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Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

published_or_final_version / Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

A new implementation of the calendar queue is described in this thesis. The calendar queue as previously implemented depended upon the use of multiple linked lists for the control of queue discipline. In the calendar heap implementation, the heap has been used to replace the previous functions of the linked list. Testing of the claim of O(1) execution time for the calendar queue was done. Comparisons of execution times of the calendar queue and the calendar heap have been made. Descriptions of the implementation as well as the complete C code for the calendar heap are included.

The Workers' Compensations Board of British Columbia (WCB) operates 4 call centers in the province devoted to compensation services. This thesis describes a review of operations at the call center in the head office, located in Richmond, B.C. We identified the need for a mathematical model to schedule telephone operators (called CSRs in WCB) in order to minimize the workforce required, while assuring minimal staffing levels to provide good customer service. We developed two integer programming models and built an interface that would enable the supervisors to use the model interactively. We compared the results from the model to one of their schedules and found that the model used 5 fewer CSRs than currently in their schedule. The potential savings derived from such a test convinced management that WCB needed to acquire and implement software to schedule staff.

No description available.

The Workers' Compensations Board of British Columbia (WCB) operates 4 call centers in the province devoted to compensation services. This thesis describes a review of operations at the call center in the head office, located in Richmond, B.C. We identified the need for a mathematical model to schedule telephone operators (called CSRs in WCB) in order to minimize the workforce required, while assuring minimal staffing levels to provide good customer service. We developed two integer programming models and built an interface that would enable the supervisors to use the model interactively. We compared the results from the model to one of their schedules and found that the model used 5 fewer CSRs than currently in their schedule. The potential savings derived from such a test convinced management that WCB needed to acquire and implement software to schedule staff. / Business, Sauder School of / Graduate

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A major purpose of this dissertation is to design and develop data structures for the Critical Path Method-Material Requirements Planning (CPM/MRP) methodology. The data structures developed consider the trade-off between processing time required to perform the required operations on data structures and the computer capacity utilization to store data. The CPM/MRP technique was designed to combine the capabilities of the critical path method and material requirements planning system. The critical path method is a project planning and control technique which schedules projects subject to technological sequence constraints and activity durations. When combined with material requirements planning, the methodology explicitly considers both the resources required by the activities comprising the project and the lead time to acquire the required resources. CPM/MRP contains algorithms for project scheduling subject to technological sequence and resource constraints. The early start and late start algorithms find feasible early start and late start schedules for both activity start times and resource order release times. The major drawback of the FORTRAN IV computer program which incorporated the CPM/MRP algorithms was the tremendous computer memory capacity requirements. This prohibited application of the CPM/MRP to large projects. The data structures developed in this dissertation are efficient with respect to both computer memory utilization and processing time. To design the data structures, the characteristics of storable and non-storable resources and the necessary operations within each resource category is studied. Another purpose of this dissertation is to develop an algorithm to schedule operating rooms for surgery procedures in hospitals subject to resource constraints to increase operating suite utilization. Since the major reason for low operating suite utilization is lack of required resources when they are needed and where they are needed, the CPM/MRP concept is applied to schedule surgeries. The late start algorithm outlined in this dissertation schedules surgeries and resources required for each surgery. The data structures and the surgery scheduling algorithm are incorporated into a FORTRAN IV computer program. The program has been tested with actual data gathered from a hospital. The results met the objectives of both computer memory utilization and low computation time.

Course timetabling is a well known constraint satisfaction optimization (CSOP) problem, which needs to be solved in educational institutions regularly. Unfortunately, this course timetabling problem is known to be NP-complete [7, 39]. This M.Sc. thesis presents a multi-phase approach to solve the university level course timetabling problem. We decompose the problem into several sub-problems with reduced complexity, which are solved in separate phases. In phase-1a we assign lectures to professors, phase-1b assigns labs and tutorials to academic assistances and graduate assistants. Phase-2 assigns each lecture to one of the two day-sequences (Monday-Wednesday-Friday or Tuesday-Thursday). In Phase-3, lectures of each single day-sequence are then assigned to time-slots. Finally, in phase-4, labs and tutorials are assigned to days and time-slots. This decomposition allows the use of different techniques as appropriate to solve different phases. Currently different phases are solved using constraint programming and integer linear programming. The multi-phase architecture with the graphical user interface allows users to customize constraints as well as to generate new solutions that may incorporate partial solutions from previously generated feasible solutions. / ix, 117 leaves ; 29 cm