Supply chain management in the construction industry has passed through different eras - yet throughout, the construction industry has experienced fragmentation, late project delivery and other Gordian Knots due to its slow adoption of innovative modern technologies and principles in the supply chain processes. Addressing the need to harmonise the construction supply chain and establish the industry as the lynchpin of the economy, Construction Supply Chain Management in the Fourth Industrial Revolution Era acts as a roadmap, re-aligning the activities of the construction supply chain stakeholders with the principles and tenets of Industry 4.0. Gathering evidence on both the benefits and disruptive potentials within the current construction supply chain management domain, this collection determines the acceptable practice and standard for regulatory bodies and managers, appealing also to researchers as it expands the frontiers of knowledge in the fourth industrial era.

Technological advancements in recent years have led to significant developments within a variety of business applications. In particular, data-driven research provides ample opportunity for enterprise growth, if utilized efficiently. Supply Chain Management in the Big Data Era is an authoritative reference source for the latest scholarly material on the implementation of big data analytics for improved operations and supply chain processes. Highlighting emerging strategies from different industry perspectives, this book is ideally designed for managers, professionals, practitioners, and students interested in the most recent research on supply chain innovations.

This proceedings volume presents recent theoretical and practical advances in operational research (OR). The papers focus on a number of key areas including combinatorial optimization, integer programming, heuristics, and mathematical programming. In addition, this volume highlights OR applications in different areas such as financial decision making, marketing, e-business, project management, scheduling, traffic and transportation. The chapters are based on papers presented at the 13th Balkan Conference on Operations Research (BALCOR). BALCOR is an established biennial conference. The selected papers promote international collaboration among researchers and practitioners, with a particular focus on the Balkan countries.

Probabilistic modeling represents a subject spanning many branches of mathematics, economics, and computer science to connect pure mathematics with applied sciences. Operational research also relies on this connection to enable the improvement of business functions and decision making. Analyzing Risk through Probabilistic Modeling in Operations Research is an authoritative reference publication discussing the various challenges in management and decision science. Featuring exhaustive coverage on a range of topics within operational research including, but not limited to, decision analysis, data mining, process modeling, probabilistic interpolation and extrapolation, and optimization methods, this book is an essential reference source for decision makers, academicians, researchers, advanced-level students, technology developers, and government officials interested in the implementation of probabilistic modeling in various business applications.

Alarm or alert detection remains an issue in various areas from nature, i.e. flooding, animals or earthquake, to software systems. Liveness, dynamicity, reactivity of alarm systems: how to ensure the warning information reach the right destination at the right moment and in the right location, still being relevant for the recipient, in spite of the various and successive filters of confidentiality, privacy, firewall policies, etc.? Also relevant in this context are to technical contingency issues: material failure, defect of connection, break of channels, independence of information routes and sources? Alarms with crowd media, (mis)information vs. rumours: how to make the distinction? The prediction of natural disasters (floods, avalanches, etc.), health surveillance (affectionate fevers of cattle, pollution by pesticides, etc.), air, sea and land transport, or space surveillance to prevent Risks of collisions between orbital objects involve more and more actors within Information Systems, one of whose purposes is the dissemination of alerts. By expanding the capabilities and functionality of such national or international systems, social networks are playing a growing role in dissemination and sharing, eg. with the support of systems like the Google Alert (https://www.google.fr/alerts) which concerns the publication of contents online. Recently, the Twitter microblogging platform announced a broadcast service, designed to help government organizations with alerts to the public. The proper functioning of such systems depends on fundamental properties such as resilience, liveliness and responsiveness: any alert must absolutely reach the right recipient at the right time and in the right place, while remaining relevant to him, despite the various constraints. on the one hand to external events, such as hardware failures, connection faults, breaks in communication channels, on the other hand to confidentiality, such as the collection and use of personal data (with or without the consent of the user), or the disparity of access policies (generation according to industrial, technological, security constraints, management of internal / external policies, etc.) between actors. This book opens the discussion on the "procrastination", the dynamics and the reactivity of the alert systems, but also the problems of confidentiality, filtering of information, and the means of distinguishing information and rumor.

This book discusses recent advances and research in applied mathematics, statistics and their applications in computing. It features papers presented at the fourth conference in the series organized at the Indian Institute of Technology (Banaras Hindu University), Varanasi, India, on 9 - 11 January 2018 on areas of current interest, including operations research, soft computing, applied mathematical modelling, cryptology, and security analysis. The conference has emerged as a powerful forum, bringing together leading academic scientists, experts from industry, and researchers and offering a venue to discuss, interact and collaborate to stimulate the advancement of mathematics and its applications in computer science. The education of future consumers, users, producers, developers and researchers of mathematics and its applications is an important challenge in modern society, and as such, mathematics and its application in computer science are of vital significance to all spectrums of the community, as well as to mathematicians and computing professionals across different educational levels and disciplines. With contributions by leading international experts, this book motivates and creates interest among young researchers.

This book provides an interdisciplinary approach to complexity, combining ideas from areas like complex networks, cellular automata, multi-agent systems, self-organization and game theory. The first part of the book provides an extensive introduction to these areas, while the second explores a range of research scenarios. Lastly, the book presents CellNet, a software framework that offers a hands-on approach to the scenarios described throughout the book. In light of the introductory chapters, the research chapters, and the CellNet simulating framework, this book can be used to teach undergraduate and master's students in disciplines like artificial intelligence, computer science, applied mathematics, economics and engineering. Moreover, the book will be particularly interesting for Ph.D. and postdoctoral researchers seeking a general perspective on how to design and create their own models.

Totally Awesome Stephen Monaco offers a comprehensive guide to social media marketing in Insightful Knowledge. He changes perceptions on social media marketing and tell readers how to develop their marketing strategies. Since social media needs to be part of your marketing efforts, read this book Monica Cornetti - Leading Authority on Entrepreneurial Thinking, and Author of Your Face Isn't Finished Until Your Lipstick is On YOU NEED THIS BOOK IF... you don't know where to start with your social media initiatives you've started your social media initiatives but aren't sure if you're on the right track your social media initiatives are in place and you believe you're on the right track none of your social media initiatives are directly tied to specific business objectives you fail to use social media monitoring / listening platforms in your social media you don't know what consumers are saying about your brand online you don't have a comprehensive Voice of Customer program in place you're not engaging consumers with relevant content across multiple platforms your company is driven by sales, rather than by marketing the breakneck tempo of today's business makes it difficult to adapt and keep up with change you no longer know how to reach potential customers

The third edition of this handbook is designed to provide a broad coverage of the concepts, implementations, and applications in metaheuristics. The book's chapters serve as stand-alone presentations giving both the necessary underpinnings as well as practical guides for implementation. The nature of metaheuristics invites an analyst to modify basic methods in response to problem characteristics, past experiences, and personal preferences, and the chapters in this handbook are designed to facilitate this process as well. This new edition has been fully revised and features new chapters on swarm intelligence and automated design of metaheuristics from flexible algorithm frameworks. The authors who have contributed to this volume represent leading figures from the metaheuristic community and are responsible for pioneering contributions to the fields they write about. Their collective work has significantly enriched the field of optimization in general and combinatorial optimization in particular.Metaheuristics are solution methods that orchestrate an interaction between local improvement procedures and higher level strategies to create a process capable of escaping from local optima and performing a robust search of a solution space. In addition, many new and exciting developments and extensions have been observed in the last few years. Hybrids of metaheuristics with other optimization techniques, like branch-and-bound, mathematical programming or constraint programming are also increasingly popular. On the front of applications, metaheuristics are now used to find high-quality solutions to an ever-growing number of complex, ill-defined real-world problems, in particular combinatorial ones. This handbook should continue to be a great reference for researchers, graduate students, as well as practitioners interested in metaheuristics.

This book reports the best practices that companies established in Latin America are implementing in their manufacturing processes in order to generate high quality products and stay in the market. It lists the technologies, production and administrative philosophies that are being implemented, presenting a collection of successful cases of studies from Latin America. The book describes how the tools and techniques are being integrated, modified and combined to create new technical resources for assisting the decision making process for better economic performance in manufacturing companies. The efforts deployed for assisting the transformation of raw materials into products and services are described. The authors explain the main key success factors or drivers for success of each tool, technique or hybrid combination approach applied to solve manufacturing problems.

The purpose of this book is to present a comprehensive review of the latest research and development trends at the international level for modeling and optimization of the supplier selection process for different industrial sectors. It is targeted to serve two audiences: the MBA and PhD student interested in procurement, and the practitioner who wishes to gain a deeper understanding of procurement analysis with multi-criteria based decision tools to avoid upstream risks to get better supply chain visibility. The book is expected to serve as a ready reference for supplier selection criteria and various multi-criteria based supplier's evaluation methods for forward, reverse and mass customized supply chain. This book encompasses several criteria, methods for supplier selection in a systematic way based on extensive literature review from 1998 to 2012. It provides several case studies and some useful links which can serve as a starting point for interested researchers. In the appendix several computer code written in MatLab and VB.NET is also included for the interested reader. Lucid explosion of various techniques used to select and evaluate suppliers is one of the unique characteristic of this book. Moreover, this book gives in depth analysis of selection and evaluation of suppliers for traditional supply chain, closed loop supply chain, supply chain for customized product, green supply chain, sustainable supply chain and also depicts methods for supply base reduction and selection of large number of suppliers.

This book introduces readers to the use of R codes for optimization problems. First, it provides the necessary background to understand data envelopment analysis (DEA), with a special emphasis on fuzzy DEA. It then describes DEA models, including fuzzy DEA models, and shows how to use them to solve optimization problems with R. Further, it discusses the main advantages of R in optimization problems, and provides R codes based on real-world data sets throughout. Offering a comprehensive review of DEA and fuzzy DEA models and the corresponding R codes, this practice-oriented reference guide is intended for masters and Ph.D. students in various disciplines, as well as practitioners and researchers.

In 2009 three consultants, green to the consulting industry were tasked with a new challenge, the activation and licensing of a new, 100 bed hospital, in only 90 days. Pulling from concept of "Day in the Life" simulations used in the military, the Hospital Incident Command System (HICS), and adult learning theories the consultants developed a method that healthcare facilities could use to ensure readiness. Thus, was born the concept of Dress Rehearsal. A Guide to Healthcare Facility Dress Rehearsal Simulation Planning: Simplifying the Complex provides a step-by-step scalable framework to coordinate an Interdisciplinary Dress Rehearsal event for a project or facility of any size. Developed for use as a resource throughout your Dress Rehearsal journey, each chapter of this guide builds upon the last and should be read in succession. We hope you leverage our lessons learned and experience and apply them to your facility to support a safe Day 1 activation.

This book contains the proceedings of the Seventh National Conference of the Italian Systems Society. The title, Systemics of Incompleteness and Quasi-Systems, aims to underline the need for Systemics and Systems Science to deal with the concepts of incompleteness and quasiness. Classical models of Systemics are intended to represent comprehensive aspects of phenomena and processes. They consider the phenomena in their temporal and spatial completeness. In these cases, possible incompleteness in the modelling is assumed to have a provisional or practical nature, which is still under study, and because there is no theoretical reason why the modelling cannot be complete. In principle, this is a matter of non-complex phenomena, to be considered using the concepts of the First Systemics. When dealing with emergence, there are phenomena which must be modelled by systems having multiple models, depending on the aspects being taken into consideration. Here, incompleteness in the modelling is intrinsic, theoretically relating changes in properties, structures, and status of system. Rather than consider the same system parametrically changing over time, we consider sequences of systems coherently. We consider contexts and processes for which modelling is incomplete, being related to only some properties, as well as those for which such modelling is theoretically incomplete-as in the case of processes of emergence and for approaches considered by the Second Systemics. In this regard, we consider here the generic concept of quasi explicating such incompleteness. The concept of quasi is used in various disciplines including quasi-crystals, quasi-particles, quasi-electric fields, and quasi-periodicity. In general, the concept of quasiness for systems concerns their continuous structural changes which are always meta-stable, waiting for events to collapse over other configurations and possible forms of stability; whose equivalence depends on the type of phenomenon under study. Interest in the concept of quasiness is not related to its meaning of rough approximation, but because it indicates an incompleteness which is structurally sufficient to accommodate processes of emergence and sustain coherence or generate new, equivalent or non-equivalent, levels. The conference was devoted to identifying, discussing and understanding possible interrelationships of theoretical disciplinary improvements, recognised as having prospective fundamental roles for a new Quasi-Systemics. The latter should be able to deal with problems related to complexity in more general and realistic ways, when a system is not always a system and not always the same system. In this context, the inter-disciplinarity should consist, for instance, of a constructionist, incomplete, non-ideological, multiple, contradiction-tolerant, Systemics, always in progress, and in its turn, emergent.

This textbook provides an introduction to the growing interdisciplinary field of computational science. It combines a foundational development of numerical methods with a variety of illustrative applications spread across numerous areas of science and engineering. The intended audience is the undergraduate who has completed introductory coursework in mathematics and computer science. Students gain computational acuity by authoring their own numerical routines and by practicing with numerical methods as they solve computational models. This education encourages students to learn the importance of answering: How expensive is a calculation, how trustworthy is a calculation, and how might we model a problem to apply a desired numerical method? The text is written in two parts. Part I provides a succinct, one-term inauguration into the primary routines on which a further study of computational science rests. The material is organized so that the transition to computational science from coursework in calculus, differential equations, and linear algebra is natural. Beyond the mathematical and computational content of Part I, students gain proficiency with elemental programming constructs and visualization, which are presented in MATLAB syntax. The focus of Part II is modeling, wherein students build computational models, compute solutions, and report their findings. The models purposely intersect numerous areas of science and engineering to demonstrate the pervasive role played by computational science.