitude of reasons were ignored at that time. One such technology is relaying which was initially proposed in the latter half of the 1960s and then was revived in the early 2000s. In this dissertation, we study relaying in conjunction with resource allocation to increase the effi ciency of wireless networks. In this regard, we differentiate between conventional relaying and relaying with buffers. Conventional relaying is traditional relaying where the relay forwards the signal it received immediately. On the other hand, in relaying with buffers or buffer-aided relaying as it is called, the relay can store received data in its buffer and forward it later on. This gives the benefit of taking advantage of good channel conditions as the relay can only transmit when the channel conditions are good. The dissertation starts with conventional relaying and considers the problem of minimizing the total consumed power while maintaining system QoS. After upper bounding the system performance, more practical algorithms which require reduced feedback overhead are explored. Buffer-aided relaying is then considered and the joint user-and-hop scheduler is introduced which exploits multi-user diversity (MUD) and 5 multi-hop diversity (MHD) gains together in dual-hop broadcast channels. Next joint user-and-hop scheduling is extended to the shared relay channel where two source-destination pairs share a single relay. The benefits of buffer-aided relaying in the bidirectional relay channel utilizing network coding are then explored. Finally, a new transmission protocol for overlay cognitive radios is derived. This protocol utilizes relays with buffers, requires only causal knowledge of the primary's message at the secondary and incentivizes the primary to cooperate with the secondary and share its codebook.

The purpose of this work has been to generate a method by which an automobile tire manufacturer can optimally allocate its weekly production ticket to its automatic tire-curing presses. The problem is of interest for the reason that the value of the objective function is markedly affected by the relative locations of tires amongst themselves. This consideration has negated the possibility of a solution being effected by the application of an algorithm for the classical linear assignment problem. In this work the problem has been formulated and solved as a quadratic assignment problem. The logic of this method of solution has been programmed and subsequently used to solve example problems, the results of which are extremely encouraging. / Thesis / Master of Engineering (MEngr)

Thesis (Ph. D., Natural Resources)--University of Idaho, May 2007. / Major professor: Jo Ellen Force. Includes bibliographical references (leaves ). Also available online (PDF file) by subscription or by purchasing the individual file.

The aim of this thesis is to study the influence that the human resource allocation process carried out at ALLEGION has over the employee satisfaction level of its employees. ALLEGION is an international manufacturing project-oriented company based in Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico, which operates with over 8,500 employees. Up until the development of this thesis, ALLEGION had never contemplated the job satisfaction level of its employees as a result of the human resource allocation process carried out in the company. Some studies have previously paid attention to the impact that best practices in human resource management have in employee performance, however, to our knowledge, it has never been discussed how the allocation of the human resources in a company can influence job satisfaction. For this reason, we believe is pertinent to conduct a study focusing on this topic. This thesis is presented as a case study of ALLEGION which follows a qualitative method and an inductive approach, where we as researchers, explored the influence that the current method followed by the company to allocate its human resources to projects has over the job satisfaction level of its employees. The first section of this thesis is dedicated to discuss the background of our research topic and to examine relevant literature focused in the subjects of human resource allocation and employee satisfaction. As part of this section, we encountered that four factors are consistently mentioned in the literature related to these core topics having an intrinsic relationship among them. We found that these factors were utilised by some scholars in the development of models to optimise the human resource allocation process and also during the measurement of employee satisfaction in different contexts. The four factors are: personal qualifications –referring to skills utilisation and expertise–, personal aspirations –referring to career development and personal growth–, group relationships –referring to personal relationships with co-workers and managers–, and finally, personal motivations –referring to job motivations–. At the end of this section we present a theoretical model that summarises our findings and highlights the correlations of the factors we identified from the literature. The central part of this thesis focuses on our practical method which comprised nine interviews with employees and project managers of ALLEGION. Our interviews were aimed to discover the relationship and influence that the human resource allocation process implemented in the company had over the job satisfaction level in its employees respectively. As part of our findings we discovered that four elements were contributors to such influence and simultaneously were related to the findings obtained during our literature review. Based upon these four factors, we drew our conclusions for the study. As a conclusion of this thesis, we found that the human resource allocation process conducted at ALLEGION holds a significant influence in the job satisfaction of its employees working in projects, and that four distinct factors should be taken into consideration during the process that functional managers carry out when they have to allocate their human resources to a certain project. These factors are: skills utilisation, career development, individual relationships of the employees with their co-workers and managers, and finally, job motivations. We concluded that the extent to which these elements are considered as part of the decision-making involved in the human resource allocation process will bring as a result a positive or negative outcome in terms of employee satisfaction among the projects of the organisation.

Macrodiversity system is a communication architecture where base stations (BS) act as distributed nodes of a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antennas. It has many promising features that can improve system performance from a network perspective, such as improving the weak signals of users affected by shadow fading, or users at the cell-edge. They also allow multiple users to share the same resource in time and frequency, improving the overall user capacity. Traditionally, evaluating the link quality of resource-sharing users requires instantaneous channel state information (CSI). However, finding compatible users to share resource in macrodiversity systems is a challenging task. For macrodiversity systems, instantaneous CSI could be passed to the backhaul processing unit (BPU) through the network backhaul. This creates a delay in the signal, and makes instantaneous CSI a less accurate reflection of the channel environment at the time. Passing instantaneous CSI of all users also creates a significant amount of network overheads, reducing the overall efficiency of the network. Compared to MIMO systems with co-located antennas, macrodiversity systems cover a larger geographical area and more users. For this reason, the number of user selection combinations can become extremely large, making scheduling decisions in real time an even more challenging task. These problems limit the realisation of the user capacity potential of macrodiversity systems. This thesis presents a low complexity method of resource allocation for up-link macrodiversity systems. In particular, it uses long-term power to estimate the link quality of resource-sharing users. Using long-term power bypasses the issue of channel estimation error introduced by the network delay, and it also reduces the communication overhead on the network backhaul. In this thesis, we use Symbol-Error Rate (SER) as the measure for link quality. Using the method developed by Basnayaka [1], we are able to estimate SER of resource-sharing users using long-term power. Using the SER estimation method, we further proposed a user compatibility check (UCC), which evaluates the compatibility of users sharing the same resource. Users are only considered compatible with each other if all of them meet a pre-defined SER threshold. We attempt to reduce the complexity of user selection by using heuristic solution-finding methods. In our research, we found that greedy algorithms have the least complexity. We propose four low-complexity user selection algorithms based on a greedy algorithm. These algorithms are simulated under different environment parameters. We evaluate the system performance in terms of utilisation and complexity. Utilisation refers to the percentage of allocated users compared to the theoretical user capacity. Complexity refers to the number of SER calculations required to find a resource allocation solution. From the simulation results, we observed that with the proposed user selection algorithms, we can achieve moderately high utilisation with much lower complexity, compared to finding user selections via an exhaustive search method. Out of the proposed user selection algorithms, the Priority Order with Sequential Removal (PO+SR) and the First-Fit (FF) algorithm have the best overall performance, in terms of the trade-off between utilisation performance, and complexity performance. The final choice of the algorithm will depend on the processing power and the system performance requirement of the macrodiversity system.

The next generation (4G) wireless systems are expected to provide universal personal and multimedia communications with seamless connection and very high rate transmissions and without regard to the users’ mobility and location. OFDM technique is recognized as one of the leading candidates to provide the wireless signalling for 4G systems. The major challenges in downlink multiuser OFDM based 4G systems include the wireless channel, the synchronization and radio resource management. Thus algorithms are required to achieve accurate timing and frequency offset estimation and the efficient utilization of radio resources such as subcarrier, bit and power allocation. The objectives of the thesis are of two fields. Firstly, we presented the frequency offset estimation algorithms for OFDM systems. Building our work upon the classic single user OFDM architecture, we proposed two FFT-based frequency offset estimation algorithms with low computational complexity. The computer simulation results and comparisons show that the proposed algorithms provide smaller error variance than previous well-known algorithm. Secondly, we presented the resource allocation algorithms for OFDM systems. Building our work upon the downlink multiuser OFDM architecture, we aimed to minimize the total transmit power by exploiting the system diversity through the management of subcarrier allocation, adaptive modulation and power allocation. Particularly, we focused on the dynamic resource allocation algorithms for multiuser OFDM system and multiuser MIMO-OFDM system. For the multiuser OFDM system, we proposed a lowiv complexity channel gain difference based subcarrier allocation algorithm. For the multiuser MIMO-OFDM system, we proposed a unit-power based subcarrier allocation algorithm. These proposed algorithms are all combined with the optimal bit allocation algorithm to achieve the minimal total transmit power. The numerical results and comparisons with various conventional nonadaptive and adaptive algorithmic approaches are provided to show that the proposed resource allocation algorithms improve the system efficiencies and performance given that the Quality of Service (QoS) for each user is guaranteed. The simulation work of this project is based on hand written codes in the platform of the MATLAB R2007b.

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