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Nurses may experience job stress and burnout due to the amount of hours worked and demanding schedules. At one hospital, nurse turnover rates were high in medical-surgical units. Surveys and interviews conducted by hospital administration found that the bedside nurses were dissatisfied with scheduling practices and that this dissatisfaction could lead to heightened turnover. The purpose of this project was to determine if the implementation of a self-scheduling model would decrease nurse turnover on a medical-surgical nursing unit. This quality improvement project focused on facilitating the empowerment of nurses through a self-scheduling model; it followed the quality improvement steps of the Deming approach of Plan-Do-Check-Act. During the pilot, turnover rates of the unit that implemented the self-scheduling model were reviewed 30 days pre- and 30 days post-implementation. The project results showed a decrease in turnover rates from 12.96% to 10.00% on the unit where the model was implemented. This project has a social impact by allowing nurses to participate in a self-scheduling model to have work–life balance, because the work environment plays a significant role in encouraging engagement and decrease in turnover. Implementing this model in other units may result in decreased nurse turnover for the hospital.

Reactive repair of a disrupted schedule is a better alternative to total rescheduling, as the latter is a time consuming process and also results in shop floor nervousness. The schedule repair heuristics reported in the literature generally address only machine breakdown. This paper presents a modified Affected Operations Rescheduling (mAOR) approach, which deals with many of the disruptions that are frequently encountered in a job shop. The repair of these disruptions has been decomposed into four generic repair actions that can be applied singularly or in combination. These generic repair actions are evaluated through a simulation study with the performance measures of efficiency and stability. The results indicate the effectiveness of the mAOR heuristic in dealing with typical job shop disruptions. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

This research proposes a Genetic Algorithm based decision support model that provides decision makers with a quantitative basis for multi-criteria decision making related to construction scheduling. In an attempt to overcome the drawbacks of similar efforts, the proposed multi-objective optimization model provides insight into construction scheduling problems. In order to generate optimal solutions in terms of the three important criteria which are project duration, cost, and variation in resource use, a new data structure is proposed to define a solution to the problem and a general Niched Pareto Genetic Algorithm (NPGA) is modified to facilitate optimization procedure. The main features of the proposed Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm (MOGA) are: A fitness sharing technique that maintains diversity of solutions. A non-dominated sorting method that assigns ranks to each individual solution in the population is beneficial to the tournament selection process. An external archive to prevent loss of optimal or near optimal solutions due to the random effect of genetic operators. A space normalization method to avoid scaling deficiencies. The developed optimization model was applied to two case studies. The results indicate that a wider range of solutions can be obtained by employing the new approach when compared to previous models. Greater area in the decision space is considered and tradeoffs between all the objectives are found. In addition, various resource use options are found and visualized. Most importantly, the creation of a simultaneous optimization model provides better insight into what is obtainable by each option. A limitation of this research is that schedules are created under the assumption of unlimited resource availability. Schedules created with this assumption in real world situations are often infeasible given that resources are commonly constrained and not readily available. As such, a discussion is provided regarding future research as to what data structure has to be developed in order to perform such scheduling under resource constraints.

With the big improvement of wireless technology, people can get their desired information at any time and any place. Due to communication asymmetry - physical asymmetry and/or information ow asymmetry, broadcast data deliv- ery is rapidly becoming the method of choice for disseminating information from server to clients. The main advantage of broadcast delivery is its scalability: it is independent of the number of users the system is serving. Acharya et al. have proposed the use of a periodic dissemination architecture in the context of mobile systems, called Broadcast Disks. Broadcast Disks can construct a mem- ory hierarchy in which the highest level contains a few items and broadcasts them with high frequency while subsequent levels contain more and more items and broadcast them with less and less frequency. However, based on Acharya et al.'s approach, some broadcast slots may be unused, which resulting in the waste of bandwidth and the increase of access time. Yang has presented a com- plementary approach to solve the empty slots problem, which also reduces the mean access time. However, based on the complementary approach, the dis- tances between slots containing the same page may not be a constant, resulting in an increase of the mean access time. Therefore, in this thesis, we propose two eÆcient broadcast programs to mitigate the above phenomenon and also to solve the empty slots problem. The rst one is a revised version of the com- plementary approach, and the second one is an adaptive approach. Most of the previous approaches assume that each mobile client needs only one data page. However, in many situations, a mobile client might need data of more than one page. Ke has proposed the SNV strategy for query set broadcast scheduling in multiple channels. In the SNV strategy, the data pages of the same query set are put as together as possible and it tries to avoid scheduling two or more pages of one query set at the same time slot of di erent channels. However, there are two disadvantages in the SNV strategy: (1) a data page with high access frequency may be scheduled at a time slot near the end of the broad- cast cycle, which results in the longer access time for requiring the whole query sets; (2) it may extend the number of slots in a certain chain, which results in the wasteness of bandwidth of the other channels. Therefore, we propose an eÆcient broadcast scheduling strategy, the Hybrid Version of the Set-based strategy ( HVS ) to improve these two disadvantages. From our performance analysis and simulation, we show that both our revised version of the com- plementary approach and adaptive approach create smaller number of slots in one broadcast cycle than Acharya et al.'s algorithm and require shorter mean access time than Acharya et al.'s algorithm and the complementary approach. Moreover,from our performance analysis and simulation, we also show that our HVS strategy requires shorter total expected delay access time, and creates smaller number of slots and smaller number of empty slots in one broadcast cycle than the SNV strategy.

In ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) networks, rate-based regulation-scheduling (R&S) mechanisms guarantee certain quality of service (QoS) with controlling the rate of a tagged connection serviced by the switches. The R&S mechanisms, which consider only the issues of one tagged connection itself but the situation of the scheduling queue, can behave hand-over well. However, there may be many connections hand over in identical condition and compete for the position in the scheduler queue. It makes the transmission to be distorted greatly from the hand-over. There is already a scheme, dynamic R&S, to smooth rate jitter with counting the hand-over of other connections. Dynamic R&S doesn't count the idle slots, which also make the interval between two consecutive tagged cells, and results in unnecessary misses. The new scheme proposed considers the system time and scheduler queue's length. It has less difference between transmission intervals and the premised one of a tagged connection, so that is better in rate-jitter control. This mechanism has O(1) time-complexity, so conforms to the demand of high-speed ATM networks.

In this thesis, we develop algorithms that make optimal use of frequency scaling to schedule jobs with real??time requirements. Dynamic voltage scaling is a technique used to reduce energy consumption in wide variety of systems. Reducing supply voltage results in a lower processor clock speed since the supply voltage has a proportional dependency on the clock speed of the processing system. In hard real??time systems, unduly reducing the speed of processor could result in jobs missing their deadlines. The voltage scaling in such systems should therefore take into consideration the deadline of jobs. This thesis will address two questions: First, given a set of discrete frequency levels, we determine an energy-optimal sched- ule of a given set of real-time jobs. We model the problem as a network flow graph and use linear programming to solve the problem. The schedule can be used on processors with discrete frequencies (like Transmeta Efficeon Processor and AMD Turion 64 Processor). Second, given a set of real??time jobs, we determine a set of optimal frequency levels which minimizes the energy consumption while meeting all the timing con- straints. This can be used to model variable-capacity facilities in operations re- search, where the capacity of the facility can be controlled at a cost.

That project’s purpose is to create the Schedule Projection System. Tere is given information about analogous Schedule Projection Systems in Lithuania and other countries. It was used “fall” model for that system’s creating control. The program was created in Microsoft Visual Basic environment and it uses OLE interface for comunicating with Microsoft Exel program. Schedule Projection System runs in any computer with x86 architecture, Microsoft Windows operating system and Microsoft Office pack. Systems documentation: Projection methodology and technology analysis. Requirements specification. Detailed project’s plan. System’s working documentation: System functional description. System manager. System installation document System administrator document After program’s revise and testing procedures the system was evaluated like specious for exploitation.

Lever pressing was maintained by a concurrent token production schedule in rats. Token deliveries (i.e., ½" steel ball bearings) were assigned probabilistically to the right or left lever (on 1:3 or 1:9 ratio for Experiment 1 and 1:6 ratio for Experiment 2). The location of the rich lever remained constant within session, but varied across daily sessions according to a pseudorandom binary sequence. Once assigned to a lever, token delivery was arranged by a random interval 15 s schedule. Transition to token exchange was determined by varying exchange-production schedules that varied after each condition (FR 1 for Experiment 1; and RR 2, FR 2, RR 3, and FR 4 for Experiment 2). During token exchange, depositing a token in the receptacle was reinforced with access to sweetened condensed milk. The generalized matching law provided an adequate description of the session wide ratio of left to right lever presses, detecting considerable undermatching across all conditions. Sensitivity to the token ratios were best described by the current session's reinforcement ratio in comparison to the prior two session's reinforcement ratios. One of four subjects showed increased response rates across successive token deliveries in the exchange-production schedule while the remaining subjects showed the opposite effects of decreased response rates as tokens were earned. Similarly, sensitivity to token-production ratios increased across successive token deliveries for one of four subjects. Differences between subjects can be explained by the duration of elicited sign tracking of tokens, measured by duration of postreinforcement pausing and direct observation of rats during sessions.

Sometimes, changes in consequences are accompanied by a clear stimulus change explicitly arranged by the experimenter. Other times when new consequences are in effect, there is little or no accompanying stimulus change explicitly arranged by the experimenter. These differences can be seen in the laboratory as multiple (signaled) schedules and mixed (unsignaled) schedules. The current study used college students and a single-subject design to examine the effects of introducing signaled and unsignaled schedules, and the transitions between them. In one phase, a card was flipped from purple to white every time the schedule was switched from VR-3 to FT-10. In another phase, the schedule still changed periodically, but the card always remained on the purple side. Results showed that the participants' responding was controlled by the schedule of reinforcement, by the color of the card, or both. These results suggest that changes in patterns of reinforcement lead to changes in stimulus control. In addition, the stimulus control for a behavior can come from several different sources. During teaching, it may facilitate the development of stimulus control to change the environment when a new behavior is required.