In this talk we discuss a tactical model recently available in warehouse literature. The model integrates the replenishment decision in inventory management, the allocation of products to warehousing systems and the assignment of products to storage locations in warehousing management. Our aim is to show the models’ potentialities and weaknesses when applied to a wide variety of problems and to identify challenging research opportunities for developing global warehouse decision support models that fill the gap between researchers and warehouse practitioners.

Warehouse design and planning is a great challenge in the field of Supply Chain Management. In this paper we discuss an optimisation model aiming to support some warehouse management decisions. In particular a mixed-integer programming model (MILP) is presented to determine product assignment and allocation to the functional areas, as well as the size of each area. Our aim is to capture the trade-offs among the different warehouse costs in order to achieve global optimal design satisfying throughput requirements.

O projeto é sabidamente um dos principais elementos de geração de vantagem competitiva no segmento de edificações. Em face disso, o ambiente organizacional onde ele é produzido – a empresa de projeto – tem que proporcionar as condições ideais para seu desenvolvimento. No entanto, as empresas de projeto, sobretudo as de pequeno porte, apresentam algumas características particulares que limitam seu desempenho, tais como: recursos financeiros, humanos e tecnológicos escassos, alta dependência do grau de empreendedorismo e liderança de seus titulares, seus proprietários atuam tanto na gestão técnica como administrativa e, em geral, desconhecem as principais técnicas de gestão disponíveis. Diante desse quadro, o principal objetivo desta tese é propor um modelo de gestão especificamente desenvolvido para pequenas empresas de projeto de edifícios verdadeiramente adaptado às suas necessidades e particularidades. O referencial teórico aqui apresentado foi desenvolvido com o objetivo de oferecer o embasamento necessário ao desenvolvimento dos trabalhos de pesquisa, possibilitando que se conhecesse e compreendesse, principalmente, o universo das pequenas empresas, as ferramentas de gestão disponíveis e as principais características do processo de projeto na construção de edifícios...

O processo de desenvolvimento do produto (PDP) tem assumido uma importância crescente na indústria devido ao aumento da complexidade de produtos e processos de produção, bem como às pressões para o atendimento dos requisitos do cliente em prazos cada vez menores. A Engenharia Simultânea (ES) é uma abordagem que surgiu em resposta a estas mudanças. Foi inicialmente desenvolvida na indústria na manufatura, a partir da organização simultânea de diferentes funções envolvidas no desenvolvimento de novos produtos. A aplicação da engenharia simultânea na construção civil tem sido estudada por acadêmicos, principalmente em empreendimentos que possuem grande incerteza e elevado grau de interdependência entre as atividades. Neste contexto, a falta de integração entre projeto e produção e a ineficácia do planejamento e controle do processo de projeto têm sido apontadas como importantes lacunas de conhecimento. Apesar dos resultados promissores de alguns estudos que buscaram adaptar ferramentas de planejamento e controle da produção, existe a necessidade de investigar a implementação de algumas práticas essenciais que viabilizem a sobreposição entre projeto e produção, tais como a redução do tamanho dos lotes de informação e o seqüenciamento de atividades de projeto. O objetivo do presente trabalho consiste em propor diretrizes para a segmentação e seqüenciamento das atividades no processo de projeto em ambientes simultâneos na construção civil...

A complexidade dos empreendimentos da construção civil tem sido abordada por diversos autores. Ao contrário da visão tradicional de que estes empreendimentos têm características predominantemente lineares, previsíveis e que seus processos podem ser gerenciados de forma independente, a noção de complexidade traz uma nova luz à gestão da construção. Assim, os empreendimentos da construção devem ser entendidos como compostos por um grande número de processos, inter-relacionados, nos quais melhorias isoladas não resultam normalmente em melhorias substanciais do todo. Neste contexto, o projeto do sistema de produção (PSP), é um processo gerencial que pode contribuir para melhorar o desempenho de empreendimentos de construção, devendo anteceder a etapa de produção. Entretanto, na indústria da construção, esta atividade é pouco difundida, sendo em geral desconsiderada nos empreendimentos. O objetivo geral desta dissertação é propor um modelo de projeto do sistema de produção (PSP) levando em consideração as características complexas dos empreendimentos. O método de pesquisa foi dividido em três etapas. Inicialmente foi realizado o estudo exploratório, cujo objetivo foi obter um melhor entendimento dos empreendimentos estudados. A segunda etapa envolveu quatro estudos empíricos...

A model of an Agent based Production Planning and Control (PPC) system able to be dynamically adaptable to local and distributed utilization of production resources and materials is presented. The PPC system is based on the selection of resources to deal with one order of different quantities of one product each time. In this way it is build one scheduling solution for that particular order. The production resources are selected and scheduled using a multiagent system supported by an implementation of the Smith Contract Net, using Java Spaces technology. The multiagent system is based on three main agents: Client, Resource and Manager. These agents negotiate the final product, and the correspondent components, requested by the client. An order for each product (component) triggers a process of dynamic design of a production system to fulfill that particular order. This system exists till the end of the order.

Prova tipográfica (In Press); A model of an Agent-based Production Planning and Control (PPC) system that can be dynamically adaptable to local and distributed utilization of production resources and materials is presented. The PPC system is based on the selection of resources to deal with one order of different quantities of one product each time. In this way, one scheduling solution is provided for that particular order. The production resources are selected and scheduled using a multi-agent system supported by an implementation of the Smith Contract Net, using Java Spaces technology. The multi-agent system is based on three main agents: Client, Resource, and Manager. These agents negotiate the final product, and the correspondent components, requested by the client. An order for each product (component) triggers a process of dynamic design of a production system to fulfil that particular order. This system exists until the end of the order.

Management accounting and control systems (MACS) may be defined as part of the global information system, through which it is collected, processed, analyzed and communicated information (financial and nonfinancial, internal and external) used for planning, monitoring and control of different organizational activities, to optimize the use of resources, to support the process of decision making and to the performance evaluation process. In this way, the concept of MACS in use in this article expands the notion of management accounting systems to embrace the entire array of control mechanisms used by organizations (See Machintosh & Quattrone, 2010).The design of MACS as elements of organizational structure that favor the development of intellectual capital has been highlighted in the literature (Cf. e. g. Prieto, 1999; Tayles, Bramley, Adshead, & Farr, 2002; Roberts, 2003; Widener, 2004; Wingren, 2004; Bjurström & Roberts, 2007; Cleary, Kennedy, O’Donnell, O’Reagan, & Bontis, 2007; Tayles, Pike, & Sofian, 2007; Cleary, 2009; Massaro, Bardy, & Pitts, 2012; Massaro, Bardy, & Zanin, 2013), mainly as a means of communication, dissemination and interpretation favoring the interaction mechanisms essential to the creation, transmission and integration of organizational knowledge. In this article...

Malaria and other arthropod born diseases remain a serious public health problem affecting the lives and health of certain social groups when the two basic strategies to control fail due to : (1) the lack of effective chemoprophylaxis/chemotherapy or the rapid development of drug resistance of the infectious agents and (2) the ineffectiveness of pesticides or the arthropod vectors develop resistance to them. These situations enhances the need for the design and implementation of other alternatives for sustainable health programmes. The application of the epidemiological methods is essential not only for analyzing the relevant data for the understanding of the biological characteristics of the infectious agents, their reservoirs and vectors and the methods for their control, but also for the assessment of the human behaviour, the environmental, social and economic factors involved in disease transmission and the capacity of the health systems to implement interventions for both changes in human behaviour and environmental management to purpose guaranteed prevention and control of malaria and other arthropod born diseases with efficiency, efficacy and equity. This paper discuss the evolution of the malaria arthropod diseases programmes in the American Region and the perspectives for their integration into health promotion programs and emphasis is made in the need to establish solid basis in the decision-making process for the selection of intervention strategies to remove the risk factors determining the probability to get sick or die from ABDs. The implications of the general planning and the polices to be adopted in an area should be analyzed in the light of programme feasibility at the local level...

(cont.) of environmental disturbances and measurement noise.The product of this thesis is a robust planning system that is tolerant of the types of uncertainty experienced by real aircraft. This robustness has been demonstrated by more than 20 successful flights on a fully automated UAV testbed.; This thesis presents the development and testing of a unique testbed consisting of a fleet of eight unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that was designed as a platform for evaluating coordination and control algorithms. A hierarchical configuration of task assignment, trajectory design, and low-level, waypoint following, are used in a receding horizon framework to control the UAV system. Future UAV teams will have to autonomously demonstrate cooperative behaviors in dynamic and uncertain environments, and this testbed can be used to compare various control approaches to accomplish these coordinated missions. Flight demonstrations are made utilizing real-time mixed-integer linear programming techniques, exercising the algorithms in realistic environments with real-world disturbances. Large disturbance sources, computational delay and measurementnoise all represent significant error sources that reduce the ability of UAV teams to interact in a coordinated fashion by increasing uncertainty on higher planning levels. This thesis develops a method that explicitly accounts for this uncertainty by including feedback loops on the task assignment and trajectory design algorithms to prescribe added robustness for the uncertainty at each stage. This approach takes into account low level controller saturation limits that might cause infeasibilities in the plans created at the higher levels of the planning system. Detailed and realistic simulation environments are useful for large-scale multi-vehicle simulations...

(cont.) to the design of a heuristic decomposed algorithm for solving the ROP problem. This decomposition methodology offers an original paradigm potentially applicable to the design of solution algorithms for a class of problems with functions and parameters that, similar to those of the ROP problem, can be parsed in subsets. The potential merit in decomposing the ROP problem in two stages and the resulting utility of the two-stage solution algorithm are evaluated by performing benefits analysis across specific dimensions related to airport efficiency, as well as stability and robustness analysis of the algorithm output.; Significant delays and resulting environmental impacts are commonly observed during departure operations at major US and European airports. One approach for mitigating airport congestion and delays is to exercise tactical operations planning and control with an objective to improve the efficiency of surface and terminal area operations. As a subtask of planning airport surface operations, this thesis presents a thorough study of the structure and properties of the Runway Operations Planning (ROP) problem. Runway Operations Planning is a workload-intensive task for controllers because airport operations involve many parameters...

Significant delays and resulting environmental impacts are commonly observed during departure operations at major US and European airports. One approach for mitigating airport congestion and delays is to exercise tactical operations planning and control with an objective to improve the efficiency of surface and terminal area operations. As a subtask of planning airport surface operations, this thesis presents a thorough study of the structure and properties of the Runway Operations Planning (ROP) problem. Runway Operations Planning is a workload-intensive task for controllers because airport operations involve many parameters, such as departure demand level and timing that are typically characterized by a highly dynamic behavior. This research work provides insight to the nature of this task, by analyzing the different parameters involved in it and illuminating how they interact with each other and how they affect the main functions in the problem of planning operations at the runway, such as departure runway throughput and runway queuing delays. Analysis of the Runway Operations Planning problem revealed that there is a parameter of the problem, namely the demand “weight class mix”, which: a) is more “dominant” on the problem performance functions that other parameters...

Construction projects are uncertain and complex in nature. One of the major driving forces that may account for these characteristics is iterative cycles caused by errors and changes. Errors and changes worsen project performance and consequently, cause schedule and cost overruns to be prevalent. In particular, these iterative cycles are more detrimental when large-scale concurrent design and construction is applied. In an effort to address these issues, this research proposes Dynamic Planning and control Methodology (DPM) as a robust design and construction planning methodology for large-scale concurrent design and construction. The proposed DPM is composed of: 1) an error and change management framework that enables understanding of the construction processes associated with errors and changes and how they affect construction performance; 2) a proactive buffering strategy for reducing sensitivity to iterative error and changes cycles; 3) a System Dynamics-based construction project model which provides policy guidelines for the planning and control of projects; and; (cont.) 4) a web-based error and change management system, which supports coordination of errors and changes among contractors and design professionals without hardware and software compatibility issues. Applying all research components into a couple of real world case projects...

This guide offers a comprehensive understanding of the design and implementation of an Open Cities mapping project for both practitioners in the field and those interested in a higher-level understanding of the process. The guideapos;s content is based on experience in implementing the initial Open Cities projects in Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka as well as on previous mapping project experience. Where relevant, it provides relevant examples from those projects in the text and full case studies at the end of guide. The Open Cities Project launched its efforts in three cities: Batticaloa, Sri Lanka; Dhaka, Bangladesh; and Kathmandu, Nepal. These cities were chosen for: 1) their high levels of disaster risk; 2) the presence of World Bank-lending activities related to urban planning and disaster management that would benefit from access to better data; and 3) the willingness of government counterparts to participate in and help guide the interventions. Chapter 2, quot;Project Design and Preparation,quot; covers how a project design process begins: by identifying partners...

Objectives This study investigates the joint role of coping planning and action control as volitional predictors of changes in the daily consumption of fruit and vegetables. Design In a longitudinal online survey, 203 participants completed assessments at baseline (Time 1), 1 week (Time 2), and 2 weeks later (Time 3). Methods Structural equation modelling was used to test a series of three nested models. In Model 1, only intention predicted behaviour; in Model 2, both coping planning and action control were tested as mediators between intention and behaviour; and Model 3 specified coping planning and action control as sequential mediators between intention and behaviour. Results Model 3 provided the best fit to the data. The mediating role of coping planning and action control between intention and fruit and vegetable intake was confirmed, whereby multiple mediation occurred in a sequential manner, with coping planning preceding action control. Conclusions For motivated individuals who are not yet following the recommendations for fruit and vegetable consumption, coping planning and action control reflect a psychological mechanism that operates in changes in fruit and vegetable consumption.

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.; The Department of Defense has a continuing need for satellite communications to satisfy the demand for information exchange for strategic, operations, and tactical warfighters. There is currently a transition planning effort to develop a satellite communications architecture for the 2007-2010 time frame. During this time all three current communication satellite systems; UFO, DSCS, and MILSTAR, are expected to degrade rapidly. As part of the transition planning effort, the U.S. Navy was tasked to form a Mobile Users Study to establish a framework for completing the detailed requirements and engineering work needed to develop the UHF/Mobile User transition plan. Then, as part of the Navy effort, the Naval Postgraduate School's Astronautical Engineering class SE-61 under Professor Brij Agrawal's guidance designed a proposed medium Earth orbit communications satellite. This thesis is a design of the Attitude Dynamics and Control Subsystem for the subject medium Earth MUS communications satellite. The thesis describes and explores the five major steps in designing an Attitude Dynamics and Control Subsystem and focuses on key ADCS related areas that are peculilar to a MEO satellite as compared to a GEO satellite.; http://archive.org/details/designofattitude00busc; Lieutenant...

Given a set of celestial bodies, the problem of finding an optimal sequence of swing-bys, deep space manoeuvres (DSM) and transfer arcs connecting the elements of the set is combinatorial in nature. The number of possible paths grows exponentially with the number of celestial bodies. Therefore, the design of an optimal multiple gravity assist (MGA) trajectory is a NP-hard mixed combinatorial-continuous problem. Its automated solution would greatly improve the design of future space missions, allowing the assessment of a large number of alternative mission options in a short time. This work proposes to formulate the complete automated design of a multiple gravity assist trajectory as an autonomous planning and scheduling problem. The resulting scheduled plan will provide the optimal planetary sequence and a good estimation of the set of associated optimal trajectories. The trajectory model consists of a sequence of celestial bodies connected by twodimensional transfer arcs containing one DSM. For each transfer arc, the position of the planet and the spacecraft, at the time of arrival, are matched by varying the pericentre of the preceding swing-by, or the magnitude of the launch excess velocity, for the first arc. For each departure date...

Motion planning and control are key problems in a collection of robotic applications including the design of autonomous agile vehicles and of minimalist manipulators. These problems can be accurately formalized within the language of affine connections and of geometric control theory. In this paper we overview recent results on kinematic controllability and on oscillatory controls. Furthermore, we discuss theoretical and practical open problems as well as we suggest control theoretical approaches to them.; Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, to appear as a book chapter in the Advanced Robotics Series, Springer-Verlag

In recent years the interest on sustainable systems has increased significantly. Among the many interested problems, creating and restoring sustainable ecosystems is a challenging and complex problem. One of the fundamental problems within this area is the imbalance between species that have a predator-prey relationship. Solutions involving management have become an integral player in many environments. Management systems typically use ad hoc methods to develop harvesting policies to control the populations of species to desired numbers. In order to amalgamate intelligence and structure, ecological systems require a diverse research effort from three primary fields: ecology, economics, and control theory. In this thesis, all three primary fields aforementioned are researched to develop a theoretical framework that includes an optimal trajectory planning system that exploits an ecosystem to maximize profits for the supporting community, and a robust control system design to track the optimal trajectories subjected to exogenous disturbances. Population ecology is used to select a model that identifies the key characteristics a management system needs to understand the behavior of the natural environment. A bioeconomic model is developed to relate the species populations to revenue. The nonlinear ecosystem is transformed into a linear parameter-varying (LPV) system that is then controlled using hinf synthesis and the gain scheduling methodology. The consequences of the results in this thesis are that optimal trajectories of an ecosystem can be obtained by constructing and solving a nonlinear programming problem (NLP)...