Om närstående ska orka leva tillsammans med en yngre demenssjuk partner behöver de erbjudas stöd som är utformat utifrån deras situation och behov. Syftet var att i samarbete med närstående till personer vars demenssjukdom debuterat före 65 års ålder planera ett närståendestöd. Metoden som användes var Participatory Action Research (PAR), en interaktiv forskningsmetod som innefattar reflektion, analys och handling. Fokusgruppssamtal genomfördes med två fokusgrupper vid vardera tre tillfällen. Samtliga deltagare var make eller maka som levde tillsammans med en yngre demenssjuk partner. Studien visade att närstående genomgår en process som har stora likheter med och följer den transitionsprocess som personen med demenssjukdom går igenom. Initialt upplevde närstående oro, ovisshet,ensamhet och osäkerhet och man upplevde brist på stöd. För att lindra dessa upplevelser krävs indirekt stöd riktat mot den sjuke och direkt stöd riktat mot den närstående. Tidigt i sjukdomsförloppet behövs individuellt anpassat stöd som bör förändras i takt med att sjukdomsprocessen fortskrider. Att ha tillgång till en person som kan fungera som lots mellan de olika övergångar närstående går igenom var betydelsefullt. / Living together with a younger spouse who is suffering from dementia requires that relatives are offered support. The aim of this Participatory Action Research (PAR) project was to, in collaboration with relatives, plan support for relatives to persons with dementia below 65 years of age. PAR is an interactive research method based on reflection, analysis and action. Two groups of relatives participated in focus groups at three occasions and data were content analysed. Relatives were wives or husbands to a younger person with dementia. Findings showed that relatives pass through a similar transition process as the person. It is important to offer individualized support initially, support that needs to be changed as the disease proceeds. Furthermore, the study showed that if relatives shall manage their own anxiety, uncertainty, and feelings of loneliness, emotional support is necessary. However, it is impossible to just offer direct support to the relatives without considering the sick persons’ needs. Finally, a personal guide that could follow the couple trough the entire process would be of importance.

<p>Many types of services are provided using some equipment or machines, e.g. transportation systems using vehicles. Designs of these systems require capacity decisions, e.g., the number of vehicles. In my dissertation, I use many-server and conventional heavy-traffic limit theory to derive asymptotically optimal capacity decisions, giving the desired level of delay and availability performance with minimum investment. The results provide near-optimal solutions and insights to otherwise analytically intractable problems.</p> <p>The dissertation will comprise two essays. In the first essay, &ldquoAsymptotic Analysis of Delay-based Performance Metrics and Optimal Capacity Decisions for the Machine Repair Problem with Spares,&rdquo I study the M/M/R machine repair problem with spares. This system can be represented by a closed queuing network. Applications include fleet vehicles' repair and backup capacity, warranty services' staffing and spare items investment decisions. For these types of systems, customer satisfaction is essential; thus, the delays until replacements of broken units are even more important than delays until the repair initiations of the units. Moreover, the service contract may include conditions on not only the fill rate but also the probability of acceptable delay (delay being less than a specified threshold value).</p> <p>I address these concerns by expressing delays in terms of the broken-machines process; scaling this process by the number of required operating machines (or the number of customers in the system); and using many-server limit theorems (limits taken as the number of customers goes to infinity) to obtain the limiting expected delay and probability of acceptable delay for both delay until replacement and repair initiation. These results lead to an approximate optimization problem to decide on the repair and backup-capacity investment giving the minimum expected cost rate, subject to a constraint on the acceptable delay probability. Using the characteristics of the scaled broken-machines process, we obtain insights about the relationship between quality of service and capacity decisions. Inspired by the call-center literature, we categorize capacity level choice as efficiency-driven, quality-driven, or quality- and efficiency-driven. Hence, our study extends the conventional call center staffing problem to joint staffing and backup provisioning. Moreover, to our knowledge, the machine-repair problem literature has focused mainly on mean and fill rate measures of performance for steady-state cost analysis. This approach provides complex, nonlinear expressions not possible to solve analytically. The contribution of this essay to the machine-repair literature is the construction of delay-distribution approximations and a near-optimal analytical solution. Among the interesting results, we find that for capacity levels leading to very high utilization of both spares and repair capacity, the limiting distribution of delay until replacement depends on one type of resource only, the repair capacity investment.</p> <p>In the second essay, &ldquoDiffusion Approximations and Near-Optimal Design of a Make-to-Stock Queue with Perishable Goods and Impatient Customers,&rdquo I study a make-to-stock system with perishable inventory and impatient customers as a two-sided queue with abandonment from both sides. This model describes many consumer goods, where not only spoilage but also theft and damage can occur. We will refer to positive jobs as individual products on the shelf and negative jobs as backlogged customers. In this sense, an arriving negative job provides the service to a waiting positive job, and vice versa. Jobs that must wait in queue before potential matching are subject to abandonment. Under certain assumptions on the magnitude of the abandonment rates and the scaled difference between the two arrival rates (products and customers), we suggest approximations to the system dynamics such as average inventory, backorders, and fill rate via conventional heavy traffic limit theory.</p> <p>We find that the approximate limiting queue length distribution is a normalized weighted average of two truncated normal distributions and then extend our results to analyze make-to-stock queues with/without perishability and limiting inventory space by inducing thresholds on the production (positive) side of the queue. Finally, we develop conjectures for the queue-length distribution for a non-Markovian system with general arrival streams. We take production rate as the decision variable and suggest near-optimal solutions.</p> / Dissertation

In this study, an operational (short term) flexibility management approach is proposed for make-to-order companies with flexible shops. Order Review and Release (ORR) techniques and typical Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) decisions are combined in this method. The proposed method prepares a shop environment by allocating process and routing flexibility types at different levels to the shop in each production cycle. Variety, volume, and criticality of the part types in the pool and the anticipated orders constitute the main inputs for flexibility allocation. A flexibility management policy is introduced and determination of the proper policy is realized with the integrated utilization of mathematical programming and simulation modeling. An experimental study is performed to investigate the effects of proposed method on a hypothetical flexible shop. Results show that with an appropriate policy, periodical and online flexibility management can be an effective tool to cope with uncertainty in demand if combined with ORR techniques.

Stora Enso Hylte Bruk är ett tidningspappersbruk beläget i Hyltebruk. De fyra pappersmaskinerna startades 1972(PM1), 1974(PM2), 1976(PM3) och 1989(PM4). Produktionen 2005 från dessa pappersmaskiner var 800 000 ton papper. För att tillverka papper åtgår stora mängder energi i form av värme och el, Hylte Bruk gjorde 2005 av med 1 % av Sveriges totala elenergibehov. Den 1/7 2004 höjdes processrelaterad elskatt från 0 till 0,5 öre/kWh vilket ledde fram till den lag som trädde i kraft den 1/1 2005, ”lag om program för energieffektivisering” (PFE)1. Ändamålet är att främja en effektiv energianvändning och ger energiintensiv industri möjlighet att delta i ett 5-årigt program för energieffektivisering. De företag som är kvalificerade att ingå i programmet och klarar av de krav som ställs befrias från elskatten. Som en del av det här programmet ingår att utarbeta en lista med elenergieffektiviseringar som ska överlämnas till Statens Energimyndighet. Detta examensarbete kan efter beslut av ansvariga på Hylte Bruk ingå som en del av denna lista. Syftet med examensarbetet var att undersöka effektiviteten hos tolv pumpar på PM2 genom mätning av effekt, flöde och tryck. En del av dessa har varit i drift i upp till 32 år, under denna tid har slitage skett, vissa pumpar har gått mot delvis stängda ventiler samt förutsättningarna i form av produktion har ändrats sedan de dimensionerades. För alla de berörda pumparna kan en effektivisering göras, den kan bestå av: lägre tryckhöjd, mindre flöde, pump med bättre verkningsgrad, eller en kombination av ovanstående exempel. De förslag som har en återbetalningstid kortare än tre år ger tillsammans en energibesparing på 1 375 000 kWh/år, vilket motsvarar mer än ¼ av vad pumparna förbrukar idag. Om istället alla de förslagen som är framarbetade och genomförbara skulle realiseras kan energibesparingen ökas ytterligare till 2 302 000 kWh/år, detta skulle dock innebära en större investeringskostnad vilket resulterar i en längre återbetalningstid.

No description available.

Workload control (WLC) systems constitute a framework mainly for the inputoutput control systems which regulate both jobs&rsquo / queues into the workshop and the flow of finished goods out of the workshop. This study is concerned with the job entry and release level of WLC which maintains a pool of unreleased jobs for the controlled release of jobs. While most of the studies in WLC concepts deal with the centralized workload control, our study decentralizes the job entry and release control and makes workstations more powerful in schedule decision making. Job&rsquo / s information is sent to the workstations by mediator which is the supervisor of the workstation. Both mediator and work stations are represented by agents in a distributed system. Jobs&rsquo / routing information is assumed to be known in advance. The developed system is verified and validated by means of test runs. Results are analyzed as well.

Techn. Univ., Diss--München, 2004.

Humboldt-Univ., Diss.--Berlin, 2004.

abstract: The e-Retail industry has grown rapidly over the last few years and is projected to continue its upward trend as consumers shift from traditional channels to online channels. In March 2010, Forrester Research forecasted that online retail sales will grow by 10% a year for the next 5 years and e-Retail sales will amount to $249 billion by 2014. With intense competition for market share and profits, information systems and technology (IST) sourcing decisions are becoming increasingly important to e-Retail firms to support continued growth and market responsiveness. There are several aspects for e-Retailers to consider when formulating its IST sourcing strategy. Whether to choose make versus buy for technology assets and services has been addressed in both strategy and IS literature (Handfield et al. 1999, Leiblein et al. 2002, Wade and Hulland, 2004). Then there is the follow-up question of selecting a best-of-breed strategy or tighter partnership with a select group of vendors (Clemons et al. 1993, Kauffman and Tsai 2009). Few studies have looked at IST sourcing or proposed models and frameworks for evaluating IST sourcing decisions (Saarinen and Vepsalainen, 1994). Furthermore, these existing studies mainly address the antecedents of the decisions but not so much on their performance effects (Kauffman and Tsai 2009; Smith et al., 1998). The goal of this study is to extend the knowledge of IST sourcing for e-Retailers, a topic which has received limited attention (Kishore et al., 2004), by addressing a core problem: How should an e-Retailer develop and implement its IST sourcing strategy to accommodate the increase in consumer demand and IT complexity but still achieve high performance? The study introduces two theoretical models to examine organizational factors that influence an e-Retailer's IST sourcing strategies of make versus buy and partnership versus best-of-breed. The proposed models are tested using a panel data set of 307 e-Retail firms over the period of 2006 to 2010. The study opens up the black box of internal firm operations by introducing a granular view of IST sourcing decisions at both the value chain and e-Commerce architecture levels and examining the performance impacts of these strategic choices. This in-depth look at IST sourcing has yet to be explored in the literature. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Information Management 2012

Submitted by Lucas Martins Ikeziri (lucas.ikeziri@unesp.br) on 2018-08-13T13:57:43Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação - Lucas Martins Ikeziri.pdf: 3834872 bytes, checksum: dcbff094cc5b0ef08e5910d9efbb4364 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Minervina Teixeira Lopes null (vina_lopes@bauru.unesp.br) on 2018-08-13T18:33:33Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 ikeziri_lm_me_bauru.pdf: 3267956 bytes, checksum: 0073dc72ff68b084049d7c710e797002 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-13T18:33:33Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 ikeziri_lm_me_bauru.pdf: 3267956 bytes, checksum: 0073dc72ff68b084049d7c710e797002 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-06-28 / O gerenciamento de estoques em cadeias de suprimentos vem enfrentando diversos problemas, como baixa rotatividade, altos investimentos em estoque, vendas perdidas por rupturas e alto índice de obsolescência dos produtos estocados. Assim, esta pesquisa tem o objetivo de avaliar a efetividade da técnica Gerenciamento Dinâmico do Pulmão (Dynamic Buffer Management - DBM) como forma de preservar a disponibilidade de produtos destinados à entrega imediata em ambientes que adotem a solução de distribuição e reposição puxada da Teoria das Restrições. Para tanto, foram realizadas simulações no software ProModel utilizando dados estocásticos para o tempo de reposição e cenários com diferentes combinações de demanda. Esta, por sua vez, pode se comportar de duas formas: i) média sem tendência com dois níveis de coeficiente de variação e ii) média com tendência sazonal com dois níveis de intensidade. Dois algoritmos do DBM foram modelados segundo seus princípios constatados na literatura e combinados com parâmetros para ajuste dinâmico do estoque alvo. Os modelos foram avaliados por meio dos seguintes indicadores: fill rate, estoque médio no sistema e rotatividade por atendimento imediato da demanda. Os resultados indicam que para a demanda média sem tendência, desativar o DBM e manter um nível sensato de estoque alvo no sistema inibe ajustes indevidos e garante um bom desempenho do modelo. Contudo, para a demanda média com tendência sazonal, o DBM é altamente recomendado para assegurar a performance do sistema e ajustar os níveis de estoque conforme o padrão da demanda se altera. / Inventory management in supply chains has faced several problems, such as low turnover, high inventory investments, lost sales due to disruptions, and high obsolescence of stored products. Thus, this research aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the Dynamic Buffer Management (DBM) technique as a way of preserving the availability of products destined for immediate delivery in environments that adopt the distribution solution and pull replenishment of the Theory of Constraints (TOC). For that, simulations were performed in the ProModel software using stochastic data for the replenishment time and scenarios with different combinations of demand. This, in turn, can behave in two ways: i) average without trend with two levels of coefficient of variation and ii) average with seasonal trend with two levels of intensity. Two DBM algorithms were modeled according to their principles found in the literature and combined with parameters for dynamic adjustment of the target level. The models were evaluated through the following indicators: fill rate, average inventory in the system and turnover for immediate demand response. The results indicate that for the average demand without trend, disabling DBM and maintaining a sensible level of target level in the system inhibits undue adjustments and ensures good model performance. However, for average demand with seasonal trend, DBM is highly recommended to ensure system performance and adjust inventory levels as the demand pattern changes.