Comments and Discussion : Toshiki Tamai

This thesis studies the allocation of stock in a two-level inventory system with stochastic demand. The system consists of one central warehouse which supplies N non-identical retailers with one single product. Customer demand occurs solely at the retailers and follows independent Poisson processes. The purpose is to investigate the value of using a more advanced allocation policy than First Come-First Serve at the central warehouse. The focus is on evaluating how well the simple First Come-First Serve assumption works in a system where the warehouse has access to real-time point-of-sale data, and where shipments are time based and consolidated for all retailers. The considered allocation policy is a myopic policy where the solution to a minimization problem, formulated as a constrained newsvendor problem, determines how the warehouse allocates its stock to the retailers. The minimization problem is solved using (a heuristic method based on) Lagrangian relaxation, and simulation is used to evaluate the average inventory holding costs and backorder costs per time unit when using the considered policy. The simulation study shows that cost savings around 1-4 percent can be expected for most system configurations. However, there were cases where savings were as high as 5 percent, as well as cases where the policy performed worse than First Come-First Serve. The study also shows that the highest cost savings are found in systems with relatively low demand, few retailers, short transportation times and a short time interval between shipments.

<p>This thesis studies the allocation of stock in a two-level inventory system with stochastic demand. The system consists of one central warehouse which supplies N non-identical retailers with one single product. Customer demand occurs solely at the retailers and follows independent Poisson processes. The purpose is to investigate the value of using a more advanced allocation policy than First Come-First Serve at the central warehouse. The focus is on evaluating how well the simple First Come-First Serve assumption works in a system where the warehouse has access to real-time point-of-sale data, and where shipments are time based and consolidated for all retailers. The considered allocation policy is a myopic policy where the solution to a minimization problem, formulated as a constrained newsvendor problem, determines how the warehouse allocates its stock to the retailers. The minimization problem is solved using (a heuristic method based on) Lagrangian relaxation, and simulation is used to evaluate the average inventory holding costs and backorder costs per time unit when using the considered policy. The simulation study shows that cost savings around 1-4 percent can be expected for most system configurations. However, there were cases where savings were as high as 5 percent, as well as cases where the policy performed worse than First Come-First Serve. The study also shows that the highest cost savings are found in systems with relatively low demand, few retailers, short transportation times and a short time interval between shipments.</p>

Insurance companies offer business and individuals the possibility to reduce the financial impact of a risk occurring by transferring it away from themselves onto someone. For taking on risk on behalf of someone else the insurance company requires a premium from the policyholder which is pooled and invested in order to meet future obligations towards the policyholder. However, the importance of the European insurance industry goes beyond economic protection of the policyholder as the industry with its EUR8.4 trillion or 58 percent of EU GDP in assets is the largest institutional investor in Europe. As the financial system has undergone dramatic transformation over time, so have the role and function of intermediaries changed. While traditional tasks like reducing transaction costs and asymmetric information became less relevant, facilitating of risk transfer and dealing with the increasing breadth and depth of financial markets are gaining more and more importance. While insurers have been able to hold illiquid asset to a larger extent arguments from the industry are made that the planned introduction of Solvency II will limit insurers and overlook their investment abilities, which is something that can affect the region’s economic development. The above mention aspect combined with the limited research that has been conducted on insurers’ asset allocation and the performance of it resulted in the following research question: Does asset allocation impact insurance company's performance? The question focuses on insurers within the European Union (EU) which is enlarged by the European Economic Area (EEA) and Switzerland, where performance is measured as the return on investment (ROI). To answer the research question in the best possible way, relevant theories such as Modern Portfolio Theory or Efficient Market Hypothesis are presented and discussed as well as previous research on asset allocation. Earlier studies about asset allocation policy and its power to explain the investment return came to different conclusions which can be due to variation in the interpretation of the findings or difficulties by distinguishing between asset allocation policy and active asset allocation. Census is used to investigate in the topic as the population of listed insurance companies within the selected region was rather small which finally came down to 42 firms due to the timeframe of 11 years. Data regarding insurer’s asset class weights in debt securities, equity, real estate, derivatives, cash and equivalent, loans and receivables and the category of others were collected. The return on investment was also collected for each year of the time period and for each insurance company. Benchmarks were constructed in order to replicate what the return of a passive investment of the same proportion would have yielded. The result was inconclusive as it was not possible to determine if asset allocation policy or active management have the greatest impact on the return on investment. This is contradicting previous research of asset allocation and performance as researchers have found that asset allocation policy explains most or all of the return.

The process of municipal land allocations is not regulated by law in Sweden with the result that Swedish municipalities has developed their own approaches of land allocation and choice of developer. In the absence of rulings and standardized municipal use has led to that especially developers considered the land allocation process to be unpredictable and not transparent. The 1st of January 2015 the law of guidelines for municipal land allocations took effect. The law states that municipalities who carry out land allocations should adopt guidelines whose content should specify each municipality’s procedure for land allocation. The purpose of the law is to create transparency, increased clarity and predictability to the initial part of the building process. Our study aims to give an overlook of how the 50 largest municipalities work with the guidelines acquired by law. The project studies the application, availability and the content of the guidelines for land allocations. The investigation shows that about 75 % of the 50 largest municipalities in Sweden have adopted guidelines for land allocation. About 60 % of the municipalities have the guidelines available on their website. Our study also shows a wide spread in content and details and that the information mediated to interested developers through the guidelines may be considered too general to be able to achieve the purpose of the law. Municipalities do not benefit from specified guidelines and the law itself opens up for general formulations and their own interpretations while there are no sanctions. We wonder whether the law simply was written to quiet the critics that have existed in the area. / Markanvisningsprocessen är inte reglerad i lag vilket har gjort att kommunerna utformat sina egna tillvägagångssätt för markanvisningen och således valet av byggherre. Avsaknaden av dels styrande regler och dels en enhetlig kommunal praxis har medfört att framförallt byggherrar ansett att markanvisningsprocessen ofta är oförutsägbar och inte transparent. Den 1 januari 2015 trädde Lag (2014:899) om riktlinjer för kommunala markanvisningar i kraft. Konkret anger lagen att kommuner som genomför markanvisningar ska anta riktlinjer vars innehåll ska precisera respektive kommuns förfarande vilket ska leda till att skapa transparens och ökad tydlighet, samt förutsägbarhet i byggprocessens inledande skede. Undersökningens syfte är att försöka ge en översiktlig bild av hur Sveriges 50 största kommuner arbetar med de riktlinjer som lagstiftningen föreskriver. Mer konkret avser uppsatsen undersöka tillämpningen och tillgängligheten av kommunala riktlinjer för markanvisningar samt dess innehåll. Undersökningen visar att cirka 75 % av de 50 största kommunerna i Sverige har antagna riktlinjer för markanvisningar. Ungefär 60 % av kommunerna har riktlinjer tillgängliga via sin hemsida. Undersökningen visar även på en stor variation i utförligheten hos de kommunala riktlinjerna och den information som förmedlas till intresserade byggherrar genom riktlinjerna kan anses alltför generell för att kunna uppnå lagens syfte. Kommuner gynnas inte av att precisera sina riktlinjer närmre och lagen i sig öppnar upp för generella skrivelser och egna tolkningar samtidigt som ingen prövning finns. Vi ställer oss frågande till om lagen helt enkelt kom till för att stilla de kritiker som funnits på området.

Thesis advisor: C. Patrick Proctor / Traditionally strict language separation policies in dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs reflect parallel monolingualism and have been criticized as failing to recognize the sociolinguistic realities of bilingual students (García & Lin, 2017). To leverage bilingual learners’ full linguistic repertoires as resources, this study explored how Sánchez, García, and Solorza’s (2018) translanguaging allocation policy could be strategically and purposefully designed in a third grade Mandarin/English DLBE classroom where the majority of the students were English-dominant speakers. Taking the form of participatory design research (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016), I (as a researcher) and a Mandarin teacher worked together to co-design translanguaging documentation, translanguaging rings, and translanguaging transformation spaces across different content areas – Chinese Language Arts, Science, and Social Studies. During the process, we also engaged in equitable forms of dialogue and listening to openly discuss, negotiate, and develop our translanguaging co-stance in iterative ways. Data collection included classroom and design meeting recordings, observational field notes, and teacher and students’ artifacts and interviews throughout the school year of 2018-19. Inductive and deductive coding were adopted for data analysis. Findings revealed that translanguaging pedagogies took many shapes based on contextual factors, such as the different pedagogical purposes and curricular demands across content areas. Students were able to develop deeper content understandings, build cross-linguistic connections, and develop their bi/multilingual identities and critical consciousness in those flexible bilingual spaces. Findings also demonstrated that the ideological (re)negotiation between the researcher and the teacher was a bumpy and discursive journey, replete with tensions, confusions, and difficult conversations. Overall, it was a balancing act to create translanguaging spaces while maintaining the language-minoritized (Mandarin) space and privileging students’ use of Mandarin given the societal dominance of English. This study provides implications for new theoretical and pedagogical understandings of translanguaging, and suggests that researcher-teacher collaboration provides a promising way to generate evidence-based, practitioner-informed, and context-appropriate knowledge for DLBE curricular and pedagogical improvements. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

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Over the last decade, Internet-based services, such as electronic-mail, music-on-demand, and social-network services, have changed the ways we communicate and access information. Usually, the key functionality of such a service is in backend components, which are located in a data center, a facility for hosting computing systems and related equipment. This thesis focuses on two fundamental problems related to the management, dimensioning, and provisioning of such backend components. The first problem centers around resource allocation for a large-scale cloud environment. Data centers have become very large; they often contain hundreds of thousands of machines and applications. In such a data center, resource allocation cannot be efficiently achieved through a traditional management system that is centralized in nature. Therefore, a more scalable solution is needed. To address this problem, we have developed and evaluated a scalable and generic protocol for resource allocation. The protocol is generic in the sense that it can be instantiated for different management objectives through objective functions. The protocol jointly allocates CPU, memory, and network resources to applications that are hosted by the cloud. We prove that the protocol converges to a solution, if an objective function satisfies a certain property. We perform a simulation study of the protocol for realistic scenarios. Simulation results suggest that the quality of the allocation is independent of the system size, up to 100,000 machines and applications, for the management objectives considered. The second problem is related to performance modeling of a distributed key-value store. The specific distributed key-value store we focus on in this thesis is the Spotify storage system. Understanding the performance of the Spotify storage system is essential for achieving a key quality of service objective, namely that the playback latency of a song is sufficiently low. To address this problem, we have developed and evaluated models for predicting the performance of a distributed key-value store for a lightly loaded system. First, we developed a model that allows us to predict the response time distribution of requests. Second, we modeled the capacity of the distributed key-value store for two different object allocation policies. We evaluate the models by comparing model predictions with measurements from two different environments: our lab testbed and a Spotify operational environment. We found that the models are accurate in the sense that the prediction error, i.e., the difference between the model predictions and the measurements from the real systems, is at most 11%. / <p>QC 20131001</p>

År 2015 trädde lag (2014:899) om riktlinjer vid kommunala markanvisningar i kraft vilken innebär att samtliga kommuner som använder sig av markanvisningar ska ta fram en policy som ska innefatta grundläggande bestämmelser kring markanvisningar. Lagen tar upp vissa specifika faktorer som ska finnas med i markanvisningspolicyn för att underlätta för allmänheten, byggherrar samt för kommunerna själva. Vid kommunala markanvisningar ska hänsyn även tas till EU:s statsstödsregler, statsstödsreglerna innebär att konkurrensförhållandena på en marknad inte på något vis får snedvridas samt att det ska vara förenligt med den inre marknaden. Detta anpassas av kommunerna genom att de bland annat säljer fastigheten till ett marknadspris. I arbetet görs en kartläggning av nio stycken kommuners markanvisningspolicys i Stockholms län för att kunna avgöra hur kommunerna förhåller sig till EU:s statsstödsregler. En intervju ska även genomföras med kommunerna för att kunna få en klarhet i hur stor förståelse kommunerna har av statsstödsreglerna samt för att förtydliga respektive kommuns markanvisningspolicy. Genom undersökningen i arbetet konstateras det att det inte finns något lagkrav på att EU:s statsstödsregler ska nämnas och förklaras i en kommuns markanvisningspolicy, men att om kommunerna gör detta kommer det att underlätta för samtliga parter och även bidra med kunskap kring statsstödsreglerna i samband med markanvisningar. Samtliga kommuner i undersökningen har anpassat sig genom att följa det som är lagstadgat i lag (2014:899) om riktlinjer för kommunala markanvisningar, vilket bland annat är att förklara hur en kommun prissätter marken vid anvisningar. Kommunerna har kunskap om att försäljning av mark ska ske till ett marknadspris samt att en kommun ska främja god konkurrens. Det som dock diskuteras är om det är tillräckligt tydligt. Majoriteten av kommunerna nämner även i sina markanvisningspolicys att kommunen ska främja god konkurrens och att kommunen ska sälja mark till ett marknadspris, dock framgår det inte varför. Slutsatsen tar upp att ett förtydligande skulle kunna behöva genomföras i respektive kommuns markanvisningspolicy. Förtydligandet skulle kunna omfatta hur kommunerna anpassat sig till EU:s statsstödsregler vid kommunala markanvisningar. Det anses att de flesta kommunerna i undersökningen inte har varit tillräckligt tydliga angående vad statsstödsreglerna innebär och varför kommunerna måste följa dessa. Det finns dock inget krav på att kommunerna måste förklara vad statsstödsreglerna innebär i en markanvisningspolicy. Genom detta förtydligande skulle EU:s statsstödsregler lättare att kunna följas av allmänheten och kommunerna skulle bättre kunna förhålla sig till statsstödsreglerna. Byggherrar skulle även få en bättre förståelse i hur kommunen arbetar och varför kommunerna uttrycker sig på olika vis i deras markanvisningspolicy, som till exempel att kommunerna ska främja god konkurrens och att försäljning av mark ska ske till ett marknadspris. / In January the first, 2015, an act (2014:899) was put into effect which implicates that all the municipalities that uses land allocation shall publish a policy, which should include basic provisions for land allocations. The act addresses certain specific factors that should be included in the land allocation to facilitate the public, builders and the municipalities themselves. The municipalities should also take EU state aid rules into account when they use land allocation, which means that a competition in a market can not be distorted in any way and also that it is compatible with the internal market. This is adapted by the municipalities by selling the property at a market price. In this study, a survey of nine municipalities landmark policy in Stockholm County is made to determine how the municipalities relate to EU state aid rules. An interview is also being conducted with the municipalities in order to get clarity on the understanding of the municipalities in the EU state aid rules and to clarify the respective municipality's land allocation policy. Through the survey in this study it is observed that there is no legal requirement for EU state aid rules to be mentioned or explained in a municipality's land allocation policy, but if the municipalities mentions the EU state aid rules in their land allocation policy, it will facilitate all parties and also contribute knowledge about the rules in connection with land allocations. All the municipalities in the survey have adapted to the act (2014:899), for instance by explain how they price the land when they use land allocations. The municipalities have understood that the sale of land must be at a market price and that they have to promote good competition. What is discussed, however, is whether it is clear enough. The majority of the municipalities mention in their land allocation policy that they should promote good competition and that they have to sale land to a market price, without mentioning the reason why. The conclusion of the study states that a clarification might to be carried out in each municipality's land allocation policy. The clarification could include how the municipalities adapted to the EU state aid rules in land allocation policies. It is considered that all the municipalities have not been sufficiently clear about what the rules mean and why the municipalities must follow them. However, there is no requirement that the municipalities have to explain what EU state aid rules mean in a land allocation policy. Through this clarification, EU state aid rules could be easier to follow by the public and municipalities could be better able to comply with the rules. Builders might also get a better understanding of how a municipality works and why the municipalities express themselves in a certain way in their land allocation policy, such as promoting good competition and selling land at a market price.

From the Proceedings of the 1977 Meetings of the Arizona Section - American Water Resources Assn. and the Hydrology Section - Arizona Academy of Science - April 15-16, 1977, Las Vegas, Nevada / The purpose and operation of the Central Arizona Project water allocation model system are described, based on a system analysis approach developed over the past 30 years into an interdisciplinary science for the study and resolution of complex technical management problems. The system utilizes mathematical and other simulation models designed for computer operations to effectively solve such problems as the CAP faces including those concerned with social and economic considerations. The model is composed of two major components: (1) a linear program designed to determine the optimal allocation of all sources of water to all demands and, (2) a hydrologic simulator capable of reflecting the impact of distribution alternatives on per-unit cost of delivery. The model, currently being use, has substantially contributed to a greater understanding of water usage potential in Arizona.