In this thought-provoking book Dr Newman looks beyond the conventional techniques of problem solving to the underlying process. He identifies eight stages and explains how to recognize which technique is appropriate to which stage. On this basis managers can generate solutions at both the personal and the organizational level. He shows: c how to overcome the four main obstacles to developing a balanced problem solving style c how to manage the relationship between problem solving style and stress c how to use physical movement as an aid to problem solving. A unique feature of the book is a Problem Solving Styles Profile that enables each reader to apply the material in the text to improve their own problem solving capability. Written in a lively and practical style and drawing on examples from a wide range of real-life problems, Dr Newman's book is certain of a warm welcome from managers, team leaders and professionals of every kind.

"It has been said that in theory, theory translates into practice, but in practice it never does. This breakthrough book defies this conventional wisdom in a unique way. It is a must read for anyone interested in structuring derivatives products." — Dr Peter Carr, Principal, Banc of America Securities

"Harry Kat has done a masterful job explaining the world of exotic options and the role that these options play in building structured securities. Dr Kat conveys the essence of these products from the perspective of a very experienced financial engineer but in a fashion that the less experienced reader can easily follow and understand. In this, Dr Kat has shown himself to be a marvellous teacher. I'm confident that this book will prove to be one of the classics to be read by future generations of financial engineers." — John F. Marshall, Principal, Marshall, Tucker & Associates, and Founding Executive Director, International Association of Financial Engineers

"This is a refreshingly new and different book about putting together structured equity products. It is not a book about deriving formulas but a book about applying formulas. The emphasis on hedging costs and alternative ways of reducing those costs by modifying the structure will be appreciated both by those who actually manufacture and sell these products and those who buy them." — Don Chance, First Union Professor, Virginia Tech

"This book is about applications, about solving real business problems with derivatives.... Contrary to many other books in the field, the approach is managerial rather than abstractly mathematical, aimed at practitioners instead of applied mathematicians. Professor Kat's book contains all the mathematics required. However, the mathematical aspects play a purely supportive role, not the starring role. Bravo!"
— Anthony F. Herbst, University of Texas at El Paso, Founding Editor, The Journal of Financial Engineering

"It is certainly a unique book, much more useful that most new books on derivatives. In a nutshell, this book is very creatively done and a great resource for professionals."
— Mark Rubinstein, Paul Stephens Professor of Applied Investment Analysis, University of California at Berkeley

This book describes an effective decision-making and planning architecture for enhancing the navigation capabilities of automated vehicles in the presence of non-detailed, open-source maps. The system involves dynamically obtaining road corridors from map information and utilizing a camera-based lane detection system to update and enhance the navigable space in order to address the issues of intrinsic uncertainty and low-fidelity. An efficient and human-like local planner then determines, within a probabilistic framework, a safe motion trajectory, ensuring the continuity of the path curvature and limiting longitudinal and lateral accelerations. LiDAR-based perception is then used to identify the driving scenario, and subsequently re-plan the trajectory, leading in some cases to adjustment of the high-level route to reach the given destination. The method has been validated through extensive theoretical and experimental analyses, which are reported here in detail.

Risk Analysis: A Quantitative Guide is a comprehensive guide for eh risk analyst and decision maker. based on the author's extensive experience in solving real-world risk problems, this book is an invaluable aid to the risk analysis practitioner. by providing the building blocks of risk-based thinking the author guides the reader through the steps necessary to produce a realistic risk-based thinking the author guides the reader through the steps necessary to produce a realistic risk analysis and offers general and specific techniques to cope with most common and challenging risk modelling problems. A wide range of solved examples is used to illustrate these technique and how they can be put together to make the best possible risk-based decisions.

The third edition of this highly regarded text has been thoroughly updated and expanded considerably with five new chapters for the risk manager, including how to plan and assess the quality of risk analysis, as well as new chapters for this risk analysis, as well as new chapters for the risk analysis modeller on summation of random variables, causality, optimization, insurance and finance modelling, forecasting, model validation and common errors, capital investment and microbial risk assessment. This new edition provides a greater focus on business and includes applications in a wide range of different settings.

Key Features: Breaks down techniques into types of modelling issues (like distribution fitting, correlation and time series forecasting) and then applies them with easy-to-follow examples. Explains powerful and proven Monte Carlo simulation and numerical techniques for dealing with uncertainty. Includes recent innovations inmodelling like fast Fourier transforms and copulas. Over 150 examples models and over 400 illustrations. Written in an informal manner with a practical rather than academic focus. Discusses the planning, uses and abuses of risk analysis. Includes a compendium of almost eighty distribution types and their uses.

< p=""> The book covers the domain of multi-criteria decision making, a topic which has gained significant attention of researchers and practitioners spanning a variety of disciplines for enhancing their decision making in real life situation. The topics in this volume help readers understand the techniques in the model building and analysis stage. The chapters cover a variety of techniques and their applications for interesting problems. This book will be of interest to readers in diverse disciplines such as engineering, business, management, humanities, psychology and law. ^

Artificial Intelligence is a seemingly neutral technology, but it is increasingly used to manage workforces and make decisions to hire and fire employees. Its proliferation in the workplace gives the impression of a fairer, more efficient system of management. A machine can't discriminate, after all. Augmented Exploitation explores the reality of the impact of AI on workers' lives. While the consensus is that AI is a completely new way of managing a workplace, the authors show that, on the contrary, AI is used as most technologies are used under capitalism: as a smokescreen that hides the deep exploitation of workers. Going beyond platform work and the gig economy, the authors explore emerging forms of algorithmic governance and AI-augmented apps that have been developed to utilise innovative ways to collect data about workers and consumers, as well as to keep wages and worker representation under control. They also show that workers are not taking this lying down, providing case studies of new and exciting form of resistance that are springing up across the globe.

This book presents the state-of-the-art in social simulation as presented at the Social Simulation Conference 2018 in Stockholm, Sweden. It covers the developments in applications and methods of social simulation, addressing societal issues such as socio-ecological systems and policy making. Methodological issues discussed include large-scale empirical calibration, model sharing and interdisciplinary research, as well as decision making models, validation and the use of qualitative data in simulation modeling. Research areas covered include archaeology, cognitive science, economics, organization science, and social simulation education. This collection gives readers insight into the increasing use of social simulation in both its theoretical development and in practical applications such as policy making whereby modelling and the behavior of complex systems is key. The book will appeal to students, researchers and professionals in the various fields.

Executives in today's business environment have never been busier. Time constraints are ever present. Resources are strained. Strategic planning constantly competes with the tactical demands of running an organization. To make matters worse, most organizational leaders, when confronted with the need for strategic planning, have no idea about how to go about it. They have plenty of knowledge and information about the organization and their situation, but no effective tools to analyze their thoughts, to make decisions that will lead to effective strategies, and most importantly, to create a plan of action. In Performance Based Strategy, Steve Fairbanks and Aaron Buchko offer a practical set of simple, productive tools that will enable leaders to develop effective strategies. The book offers tools that have been tested in small, medium, and Fortune 100 companies, with for profit and not-for-profit organizations, and across a breadth of industries, such as manufacturing, health care, banking, distribution, transportation, government, and charities, among others. The authors have used these tools as insiders to turn around companies, and as outsiders in advisory and board roles. When properly applied, the strategies offered here enable leaders to see their situations and organizations in new ways. Managers will be able to present information in a way that everyone in the organization will understand. Executives can provide a sense of direction that will provide a framework for decision making that will give guidance to people. Above all, applying these tools will enable managers to improve their firm's performance.

This book considers the problem of determining how many barrels of crude oil an oil-producing and exporting country should produce annually for export along with several other important problems that decision-makers in the crude oil industry face and discusses procedures for finding optimum solutions for them. It considers the important Objective Functions they need in making these critical decisions, and discusses procedures to find the best solutions. Outputs from the treatment units, in an oil refinery are only semi-finished products; these are blended into finished products like gasoline, diesel oil, etc., meeting various specifications that the marketplace demands. The book discusses models for solving these problems optimally with examples.

The book presents the proceedings of the 4th EAI International Conference on Management of Manufacturing Systems (MMS 2019), which took place in Krynica Zdroj, Poland, on October 8-10, 2019. The conference covered Management of Manufacturing Systems with support for Industry 4.0, Logistics and Intelligent Manufacturing Systems and Applications, Cooperation management and its effective applications. Topics include RFID Applications, Economic Impacts in Logistics, ICT Support for Industry 4.0, Industrial and Smart Logistics, Intelligent Manufacturing Systems and Applications, and much more.

This book presents a diverse range of recent operational research techniques that have been applied to agriculture and tourism management. It covers both the primary sector of agriculture and agricultural economics, and the tertiary sector of the tourism industry. Findings and lessons learned from these innovations can be readily applied to various other contexts. The book chiefly focuses on cooperative management issues, and on developing solutions to provide decision support in multi-criteria scenarios.

This book reports on an operational management approach to improving bike-sharing systems by compensating for fluctuating demand patterns. The aim is to redistribute bikes within the system, allowing it to be "actively" balanced. The book describes a mathematical model, as well as data-driven and simulation-based approaches. Further, it shows how these elements can be combined in a decision-making support system for service providers. In closing, the book uses real-world data to evaluate the method developed and demonstrates that it can successfully anticipate changes in demand, thus supporting efficient scheduling of transport vehicles to manually relocate bikes between stations.

This is the first book to provide a comprehensive and systematic introduction to the ranking methods for interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets, multi-criteria decision-making methods with interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets, and group decision-making methods with interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy preference relations. Including numerous application examples and illustrations with tables and figures and presenting the authors' latest research developments, it is a valuable resource for researchers and professionals in the fields of fuzzy mathematics, operations research, information science, management science and decision analysis.

This book is dedicated to the systematization and development of models, methods, and algorithms for queuing systems with correlated arrivals. After first setting up the basic tools needed for the study of queuing theory, the authors concentrate on complicated systems: multi-server systems with phase type distribution of service time or single-server queues with arbitrary distribution of service time or semi-Markovian service. They pay special attention to practically important retrial queues, tandem queues, and queues with unreliable servers. Mathematical models of networks and queuing systems are widely used for the study and optimization of various technical, physical, economic, industrial, and administrative systems, and this book will be valuable for researchers, graduate students, and practitioners in these domains.

This book offers an essential review of central theories, current research and applications in the field of numerical representations of ordered structures. It is intended as a tribute to Professor Ghanshyam B. Mehta, one of the leading specialists on the numerical representability of ordered structures, and covers related applications to utility theory, mathematical economics, social choice theory and decision-making. Taken together, the carefully selected contributions provide readers with an authoritative review of this research field, as well as the knowledge they need to apply the theories and methods in their own work.

Combinatorial optimization is a multidisciplinary scientific area, lying in the interface of three major scientific domains: mathematics, theoretical computer science and management. The three volumes of the Combinatorial Optimization series aim to cover a wide range of topics in this area. These topics also deal with fundamental notions and approaches as with several classical applications of combinatorial optimization. Concepts of Combinatorial Optimization, is divided into three parts: - On the complexity of combinatorial optimization problems, presenting basics about worst-case and randomized complexity; - Classical solution methods, presenting the two most-known methods for solving hard combinatorial optimization problems, that are Branch-and-Bound and Dynamic Programming; - Elements from mathematical programming, presenting fundamentals from mathematical programming based methods that are in the heart of Operations Research since the origins of this field.

Investment in any new project invariably carries risk but the construction industry is subject to more risk and uncertainty than perhaps any other industry. This guide for construction managers, project managers and quantity surveyors as well as for students shows how the risk management process improves decision-making. Managing Risk in Construction Projects offers practical guidance on identifying, assessing and managing risk and provides a sound basis for effective decision-making in conditions of uncertainty. The book focuses on theoretical aspects of risk management but also clarifies procedures for undertaking and utilising decisions. This blend of theory and practice is the real message of the book and, with a strong authorship team of practitioners and leading academics, the book provides an authoritative guide for practitioners having to manage real projects. It discusses a number of general concepts, including projects, project phases, and risk attitude before introducing various risk management techniques. This third edition has been extended to recognize the reality of multi-project or programme management and the risks in this context; to highlight the particular problems of risk in international joint ventures; and to provide more coverage of PFI and PPP. With case studies and examples of good practice, the book offers the distilled knowledge of over 100 man-years of experience in working on all aspects of project risk, giving sound practical guidance on identifying, assessing and managing risk.

This book is intended as a text covering the central concepts and techniques of Competitive Markov Decision Processes. It is an attempt to present a rig orous treatment that combines two significant research topics: Stochastic Games and Markov Decision Processes, which have been studied exten sively, and at times quite independently, by mathematicians, operations researchers, engineers, and economists. Since Markov decision processes can be viewed as a special noncompeti tive case of stochastic games, we introduce the new terminology Competi tive Markov Decision Processes that emphasizes the importance of the link between these two topics and of the properties of the underlying Markov processes. The book is designed to be used either in a classroom or for self-study by a mathematically mature reader. In the Introduction (Chapter 1) we outline a number of advanced undergraduate and graduate courses for which this book could usefully serve as a text. A characteristic feature of competitive Markov decision processes - and one that inspired our long-standing interest - is that they can serve as an "orchestra" containing the "instruments" of much of modern applied (and at times even pure) mathematics. They constitute a topic where the instruments of linear algebra, applied probability, mathematical program ming, analysis, and even algebraic geometry can be "played" sometimes solo and sometimes in harmony to produce either beautifully simple or equally beautiful, but baroque, melodies, that is, theorems."

To understand public policy decisions, it is imperative to understand the capacities of the individual actors who are making them, how they think and feel about their role, and what drives and motivates them. However, the current literature takes little account of this, preferring instead to frame the decisions as the outcomes of a rational search for value-maximising alternatives; or the result of systematic and well-ordered institutional and organisational processes.

Yet understanding how personal and emotional factors interact with broader institutional and organisational influences to shape the deliberations and behaviour of politicians and bureaucrats is paramount if we are to construct a more useful, nuanced and dynamic picture of government decision making. This book draws on a variety of approaches to examine individuals working in contemporary government, from freshly-trained policy officers to former cabinet ministers and prime ministers. It provides important new insights into how those in government navigate their way through complex issues and decisions based on developed expertise that fuses formal, rational techniques with other learned behaviours, memories, emotions and practiced forms of judgment at an individual level.

This innovative collection from leading academics across Australia, Europe, the United Kingdom, and North America will be of great interest to researchers, educators, advanced students and practitioners working in the fields of political science, public management and administration and public policy.

This book explores the methodological frontiers of managerial and organizational cognition (MOC), an exciting and diverse interdisciplinary body of work that began with the publication in 1958 of James G. March and Herbert A. Simon's classic work Organizations. Entering its fourth decade, the field gained significant momentum following the appearance of Anne S. Huff's (1990) book Mapping Strategic Thought, which explored the (then) methodological frontiers of MOC. The world has changed since then and so, too, have the methods available to MOC researchers; it is timely, therefore, to examine the extent to which the methods that were foundational to the development of MOC are still fit for purpose. Taking stock of MOC's many methodological accomplishments, the thought-provoking chapters comprising this second volume of the New Horizons in Managerial and Organizational Cognition book series set the agenda for the next phase of the field's development.

This book is comprised of international author perspectives from the 2016 Australian Association for Professional and Applied Ethics (AAPAE) conference, hosted by the University of South Australia in Adelaide. The volume brings to life a number of the conference themes including corporate social responsibility, culture, academic integrity, vulnerability, health, military ethics, education, leadership, sustainability and philosophy and addresses concerns of many leading applied ethicists.

Based on a broad range of case studies, Organization and Management Problem Solving is an insightful text designed to improve the application of organization theory and systems thinking in teaching and practice. This book illustrates the five key themes in the nature of organization and management?technical, structural, psychosocial, managerial, and cultural?through the analysis of measured incidents tested by students.

A clear theoretical framework supports the case studies, allowing the text to have practical relevance to contemporary settings and to be recognized as a model for describing, analyzing, and responding to organization and management problems. The model integrates the thinking of many writers on organization and problem solving including Ackoff, Blake, and Mouton; Schein, Kast, and Rosenweign; and Mitroff and Lippitt. The approach eliminates causal conditions and emphasizes responsive problem solving. Theory is applied and expanded as needed to a broader social context, engaging the reader in a thorough understanding of the nature and development of organization theory and problem solving.

This book is relevant to consultants, academics, and professional managers in a number of settings (academic, military, business organizations, and research institutes) and disciplines (including development and change, management, human resources, social psychology, communication, sociology, and psychology).

This graduate-level textbook covers modelling, programming and analysis of stochastic computer simulation experiments, including the mathematical and statistical foundations of simulation and why it works. The book is rigorous and complete, but concise and accessible, providing all necessary background material. Object-oriented programming of simulations is illustrated in Python, while the majority of the book is programming language independent. In addition to covering the foundations of simulation and simulation programming for applications, the text prepares readers to use simulation in their research. A solutions manual for end-of-chapter exercises is available for instructors.

"Stafford Beer is undoubtedly among the world s most provocative, creative, and profound thinkers on the subject of management, and he records his thinking with a flair that is unmatched. His writing is as much art as it is science. He is the most viable system I know." Dr Russell L Ackoff, The Institute for Interactive Management, Pennsylvania, USA.
"If anyone can make it Operations Research] understandably readable and positively interesting it is Stafford Beer everyone in management ..should be grateful to him for using clear and at times elegant English and even elegant diagrams." The Economist
In Brain of the Firm and The Heart of Enterprise Stafford Beer worked out the scientific laws that govern any viable system. They constitute the basis for this book which is concerned solely with the application of those laws to the understanding of any particular enterprise. In the form of a Handbook or Manager s Guide, Diagnosing the System deals with the fundamental problem of management how to cope with complexity itself. It shows you how to design (or redesign) an enterprise in conformity with the laws of viability, and will help you to diagnose faults in your organizational structure.