bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Goal programming applied to police patrol allocation
Authors: Saladin Brooke A. 
Published: October 2002

AbstractThis paper describes the development of a decision‐making methodology to aid the police patrol planner in resolving the patrol allocation problem. The methodology developed provides information to assist in two major decision areas: staff sizing and vehicle requirement schedules. This research uses a queuing based simulation model to derive expected service levels for a number of different performance measures. Given these results, tradeoff curves are mapped between specified performance measures and utilization rates of patrol vehicles. With this information the patrol planner specifies limiting levels for both performance measures and other managerial constraints which, in turn, are inputted into a goal programming algorithm to determine appropriate staff sizes and vehicle requirements. The primary output provided the patrol planner is the required amount of patrol vehicle hours to allocate to each watch per day per precinct in order to satisfy a designated set of performance measure levels and managerial constraints. The methodology presented in this research was developed in conjunction with the Columbus, Ohio, Police Department with data being provided by the Research and Planning Division.
An empirical investigation of different strategies for material requirements planning
Authors: Bahl Harish C. , Ritzman Larry P. 
Published: October 2002

AbstractMaster production scheduling, component lot sizing, and capacity requirements planning represent three important modules of material requirements planning (MRP) systems. Coordinating these three modules has been largely dependent on managerial judgment and experience. In this research, five different strategies for integrating these modules are empirically investigated. These strategies differ mainly in the extent to which the modules are coordinated. The impact of the shop, product, component and cost characteristics is measured by varying ten experimental factors. The research findings so obtained provide several guidelines on the effectiveness of each strategy in different environmental settings.
The use of workload information to control job lateness in controlled and uncontrolled release production systems
Authors: Bertrand J.W.M. 
Published: October 2002

AbstractThe performance of a workload dependent scheduling and due date assignment rule is investigated. The rule uses time‐phased workload information and time‐phased capacity information. Performance comparisons are made with a rule that uses only time‐aggregated workload information. The performance for two methods of releasing jobs to the shop is investigated: an uncontrolled method where the jobs are released at random, and a controlled method where jobs are released to maintain a specific workload norm. Computer simulation is used as the research tool. The mean and standard deviation of lateness are used as performance measures.The results indicate that the use of time‐phased workload information may decrease the variance of the lateness, as compared with the use of time‐aggregated workload information only. However, the magnitude of the effect depends on the type of sequencing rule used. Furthermore, if time‐phased information is used, control of the mean lateness requires that the amount of capacity available for loading used in the loading procedure differs from the amount of capacity actually available for production. It is shown that by selecting adequate parameter values, both a constant mean lateness and a small variance of lateness can be obtained with this type of assignment rule.These results are valid for both types of release situations. So even in the case where the workload of the shop is under strict control, and the mean operation flow time does not, therefore, vary, the use of time‐phased workload information can decrease the variance of the lateness.
Manual versus automated check encoding in commercial banks
Authors: Davis Samuel G. , Reutzel Edward T. 
Published: October 2002

AbstractDespite moves toward electronic funds transfer systems, the financial community must continue to cope with the labor‐intensive paper processing requirements associated with a payments mechanism still heavily reliant upon checks. An attempt to eliminate the labor intensity is the recent development of optical scanning capture equipment which “reads” printed or handwritten documents. Mathematical programming models are used to compare the manual and the automated processing systems on a cost basis and to identify the kind of environment suitable for automation.
The subassemblies problem: Make to stock or combine?
Authors: Smith Spencer B. 
Published: October 2002

AbstractIn intermittent manufacturing of complex, assembled products, subassemblies are commonly produced on separate production orders, stored, and withdrawn as needed to make higher level assemblies. An alternate procedure is to make subassemblies as a set of operations on the production orders for their parent assemblies. If the latter method is employed, we say the subassemblies are combined.Whether subassemblies are made to stock or combined affects the number of production orders issued, the amount of stockkeeping and materials handling, the number of setups, and the size of the inventory investment. As a result, the impact on manufacturing costs can be substantial.In earlier work, the author developed and applied cost minimization methods for making these decisions in a preMRP, order point‐order quantity environment. In this paper these methods are extended so that they are applicable to computer‐based MRP systems.The proposed decision‐making strategy is to select a product line and establish the set of subassemblies within the line which could be either made to stock or combined. A typical master production schedule is selected and requirements are determined for the level 1 assemblies. Each level 1 assembly is analyzed to determine the cost associated with combining it or not combining it with each of its parents. The minimum cost alternative is selected and the process is repeated for the level 2 assemblies and so forth until all levels have been analyzed.A number of numerical examples are presented including cases where subassemblies are common to multiple parents, multiple units of a subassembly are used in one parent, and subassemblies have repair demand. Also a method is developed and illustrated for making decisions where learning affects the cost of assembly operations and must be taken into account.Analysis of product structure to determine whether subassemblies should be made to stock or combined offers the possibility of substantial cost savings. This paper presents a simple, straight forward method for making the analysis in an MRP environment.
On the natural cycle time of assembly lines
Authors: Shtub Avraham 
Published: October 2002

AbstractHeavy products such as airplanes are assembled in an assembly line fashion. These assembly lines are designed to complete a unit every few hours and up to a few days. The size of the product and the limited space available for work stations motivate the operation of such lines in two or three shifts.The objective of this research is to analyze the effects of multiple shifts on production scheduling of assembly lines in heavy industry. Two effects are: 1. On learning and improvement of performance as a function of experience and 2. On the production control system.The use of shifts causes a synchronization problem when the cycle time and the length of each shift do not have some special attributes; this problem can be solved by using parallel assembly line operating at their “natural cycle time.” A procedure for calculating the natural cycle time is suggested.The effect of parallel assembly lines on the expected labor cost of the line was checked by designing a set of randomly generated problems. The simulation study suggests that the parallel line configuration does not change significantly the total number of workers in the production system when facility layout cost is kept constant.The major conclusion of this study is that management should consider parallel line configuration whenever a synchronization problem exists and causes difficulties in production control as well as reduction in the learning effect.
Selecting master slab width(s) for continuous steel casting
Authors: Vonderembse Mark A. 
Published: October 2002

AbstractThis research investigates a production planning problem faced by one of the largest companies in the steel industry. The company constructed a continuous caster capable of producing slabs of steel from 92 to 104 inches wide. The planning decision is to select the most economical master slab width(s) from this range. Embedded in this production planning problem is a short‐term scheduling problem. Because master slabs are wider than customer requirements and wider than the equipment which processes them, they must be ripped longitudinally. Before selecting the master slab widths, a procedure must be developed to combine various customer order widths to obtain minimum losses when the master slabs are ripped. The author presents a mathematical programming formulation developed to solve this short‐term scheduling problem, and then demonstrates its use in solving the production planning problem of selecting the master slab width(s). While the actual results may not be directly applicable to different sets of circumstances, the methodology and its use are important, as demonstrated by the fact that the results obtained from the study have been implemented by the company.
Decision support systems (DSS) design for operations managers: an empirical study of the impact of report design and decision style on effective choice
Authors: Davis Donald L. , Davis R. Dean , Shrode William S. 
Published: October 2002

AbstractIn making decisions, production managers usually rely on information contained in reports generated by an information system. Unfortunately, a production manager is likely to receive a report that best supports his/her decision‐making style only by chance. This investigation studies the individual differences in decision‐making style for production managers making production scheduling decisions, and the decision support design that best supports their decisions.Ninety‐six subjects classified by decision‐making style (Myers‐Briggs Classification) acted as production managers in a simulated production environment. Sequential production scheduling decisions were made based on reports generated by a computerized production simulator. The simulator was an interactive program that simulates a production task in a single‐product organization. Based upon the information contained in the reports, managers developed production schedules for the firm's next production run and input their decisions into the simulator, which then generated the reports for that run. The managers' objective was to minimize the firm's total cost.Decision‐making style and the type of report were examined as independent variables in the study. The dependent variables were decision time, decision confidence, and total cost of production. Thus, a manager's performance was measured by decision time, confidence, and the manager's total cost.Each manager was classified by decision‐making style and received as output one of four report designs, i.e., tabular‐raw data, tabular‐summarized data, graphical‐raw data, or graphical‐summarized data.The results of the experiment suggest that for production decision support systems there are report designs better suited to certain decision‐making styles than others for scheduling decisions. However, the results indicate that managers with certain decision‐making styles can make effective scheduling decisions with more than one type of report design. The implications of the results are illustrated by means of example MRP reports.
MRP strategies: Effects on cash flow
Authors: Veral Emre A. 
Published: October 2002

AbstractAs material requirements planning systems do not consider capacity limitations in their inherent logic, considerable effort must be spent to achieve feasible production plans. This simulation study examines the cash flow consequences of nine production planning strategies consisting of three master production scheduling methods and three component/part scheduling methods. Experimentation examines different operational cost ratios. Evaluation criteria used are characterized by total cash flow and periodic variablity of cash flow to support operating expenses for each planning strategy.Simulation results indicate that sophisticated methods for planning do not necessarily cause significant savings. A second finding is that a smoother master production schedule tends to result in more stable cash outflow patterns. In comparison, component scheduling efforts are found to have relatively insignificant consequences when compared to the effects of master production schedules.
Performance evaluation of the LDR and the PSH with forecast errors
Authors: Barman Samir , Tersine Richard J. , Burch E.Earl 
Published: October 2002

AbstractDespite its ability to produce optimal solutions, the Linear Decision Rule (LDR) has not had a significant impact in the business environment. The Production Switching Heuristic (PSH), which has shown promising results when compared with the LDR, has experienced some business application because of its practicability and flexibility. During aggregate production planning, forecast errors are almost unavoidable, but the sensitivity of these models to such errors has not been thoroughly tested. Insufficient attention has been paid to truly understand the cost effects of forecast errors and other important interactions. The study investigates these issues by analyzing the results of 740 simulated problems.Using the famous “paint factory” cost data, the sensitivity of the LDR and the PSH are examined under various experimental conditions. The factors controlled at different levels are: forecast error mean, forecast error standard deviation, demand pattern, demand variability, and cost coefficients. The results show that 1) the PSH is generally less sensitive than the LDR to forecast errors, 2) both forecast error mean and standard deviation effectively measure the severity of forecast errors, and 3) underforecasts cause less cost penalty than overforecasts.The outcome of the study has helpful managerial implications for aggregate planning related decisionmaking. It suggests that the use of the PSH could result in potential cost savings even if significant forecast errors are envisioned as long as the period‐to‐period demand variability is not substantially high. Also, BIAS warrants more attention than MSE in evaluating the extent of forecast errors and their eventual cost impact on aggregate production planning.
Use of the net present value criterion in a random job shop where early shipments are forbidden
Authors: Scudder Gary D. , Smith‐Daniels Dwight E. , Rohleder Thomas 
Published: October 2002

AbstractBoth practitioners and researchers in the field of Operations Management have suggested that shop scheduling should be an integral component in both the strategic and tactical plans for an organization's assets. This paper examines the use of an accepted measure of return on assets, net present value (NPV), in a simulated shop scheduling environment where early shipment of jobs before their due dates is forbidden. In addition, early shipment of raw materials to the shop is also forbidden. This shop environment is consistent with the prevalent practice in industry of accepting orders only on a just‐in‐time basis to reduce purchased parts inventories. The NPV measure provides a means of balancing a variety of performance criteria that have been treated as separate objectives previously, including work‐in‐process inventory, finished goods inventory, mean flow time and mean tardiness, while also providing a means of measuring monetarily the value of various shop scheduling approaches.The NPV performance of priority scheduling rules and order release policies is measured in this research through the simulation of a random job shop under a variety of environmental conditions. It is found in a comparison of priority rules that use time‐based information with those that use job value information that the Critical Ratio rule provides higher average performance than the three other rules used in the study. However, in some situations that are consistent with JIT practice, value‐based priority rules also perform well. The use of a mechanism for delaying the release of jobs to each work center in the shop provided higher average NPV when shop utilization was set at a low level of 80%, while immediate release of work upon its arrival to the shop provided superior performance at a higher shop utilization level of 94%. While JIT materials delivery and costing yields higher NPV, it did not alter the relative ranking of priority rule/release policy combinations. In addition, it was found that environmental factors, including average job length, average number of tasks per job and level of tardiness penalty, resulted in greater variations in NPV performance than the institution of a JIT raw materials delivery policy.
A volume and material handling cost based heuristic for designing cellular manufacturing cells
Authors: Ahmed Mesbah U. , Ahmed Nazim U. , Nandkeolyar Udayan 
Published: October 2002

AbstractOne of the major problems in a group technology or cellular manufacturing environment is the formation of part groups and machine cells. Because of the combinatorial nature of the cell formation problem, it is difficult to solve the problem optimally. Most of the procedures related to cell design in cellular manufacturing operate on the part‐machine incidence matrix in an attempt to identify block diagonality. If complete block diagonality does not exist, the decision about cell configuration is left to the subjective judgement of the designer. These procedures are also generally based on part routing only, and do not consider part volume and material handling costs.In this paper we develop an integer programming model, as well as a heuristic to effectively assign machines to cells. In these procedures we consider component volumes, costs related to movement of components between and within cells, and penalty for not using all machines in a cell visited by a component. Since the integer programming formulation becomes large even for small problems, an efficient heuristic is developed to solve larger problems. The heuristic solutions to 180 randomly generated small problems were compared against the optimal solutions obtained by the integer programming model. The heuristic has been found to identify optimal solutions in all 180 cases.This heuristic is also compared to several well known algorithms on 900 larger test problems. These problems were generated to cover a wide range of environmental situations such as varying levels of block diagonality in the part‐machine incidence matrix, and diversity in the component volumes and material handling costs. In 99% of the problems our heuristic generated solutions which are better or as good as the best solution obtained by other algorithms. Further, in situations where complete block diagonality in the part‐machine incidence matrix did not exist, our heuristic produced even better results. Since the maximum number of iterations required in our heuristic is the number of machines in the problem, the heuristic is computationally efficient.
International factory productivity gains
Authors: Schmenner Roger W. 
Published: October 2002

AbstractThis paper analyzes influences on factory productivity gains by using detailed, consolidated, crosssectional survey data from 561 plants on three continents, and by using times series data from five plants of a single company (a major domestic auto maker). Some grand themes, all intuitively satisfying, surface in the regression results on both sets of data. Technology advance, throughput time reduction, work force involvement, quality, inventory reduction, and simplified organization all foster productivity gains. Furthermore, using data from another company (Square D), labor efficiency is debunked as a proxy for labor productivity; other forces are at play in influencing productivity gains.The breadth of the survey sample (United States/Canada, Europe, Korea) permits tests of two often‐touted hypotheses. It is frequently proposed that location‐related factors (e.g., culture, governmental policies) affect factory productivity. Careful examination of the statistical evidence, however, does not confirm this. Similarly, managers often state that process industry plants are more productive than nonprocess, more fabrication and assembly, plants. This assertion, too, is not confirmed by the statistical evidence. Other things being equal, process industry plants do not show productivity gains any greater than non‐process industry plants.
Alternative quality improvement practices and organization performance
Authors: Adam Everett E. 
Published: October 2002

AbstractQuality improvement is a highly desired objective in the fiercely competitive international business world, yet it remains elusive to many US organizations. This study relates alternative quality improvement approaches to actual operating and financial performance. Productivity improvement approaches are also investigated and related to performance to define better the relationship between quality and productivity. In this study, multiple quality and productivity approaches are correlated to eight quality, three operating, and three financial performance measures for 187 US business firms. Results indicate a strong relationship between a quality improvement approach and performance quality. The relationship between a quality improvement approach and operating or financial performance is weaker, but significant. Productivity improvement approaches also help predict quality, operating, and financial performance — often similarly to quality improvement approaches. This study suggests that the profile of quality and productivity improvement approach should vary, depending upon whether the firm is most interested in performance quality, operating improvement, or financial performance.
Robust planning: a new paradigm for demand chain planning
Authors: Van Landeghem Hendrik , Vanmaele Hendrik 
Published: October 2002

AbstractThis paper proposes a new paradigm for tactical demand chain planning (DCP), called robust planning, based on risk assessment of the supply and demand chain. The concepts of supply chain management (SCM), and its extension demand chain management (DCM), have been at the center of much recent research. One of the reasons for this is that, over the last years, a significant number of information systems have emerged, which claim to support the concept. The paper argues that these systems mostly adopt a myopic view of planning, based on pure deterministic planning methods. It demonstrates that such an approach fails to coop with the considerable uncertainty of the planning information. The proposed robust planning paradigm is then introduced and its impact explained, using the well‐known example of the beer game. It holds the promise of reducing the number of re‐planning cycles, through a better characterization of the expected service level performance over a medium planning horizon. Finally, a case study will show the value of robust planning in a European chemical enterprise.