Proposal for a Dynamic Scheduling Architecture and Method Using an Holonic Approach

Objective To explore the effect of dynamic job scheduling method on the easing emergency department crowding.Methods Totals of 80 nurses in the emergency department at 6 pm-1 am from January to June in 2010 were control group,which adopted traditional scheduling model,and 80 nurses in emergency department at 6 pm-1 am from January to June in 2011 were control group were experimental group,which adopted dynamic job scheduling method.Then,satisfactionof patients,doctors,nurses and the quality of care were observed in two groups and compared.Results Between the experimental group and control group,patients' satisfaction (97.2 vs 90.6),doctors' satisfaction (96.0 vs 82.0),nurse satisfaction (96.3 vs 85.0),quality of care (87.21 ±4.31vs 92.26 ± 3.24),and the difference was statistically significant( x2 =9.862,5.005,5.959,8.636 ; respectively ; P ＜ 0.05 or P＜0.01).Conclusions Dynamic job scheduling method implementing can improve the disposal efficiency of emergency room,infusion room and observing room,reduce labor intensity of nurses,improve patients and accompany people's satisfaction,and effectively easing crowding of emergency room. Key words: Emergency service,hospital; Crowding; Nursing job; Dynamic scheduling

Manufacturing systems are changing its structure and organization, focusing and limiting its core competencies. Proposed organizational and technological paradigms suggest dynamic organization forms like extended enterprise or virtual enterprises where entities outsource complementary products and actively pursuit cooperation with partners. However, a long way must be tracked in different domains and especially in organizational infrastructures and knowledge management. This paper characterizes and describes concepts and requirements related to the most common Distributed Manufacturing Systems approaches, emphasizing its needs about organizational and technological shifts. These ones are further interrelated with three organizational-technological approaches, which leads to the identification and description of needed functional services and particularly the service respecting to inter-domain knowledge operability.KeywordsKnowledge ManagementFractal FactoryVirtual EnterpriseComputer Integrate ManufactureOrganizational InfrastructureThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

In the light of the dynamic capacity-increase problem of the limited buffer in flexible flow shops, this paper proposes a buffer dynamic capacity-increase scheduling method based on the public buffer, establishing a mathematical programming model of flexible flow shops with the limited buffer. According to the time cost of workpiece transferred into and out of the public buffer, we design the scheduling rules to control workpiece's access to and from the public buffer. Through the buffer dynamic capacity-increase scheduling method based on local scheduling rules as the core, the production blockage caused by capacity limitation of limited buffer in flexible flow shops is solved. Through the instance data test, a simulation experiment is designed to compare the scheduling result of the dynamic capacity-increase scheduling method in flexible flow shops with that of scheduling method without applying the proposed method. It is verified that this scheduling method is effective for solving such scheduling problems in actual workshop production.

There is a growing recognition that current manufacturing enterprises must be agile, that is, capable of operating profitably in a competitive environment of continuously changing customer demands. The use of a virtual enterprise (VE) is becoming increasingly prevalent, and that has been made possible, in part, due to the significant advances in communication and information technology in recent years. A manufacturing system is one of the competitive factors that forms an effective VE. Therefore, for manufacturers wishing to obtain a contract in VE, it is crucial to present attractive and competitive offers to other coalition members. There are several criteria to these offers, such as cycle time, fulfilment of due date or quick shipping date, cost, and quality assurance for the ordered products. Manufacturing system simulation could endorse the basic estimates of the criteria for the strategic offer. The distributed simulation model concept provides practical solutions to facilitate such a large-scaled precise simulation model in the VE environment, because it is constructed as the integration of several manufacturing simulation models of each production module in the factory. As a solution to realize this integration, we propose a Distributed Virtual Factory (DVF) concept that consists of distributed precise simulation models connected by several synchronization mechanisms named Time Bucket algorithms. A DVF enables precise evaluations of the whole manufacturing system, especially in terms of the material flows. In this study, we introduce an Activity Based Costing (ABC) method into the DVF architecture to estimate the detailed cost analysis of the products. The methodology facilitates strategic enterprise management to prepare the request for the bids in the VE environment. The effectiveness of the proposed concept in agile manufacturing is discussed with simulation experiments.

Weaknesses in warehousing systemic risk in modern Financial Market Infrastructure (FMI) are the result of a combination of market failures and of structural flaws deeply ingrained in modern financial markets. The same applies to investor control over their investments over the custodial chain. Yet the utility of complex FMI comprising long custodial chains and large global Central Counterparties (CCPs) for the operation of modern markets seems undisputable. A shift in the technology paradigm with the introduction of DLT systems for securities and derivatives FMI, could, however, increase investor control, the efficiency of systemic risk distribution, and create a more diverse and resilient financial ecosystem. This cross-disciplinary paper explores all these claims and identifies a multitude of welfare-enhancing reasons favouring a paradigm shift in FMI technology. It also proposes a comprehensive blockchain-based framework for the development of permission-based platforms for derivatives clearing and settlement and the handling of liquidity shortages within DLT systems. Arguably, the impact of technological change will lead to a reduction of industry rents for the benefit of end investors and end users of finance (entrepreneurs and businesses) enhancing market welfare. It may also signal a shift in market behaviour from short-term/speculative finance towards long-term/committed finance. Therefore, the use of blockchain technology in FMI can prove genuinely transformative for the structure and future direction of the financial services industry as whole.

Metrics for evaluating distributed manufacturing control systems

The primary function of any enterprise is to sell its products and/or skills profitably. This aim, compounded by the economic necessity, is often achieved by collaborating with other enterprises. Therefore, manufacturing systems can no longer be seen in isolation; they must be seen in the context of the total business and the associated key linkages of the business: back through the supplier chain and forward into the distribution and customer chain. In reality these chains often take the forms of enterprise networks. There can be almost infinite variations to the range and scope of collaborations within an enterprise network. This paper discusses some recent developments in the nature of bilateral enterprise collaborations and the resulting emergence of new manufacturing paradigms. It attempts to identify the key types of collaborations (supply chain, extended enterprise and virtual enterprise) and analyses their essential attributes and operational characteristics.

This article addresses the methodological problem of formal representation and mathematical modelling of flexible configurable supply chains (SC) in virtual enterprises (VE). The particular feature of this problem lies in high level of complexity and uncertainty in VE. The classic methods do not allow developing of practicable complex models with the sufficient degree of flexibility and taking into account the goal-oriented (active) behavior of enterprises. We consider the SC planning and control in VE at the conceptual level and introduce an integrated approach for complex modeling and optimisation of SC in VE. This approach is based on combination of classic and multi-agent approaches, adaptive planning and control, and multiple-model complexes. The planning, monitoring and reconfiguration of SC are considered complex based on the unified methodological principles. It allows interconnecting of planning and control models as well as adaptation of models to the current execution environment.

Virtual enterprise (VE), like strategic alliance, outsourcing and supply chain, focus on inter-organizational cooperation. But, how can we identify and differentiate it from them? Goldman and Preiss gave the six strategic reasons for the formation of VE. However, the six strategic reasons are not exclusive for VE, and which is lack of reasoning based on strategic management theory. Our purposes are: 1, reasoning the formation of VE based on resource based theory; 2, identifying VE and differentiating it from strategic alliance, outsourcing.

Virtual Enterprise (VE) is a temporary alliance of enterprises that come together in order to better respond to cope with demand of customers. VE includes many kinds of business models in term of supply chain, such as vertical structure, horizontal structure and so on. In this study, we focus on the negotiation process in VE, and try to apply multi-agent paradigm with marketing science and game theoretic approach as its decision making mechanism in order to analyse the characteristics of several business models. We propose VE simulation models to analyse the forming dynamism of VE amongst several potential members in the negotiation domain, and finally clarify the performance of VE based business models.

The application of any e-Solution promises significant returns. In particular, using internet technologies both within enterprises and across the supply (value) chain provides real opportunity, not only for operational improvement but also for innovative strategic positioning. However, significant questions obscure potential investment; how any value will actually be created and, importantly, how this value will be shared across the value chain is not clear. This paper will describe a programme of research that is developing an enterprise simulator that will provide a more fundamental understanding of the impact of e-Solutions across operational supply chains, in terms of both standard operational and financial measures of performance. An efficient supply chain reduces total costs of operations by sharing accurate real-time information and coordinating inter-organizational business processes. This form of electronic link between organizations is known as business-to-business (B2B) e-Business. The financial measures go beyond simple cost calculations to real bottom-line performance by modelling the financial transactions that business processes generate. The paper will show how this enterprise simulator allows for a complete supply chain to be modelled in this way across four key applications: control system design, virtual enterprises, pan-supply-chain performance metrics and supporting e-Supply-chain design methodology.

Semiconductor manufacturing is considered as one of the most complex manufacturing process. Due to its large-scale, uncertainty, reentrance and mixed processing, it needs true dynamic scheduling method urgently. On the analysis of the self-organizing activities of ant colony system, the pheromone based dynamic scheduling rule is presented. The rule is simulated and the result analysis is given by comparing with other heuristic scheduling methods, which show that this method can optimize multi objectives of the semiconductor fabrication line and has a good perspective.

A semantic web service environment for B2B and B2C auction applications within extended and virtual enterprises

Synchronous Data Flow (SDF) is a well-known model of computation that is widely used in the control engineering and digital signal processing domains. Existing scheduling methods are mainly static approaches that assume full knowledge of the environment, e.g. data arrival times. In a growing number of practical cases like internet multimedia applications there exists only partial knowledge of the environment, e.g. average data rates. Here, only dynamic scheduling can yield optimal results. In this paper, we propose a new dynamic scheduling method that minimizes the maximal response time of the system. It is a generalization of a deadline revision method to allow treatment of data-dependent tasks using EDF scheduling. The applicability and benefit of the new approach is shown using a real-world example.

As environmental problems become more apparent, manufacturers need to balance environmental considerations with economic activities. This is where closed-loop supply chains are gaining attention. However, in addition to demand fluctuations, which are a problem in conventional supply chains, a circular supply chain is unstable in terms of supply, where end-of-life products are collected and reused. This destabilizes not only excess inventory and shortages but also production resources, such as manpower, facilities, and raw materials. This study focuses on the stabilization of the manufacturing system in a closed-loop supply chain. To confirm the dynamic changes in the manufacturing system, we designed a simulation model of a closed-loop manufacturing system and conducted numerical experiments under several scenarios, taking the variation of manufacturing quantity per unit period as an evaluation measure of stability. After showing that unplanned remanufacturing destabilizes the recovery of reusable end-of-life products, we demonstrate that the manufacturing system can be stabilized by appropriately limiting the amount of remanufacturing. However, excessive limits reduce opportunities for remanufacturing end-of-life products and generate adverse economic and environmental impacts. To determine appropriate restrictions, it is necessary to consider the product currently in use by the customer as a virtual inventory and to consider factors such as the quality of the products in the virtual inventory. In the future, we plan to study a system that can dynamically manage remanufacturing quantities based on the status of virtual inventories.