The purpose of this research is through building a System Dynamics model to show hospital operating structure as a whole and to find out the interactions between variables. And through the Management Flight Simulator to simulate three policy¡X¡§retrenchment personnel policy¡¨, ¡§retrenchment personnel policy and ¡§raising salary¡¨, ¡§abundant personnel policy¡¨¡X to find out the best manage policy. The case in this research is a Regional Teaching Hospital in southern Taiwan. The model is built according to the information which got by many times interview. The model has four sub-systems; they are ¡§market sub-system¡¨, ¡§human resource sub-system¡¨, ¡§equipment sub-system¡¨ and ¡§finance sub-system¡¨. After the simulation and the evaluation, we find that ¡§abundant personnel policy¡¨ can save more cost than ¡§retrenchment personnel policy¡¨. That is because ¡§abundant personnel policy¡¨ not only can save the physical cost like recruiting cost and training cost, but also can save the invisible cost like the experience of employee can¡¦t be accumulated. Besides, raising salary although can slacken off the decreasing employee satisfaction due to the overloading, but it is cure the symptoms, not the disease. In long-term, it will lead to the increasing cost, decreasing the competitiveness.

This research is an empirical study on the kind of special restaurants, aiming at understanding the growth strategy in food and beverage industry by means of system dynamics and building the management flight simulator for the research object. Based on several times of interviewing an Italian restaurant, the research model is built and composed of five major parts, which are ¡§Subsystem of customer and market,¡¨ ¡§Subsystem of employee,¡¨ ¡§Subsystem of capacity,¡¨ ¡§Subsystem of service quality and satisfaction¡¨ and ¡§Subsystem of finance.¡¨ Under the property of low repurchasing in this kind of restaurant, conclusions below are found after policy simulating: 1. Strategy of high-price with high-cost is suitable for this kind of restaurant¡¦s long-term management. Though the cost is higher, high-price strategy results in high customer satisfaction. With high revenue and steady customers, the possibility of insufficiency of growth and investment decreases. 2. Even if a restaurant has high customer satisfaction and sufficient capital, growing too fast will fail it easily. Growing too fast will fail a restaurant because of insolvency, especially the kind of special restaurant, of which the frequency of patronage is not as high as that of common restaurants. Therefore, quick expansion will bring out huge expenditure; thus, fails a restaurant even if there is high service quality and high satisfaction. 3. Advertisement makes future customers patronize earlier. Maintaining frequent customers is a better strategy. Advertisement makes future customers patronize earlier, but its effect does not last as long as word-of-mouth effect. 4. Business environment is better when all competitors compete with each other by means of high-price strategy. By adopting low-price strategy, a restaurant will draw lots of customers and need to expand itself. Quick expansion, however, reduces customer satisfaction and leads to fail eventually. Instead, managers who adopt high-price strategy run business better. As a result, business environment is better when market players adopt high-price strategy.

This article is about building a dynamic model of an Italian food restaurant in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. The model contains six sectors, including human resource sector, kitchen sector, quality sector, training sector, market sector and the financial sector. Depending on these six sectors we build a computer simulation model. With this computer simulation model can help people get better understanding of the real operational system and can have better insights of the restaurant management. In this article, we found out that the restaurant manager needs to emphasize the quality and training of their employees. If the restaurant grows without enough qualified employees, the growth will meet its limit and has problems like quality decline, working overtime, high turnover rate, customer base decline and may cause the restaurant to close up. In this article, we also found out that the training must both emphasize the professional training and ethic training and it is better to emphasize a little more on the ethic training. If the restaurant managers focus only on the professional training, it will bring serious problems. Since it has many conflicts during the work, the ethic training can help employees having more stable, social emotions for better customer service and build a trust and harmonious working atmosphere. Otherwise, the conflicts between the coworkers may cause service delay, service mistakes, increasing cost and high turnover rate. All these problems will affect the operation of the restaurant management in long term. In this article, the dynamic model contains many soft variables of the restaurant management. It can provide the learner of dynamic model building to learn about the soft variables modeling.

This research tries to observe an advertizing printing company¡¦s business model and understand the interaction between different policies implemented on the company by System Dynamics. Futhermore, building Management Flight Simulatior can let one simulate the situation and policies to find the effective policies. After the simulation and the evaluation, we find that if the company only pays attention to marketing but didn¡¦t make efforts on the employees¡¦ training, it will block the company¡¦s growth, and the manager always ignored this problem. However, if we only make efforts on training the employees or hiring new employees, it will be just a waste of money in the long run. Therefore, the manager should enlarge his thinking boundary, and considerate not only marketing but training, and even many other policies, and the most important is their interaction, at appropriate time.

This dissertation provides three essays. In the first essay, a model with two linguistic variables is built to demonstrate the joint effect of multiple linguistic variables in a dynamic modeling context. Triangular membership function is used to represent the linguistic variables and the joint effect is captured through fuzzy inference method. In this essay, the results obtained by employing fuzzy concepts are compared with the results that one would obtain using generic lookup functions. The second essay develops a system dynamics model by which policy makers can assess the impact of various travel demand management interventions within a metropolitan area and as a consequence understand the complex behavior of affected transportation-socioeconomic systems. This essay builds on a previously formulated approach where fuzzy concepts are used to represent five linguistic variables used in the model. We also compare the level of traffic congestion under the scenarios with and without traffic congestion pricing. The third essay is based on the second essay where different scenarios of the travel demand management policies are evaluated and analyzed. There are two parts in this essay. The first part addresses the construction of a Management Flight Simulator (MFS) that is used to do policy analysis for travel demand management policies. By using the Management Flight Simulator, the second part of the essay describes the evaluation of alternative travel demand management policies. In this research, we found that the revenue generated from congestion pricing does increase mass transit capacity even with the aging of mass transit capacity. However, in the short term traffic congestion is mitigated while in the long term the proposed travel demand management policy actually deteriorates the traffic situation. / Ph. D.

The global infrastructure gap has continually widened over the last few decades. Industry reports and academic publications suggest that, in terms of road infrastructure, both advanced and developing economies have not paid sufficient attention to modernize their infrastructure assets. A wider road infrastructure gap signifies that highway conditions have declined because governments have not had enough resources for maintenance and rehabilitation. In the same way, it also indicates that congestion levels have grown and the level of service in most road networks has dropped because public agencies have not had sufficient funds to generate new highways and expand existing corridors. This dissertation, therefore, provided insights into the difficulties associated with improving the existing highway assets and the barriers related to expanding the current roadway capacity through public-private partnerships (PPPs). The research involved three interdependent studies. In the first study, I examined the continuous deterioration of the US highway system through a system dynamics model, which focused on the dynamics of capital investments and maintenance expenditures in the US road infrastructure. The results confirmed that the American highway system is currently stuck in a capability trap. This makes it difficult for the system to improve at the rates required by the country's economic growth. In my second investigation, my attention shifted toward the governance challenges related to building new roads and expanding highway capacity through PPPs. I developed a systems map of governance variables informed by past-published evidence from actual projects. By specifically examining the shaping phase of public-private initiatives, the work uncovered the effects of feedback relationships and interdependencies on PPP feasibility. This offered insights about the relationship between governance mechanisms and successful PPP development. In the third study, I utilized variables and relationships identified in my second investigation to develop a management flight simulator in order to better explain governance difficulties in the procurement phase of PPP projects. The simulator was implemented during an educational exercise with graduate students of civil engineering. By doing so, I confirmed that the simulator has the potential to increase our understanding of PPP procurement processes. Results indicated that the simulation tool was a suitable instrument to explain how government capacity, project uncertainty, and technical complexity influence PPP tendering. Overall, my findings across the three studies illustrate different means to understand why closing the global road infrastructure gap is challenging. Together, the three inquiries indicate that examining the road infrastructure sector as a socio-technical system contributes to improve our understanding of the expenditure dynamics related to existing assets and to enhance our comprehension of the governance challenges associated with developing new roads. / Ph. D. / Over the last decades, the global infrastructure gap has continually expanded. In the road infrastructure sector, governments around the world have failed to meet the growing societal and economic demands for additional infrastructure investments. This suggests that highway conditions have declined because there are not enough resources to improve the existing roads and develop new highways. As a result, the size and quality of global road network keep deteriorating annually. This dissertation provided insights into the difficulties related to enhancing the quality conditions of the existing road network and the problems associated with increasing roadway capacity through public-private partnerships (PPPs). The research was conducted through three interdependent studies. In the first study, I developed a simulation model in order to understand the continuous deterioration of the US highway system. I concluded that the US government has been unable to achieve sustained improvements in the system because of prioritizing rehabilitation over preventive maintenance. In my second investigation, I conducted a literature review focused on analyzing governance-related concepts in PPP projects. I created a systems map that helps to understand how governance variables influence failure and success in the shaping phase of public-private agreements. In the third study, I developed an educational tool focused on explaining some of the challenges of conducting procurement processes in PPPs. This tool proved to be effective in terms of illustrating how government capacity, project uncertainty, and technical complexity influence PPP tendering. Overall, the three studies offer a socio-technical perspective of why closing the global road infrastructure gap is challenging. Together, they contribute to improve our understanding of the difficulties associated with enhancing the conditions of the current road network and developing new roads through PPPs.

In order to make company work efficiently, managers often divide an enterprise into several functions or departments, such as sales, marketing, human resource, finance and manufacture. However, in this structure, managers would fail to see the wood for the trees. Because each department manager has to be responsible for his own performance, which may easily leads these managers to make decisions that are fit for their department instead of the whole company. Therefore, it¡¦s impossible for companies to make an optimized decision in a dynamic environment. As we enlarge space and time, we can find out that decisions may influence one by another, and the feedback of each decision has a long time delay which makes the manager try to see the wood for the trees even harder. For one manager who tries to show up his performance in a short time will leave the side effect which caused by time delay to other people. What even worse is they can¡¦t predict how much side effect is behind. In this research, we used system dynamics and systems thinking to develop our system dynamics model for the case study. And we developed a MFS(management flight simulator) as a learning tool. Students who manipulate this MFS can enrich their ability to see the wood for the trees. In this case study, we choose a factory which provide electronic product assemble services as a research object. The company was established since AD 1989 until now. After first five years hard working time, it started to grow up stably by keeping changing the product and service. In this industry, success is relied on product quality, price, service and delivery time. Only by making the optimized decision in this competition market can gain better performance. This thesis simulated the case company surface mount technology plant from 1995 to 2006 for 12 years. Students can make different decisions to obtain different equity and capital equipment to evaluate their performance. By different result, simulators can reconsider the structure which is behind the game and their own mental models. After learning from this virtual world, players will find out that their own mental models influencing the final result. From the result and experience, one simulator can accumulate their know-how for the next game. After experiencing this double loop learning process, player will finally learn how to make the best decisions by systems thinking for the real world. Keywords : System Dynamics¡BSystems Thinking¡BDynamic Complexity¡BEnterprise Modeling¡BManagement Flight Simulator¡BSurface Mount Technology(SMT)¡BElectronic Manufacturing Services(EMS)

This thesis researches dynamics in projects managed by Scrumban. It describes the creation of system dynamics simulation model, which provides insight into the relationships between system components. It also presents data, that are further analysed with the purpose of discovering patterns in behaviour of project attributes in time, such as size of the product backlog, work in progress etc. The patterns are discovered and recommended parameter settings are provided so that there is no idle time or higher defect rate than necessary. Soft factors are also included in the model, namely the development team and the customer, which have a grand effect to the model behaviour. Managment flight simulator is developed, which provides the option to experiment even to users, who are not familiar with system dynamics modelling. The thesis consists of two parts. In the first part, necessary theory of project management, system dynamics and their fusion is provided. The second part is dedicated to the process of creating the simulation model, dynamic hypothesis formulation, mathematical modelling, testing and data analysis. In consideration of the analysis results, recommended policies are provided. Last pages of the thesis describe the user interface of management flight simulator and it's controls.