OR, Defence and Security presents eleven papers, originally published in the Journal of the Operational Research Society and the Journal of Simulation, which exemplify important themes and topics in Operational Research (OR), as applied to modern-day defense and security issues. Topics range from frontline OR in a peace-support operation to new developments in combat modelling, and from the logistics of overseas intervention to defence planning at the top level. Also included are examples of applications addressing insurgency and terrorism. Edited by Dr Roger A. Forder, who had a distinguished career in OR in the UK Ministry of Defence, he has also written an authoritative introductory chapter which sets the papers in the context of the global strategic environment as it has evolved since the end of the Cold War. The OR Essentials series presents a unique cross-section of high quality research work fundamental to understanding contemporary issues and research in across a range of Operational Research (OR) topics. It brings together some of the best research papers from the esteemed Operational Research Society and its associated journals, also published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Scheduling is a resource allocation problem which exists in virtually every type of organization. Scheduling problems have produced roughly 40 years of research primarily within the OR community. This community has traditionally emphasized mathematical modeling techniques which seek exact solutions to well formulated optimization problems. While this approach produced important results, many contemporary scheduling problems are particularly difficult. Hence, over the last ten years operations researchers interested in scheduling have turned increasingly to more computer intensive and heuristic approaches. At roughly the same time, researchers in AI began to focus their methods on industrial and management science applications. The result of this confluence of fields has been a period of remarkable growth and excitement in scheduling research. Intelligent Scheduling Systems captures the results of a new wave of research at the forefront of scheduling research, of interest to researchers and practitioners alike. Presented are an array of the latest contemporary tools -- math modeling to tabu search to genetic algorithms -- that can assist in operational scheduling and solve difficult scheduling problems. The book presents the most recent research results from both operations research (OR) and artificial intelligence (AI) focusing their efforts on real scheduling problems.

This book is the first comprehensive tutorial on matheuristics. Matheuristics are based on mathematical extensions of previously known heuristics, mainly metaheuristics, and on original, area-specific approaches. This tutorial provides a detailed discussion of both contributions, presenting the pseudocodes of over 40 algorithms, abundant literature references, and for each case a step-by-step description of a sample run on a common Generalized Assignment Problem example. C++ source codes of all algorithms are available in an associated SW repository.

This book provides a relatively whole view of data-driven decision-making methods for energy service innovation and energy system optimization. Through personalized energy services provision and energy efficiency improvement, the book can contribute to the green transformation of energy system and the sustainable development of the society. The book gives a new way to achieve smart energy management, based on various data mining and machine learning methods, including fuzzy clustering, shape-based clustering, ensemble clustering, deep learning, and reinforcement learning. The applications of these data-driven methods in improving energy efficiency and supporting energy service innovation are presented. Moreover, this book also investigates the role of blockchain in supporting peer-to-peer (P2P) electricity trading innovation, thus supporting smart energy management. The general scope of this book mainly includes load clustering, load forecasting, price-based demand response, incentive-based demand response, and energy blockchain-based electricity trading. The intended readership of the book includes researchers and engineers in related areas, graduate and undergraduate students in university, and some other general interested audience. The important features of the book are: (1) it introduces various data-driven methods for achieving different smart energy management tasks; (2) it investigates the role of data-driven methods in supporting various energy service innovation; and (3) it explores energy blockchain in P2P electricity trading, and thus supporting smart energy management.

This book explores the novel uses and potentials of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) under big data. These areas are of widespread interest to researchers and practitioners alike. Considering the vast literature on DEA, one could say that DEA has been and continues to be, a widely used technique both in performance and productivity measurement, having covered a plethora of challenges and debates within the modelling framework.

The development of U.S. urban transportation policy over the past half-century illustrates the changing relationships among federal, state, and local governments. This comprehensive text examines the evolution of urban transportation planning from early developments in highway planning in the 1930s to today's concerns over sustainable development, security, and pollution control. Highlighting major national events, the book examines the influence of legislation, regulations, conferences, federal programs, and advances in planning procedures and technology. The volume provides in-depth coverage of the most significant event in transportation planning, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1962, which created a federal mandate for a comprehensive urban transportation planning process, carried out cooperatively by states and local governments with federal funding. Claiming that urban transportation planning is more sophisticated, costly, and complex than its highway and transit planning predecessors, the book demonstrates how urban transportation planning evolved in response to changes in such factors as the environment, energy, development patterns, intergovernmental coordination, and federal transit programs. This updated, revised, and expanded edition features two new chapters on global climate change and managing under conditions of constrained resources, and covers the impact of the most recent legislation, 50 years after the Highway Act of 1962, emphasizing such timely issues as security, oil dependence, performance measurement, and public-private sector collaboration.

This book deals with World Class Operations Management (WCOM), detailing its principles, methods and organisation, and the results that this approach can bring about. Utilising real-world case studies illustrated by companies that have adopted this model (interviews with Saint-Gobain, L'Oreal, Tetra Pak, Bemis, and Bel Executives), it describes common patterns drawn from decades of hands-on experience, so as to present a theoretical approach together with the concrete application of its principles. WCOM, adopted by several multinational companies, is one of the more innovative management practises, as it integrates the best Continuous Improvement approaches (Lean, Total Productive Management, World Class Manufacturing) as well as the most innovative approaches in human dynamics like Change Leadership, Performance Behavior, Shingo Model, to name a few. Every book's chapter has been authored by an expert in these different fields, thus revealing the synergy among the different practices, which is one of the distinguishing and successful aspects of WCOM Maximising reader insights into the successful implementation of such an approach, and explaining not only its potentialities, but also its implementation dynamics, the critical points and the ways it can be integrated into different situations, this book is also about how to create a culture of excellence that is sustainable over a long period of time and delivers consistent (or ever-improving) results.

This open access book presents a new generation multi-criteria, multi-stake holder, decision aide, called an "institutional compass". Based on hard data, the compass tells us what quality-direction we are heading in as an institution, region, system or organisation. The quality is not chosen from the usual scalar qualities of: good, neutral and bad. Instead, it is a quality chosen between: harmony, discipline and excitement. None is good in and of itself. We need some of each. The compass marks a new generation in four respects. 1. The representation of the data is intuitive and simple to understand, and therefore can be used to communicate and justify policy decisions. 2. Any data can be included, i.e., none is excluded. This makes the compass tailored to particular situations, voices and contexts. 3. The data includes different time horizons and different types of value: monetary, use, social, sentimental, religious, intrinsic, existential... 4. The process of compass construction can be made inclusive at several junctions. An institutional compass can be extended to evaluate products, add normativity to a systems analysis, reflect world-views such as that of ecological economists or function as an accounting system to manage scarce resources. There are four parts to the book. The first part introduces the general ideas behind the compass. In the second part, the author presents the method for constructing the compass. This includes data collection, data analysis and a mathematical formula to aggregate the data into a single holistic reading. In the third part, the author extends the methodology: to incorporate it into systems science, adding a normative and quality-direction dimension, to use it as a non-linear accounting method and more thoroughly to reflect the philosophy of ecological economists to give a real measure of sustainability. In the fourth part, we see three case studies: one for the World Health Organisation, a second is the use of the compass to label products in a shop and the third is as a regional compass for Hauts-de-France. The book ends with philosophical conclusions. Throughout the book, we see tight arguments, refreshing ideas and a thorough treatment of objectivity in decision making.

Location, scheduling and design problems are assignment type problems with quadratic cost functions and occur in many contexts stretching from spatial economics via plant and office layout planning to VLSI design and similar prob lems in high-technology production settings. The presence of nonlinear inter action terms in the objective function makes these, otherwise simple, problems NP hard. In the first two chapters of this monograph we provide a survey of models of this type and give a common framework for them as Boolean quadratic problems with special ordered sets (BQPSs). Special ordered sets associated with these BQPSs are of equal cardinality and either are disjoint as in clique partitioning problems, graph partitioning problems, class-room scheduling problems, operations-scheduling problems, multi-processor assign ment problems and VLSI circuit layout design problems or have intersections with well defined joins as in asymmetric and symmetric Koopmans-Beckmann problems and quadratic assignment problems. Applications of these problems abound in diverse disciplines, such as anthropology, archeology, architecture, chemistry, computer science, economics, electronics, ergonomics, marketing, operations management, political science, statistical physics, zoology, etc. We then give a survey of the traditional solution approaches to BQPSs. It is an unfortunate fact that even after years of investigation into these problems, the state of algorithmic development is nowhere close to solving large-scale real life problems exactly. In the main part of this book we follow the polyhedral approach to combinatorial problem solving because of the dramatic algorith mic successes of researchers who have pursued this approach."

This book includes a spectrum of concepts, such as performance, productivity, operations research, econometrics, and data science, for the practically and theoretically important areas of 'productivity analysis/data envelopment analysis' and 'data science/big data'. Data science is defined as the collection of scientific methods, processes, and systems dedicated to extracting knowledge or insights from data and it develops on concepts from various domains, containing mathematics and statistical methods, operations research, machine learning, computer programming, pattern recognition, and data visualisation, among others. Examples of data science techniques include linear and logistic regressions, decision trees, Naive Bayesian classifier, principal component analysis, neural networks, predictive modelling, deep learning, text analysis, survival analysis, and so on, all of which allow using the data to make more intelligent decisions. On the other hand, it is without a doubt that nowadays the amount of data is exponentially increasing, and analysing large data sets has become a key basis of competition and innovation, underpinning new waves of productivity growth. This book aims to bring a fresh look onto the various ways that data science techniques could unleash value and drive productivity from these mountains of data. Researchers working in productivity analysis/data envelopment analysis will benefit from learning about the tools available in data science/big data that can be used in their current research analyses and endeavours. The data scientists, on the other hand, will also get benefit from learning about the plethora of applications available in productivity analysis/data envelopment analysis.

This book is the first to approach healthcare informatics from the perspective of innovation. Drawing on the unique pairing of information and innovation, it offers an analysis to help readers rethink information technology, knowledge management, interprofessional collaboration and the generation of wisdom in the context of healthcare.The concept of "translational" research stems from the medical and health sciences, and features bidirectional and recursive information-generation processes involving bed-to-bench and bench-to-bed approaches. Based partly on this, translational systems science has become a new trend within systems sciences, motivated by the need for practical applications that help people by offering holistic systems solutions for complex ideas. Today, numerous innovations are emerging in diversified clinical practices, and there has been a remarkable convergence of new technologies in disciplines like genome therapy, immunotherapy, iPS cells, imaging diagnosis, personalized medicine, molecular targeted drugs, surgical robots, and remote nursing. Innovation is also occurring in health management fields, including health records, insurance reimbursement methods, quality control, and safety. In these areas, big data and machine learning are accelerating innovation. Behind these innovations are the creation, sharing, bridging, and translation of data, information, knowledge, and wisdom, and as such health informatics is critical in promoting health innovations.The book explores the horizons of health informatics, introducing cutting-edge practical cases and theoretical frameworks, including but not limited to fields such as big data, machine learning, drug discovery, interprofessional collaboration, electronic health records, robotics, telenursing, quality improvement, and safety.

This book assesses potential developments of terrorism and ways to prevent it-the growing threats as new technologies become available - and how the same new technologies may help trap those with potential mal-intent. The drumbeat of terror resonates from everywhere; how can we stop it? What are the tripping points along the road and how can we avoid them? Increasingly more people have access to increasingly more information and increasingly more destructive technologies. In the meantime, increasingly advanced technologies help us create an increasingly safer and more harmonious world. Advantages and disadvantages are accelerating each other. While hybrid threats are intensifying, so are the opportunities to address them. But what are the compromises and how can we mitigate them? This book also looks at the unexpected and often random success and failure of policies to counter the evolving terror threat. The various aspects of the terrorism phenomena are presented in a unique way using scenario vignettes, which give the reader a realistic perception of the threat. The combination of positive and negative implications of emerging technologies is describing what might well be one of the most important dimensions of our common future.

This book pulls together many perspectives on the theory, methods and practice of drawing judgments from panels of experts in assessing risks and making decisions in complex circumstances. The book is divided into four parts: Structured Expert Judgment (SEJ) current research fronts; the contributions of Roger Cooke and the Classical Model he developed; process, procedures and education; and applications. After an Introduction by the Editors, the first part presents chapters on expert elicitation of parameters of multinomial models; the advantages of using performance weighting by advancing the "random expert" hypothesis; expert elicitation for specific graphical models; modelling dependencies between experts' assessments within a Bayesian framework; preventive maintenance optimization in a Bayesian framework; eliciting life time distributions to parametrize a Dirichlet process; and on an adversarial risk analysis approach for structured expert judgment studies. The second part includes Roger Cooke's oration from 1995 on taking up his chair at Delft University of Technology; one of the editors reflections on the early decade of the Classical Model development and use; a current overview of the theory of the Classical Model, providing a deep and comprehensive perspective on its foundations and its application; and an interview with Roger Cooke. The third part starts with an interview with Professor Dame Anne Glover, who served as the Chief Scientific Advisor to the President of the European Commission. It then presents chapters on the characteristics of good elicitations by reviewing those advocated and applied; the design and development of a training course for SEJ; and on specific experiences with SEJ protocols with the intention of presenting the challenges and insights collected during these journeys. Finally, the fourth (and largest) part begins with some reflections from Willy Aspinall on his many experiences in applying the Classical Model in several application domains; it continues with related reflections on imperfect elicitations; and then it presents chapters with applications on medicines policy and management, supply chain cyber risk management, geo-political risks, terrorism and the risks facing businesses looking to internationalise.

This book examines inventory and production strategies that can reduce unexpected breakdown costs. It highlights different EPQ models to deal with such problems, providing optimal value derivations for decision variables. It provides proofs for concavity or convexity of objective functions. The chapters also include numerical examples for all the developed mathematical models. Imperfect Inventory Systems: Inventory and Production Management and Breakdown should be useful for professionals working on supply chains, but also researchers in operations research and inventory management.

The book offers a comprehensive survey of interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets. It reports on cutting-edge research carried out by the founder of the intuitionistic fuzzy sets, Prof. Krassimir Atanassov, giving a special emphasis to the practical applications of this extension. A few interesting case studies, such as in the area of data mining, decision making and pattern recognition, among others, are discussed in detail. The book offers the first comprehensive guide on interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets. By providing the readers with a thorough survey and important practical details, it is expected to support them in carrying out applied research and to encourage them to test the theory behind the sets for new advanced applications. The book is a valuable reference resource for graduate students and researchers alike.

This book has resulted from the activities of IFAC TC 5.2 "Manufacturing Modelling for Management and Control". The book offers an introduction and advanced techniques of scheduling applications to cloud manufacturing and Industry 4.0 systems for larger audience. This book uncovers fundamental principles and recent developments in the theory and application of scheduling methodology to cloud manufacturing and Industry 4.0. The purpose of this book is to present recent developments in scheduling in cloud manufacturing and Industry 4.0 and to systemize these developments in new taxonomies and methodological principles to shape this new research domain. This book addresses the needs of both researchers and practitioners to uncover the challenges and opportunities of scheduling techniques' applications to cloud manufacturing and Industry 4.0. For the first time, it comprehensively conceptualizes scheduling in cloud manufacturing and Industry 4.0 systems as a new research domain. The chapters of the book are written by the leading international experts and utilize methods of operations research, industrial engineering and computer science. Such a multi-disciplinary combination is unique and comprehensively deciphers major problem taxonomies, methodologies, and applications to scheduling in cloud manufacturing and Industry 4.0.

The well-ordered, fully aligned view of organization and management practice, with its unfailingly positive results, bears little relationship to the world that managers and others experience every day. This straight-line, 'do this and you'll get that' idealization is far removed from the wiggly reality. Despite this, the former continues to dominate the ways in which management is spoken about and judged in formal organizational arenas and wider society. This creates unrealistic expectations of what managers (from CEO to the front line) can sensibly achieve independently of the actions of others. Crucially, too, it distorts the ways in which they and others account formally for their actions. And so, the fantasy continues. Against this background, the book offers a radically different way of thinking about, and engaging with, the irreducible complexity of organization and management practice. Using straightforward language throughout, it sets out to help managers and others to become consciously aware of what they already know deep down about how organization works and what they - and everyone else - are actually doing in practice. It then offers a practical approach to everyday practice that takes complexity seriously. Armed with these new insights, readers will be better placed to apply their innate understanding and practical judgement to the demands that they and others face day to day. Whether these arise from their roles as managers, other practitioners, policy makers, regulatory authorities, or participants more generally.

Based on the "Fourth International Conference on Dynamics of Disasters" (Kalamata, Greece, July 2019), this volume includes contributions from experts who share their latest discoveries on natural and unnatural disasters. Authors provide overviews of the tactical points involved in disaster relief, outlines of hurdles from mitigation and preparedness to response and recovery, and uses for mathematical models to describe natural and man-made disasters. Topics covered include economics, optimization, machine learning, government, management, business, humanities, engineering, medicine, mathematics, computer science, behavioral studies, emergency services, and environmental studies will engage readers from a wide variety of fields and backgrounds.

This book contains international perspectives that unifies the themes of strategic management, decision theory, and data science. It contains thought-provoking presentations of case studies backed by adequate analysis adding significance to the discussions. Most of the decision-making models in use do take due advantage of collection and processing of relevant data using appropriate analytics oriented to provide inputs into effective decision-making. The book showcases applications in diverse fields including banking and insurance, portfolio management, inventory analysis, performance assessment of comparable economic agents, managing utilities in a health-care facility, reducing traffic snarls on highways, monitoring achievement of some of the sustainable development goals in a country or state, and similar other areas that showcase policy implications. It holds immense value for researchers as well as professionals responsible for organizational decisions.

Research Methodology in Strategy and Management advances understanding of the methods used to study organizations - including managers, strategies, and how firms succeed. This volume explores cutting-edge methodological approaches to the study of organizations, managers, and strategy, and offers 'how to' guides for applying these approaches. It also includes retrospective accounts by Joe Hair and John van Maanen, of the key methodological contributions they have made throughout their careers. This is an informative book for all academics and researchers working in the fields of management, strategy, international business, entrepreneurship and organization theory.

This volume is the last (IV) of four under the main themes of Digitizing Agriculture and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). The four volumes cover rapidly developing processes including Sensors (I), Data (II), Decision (III), and Actions (IV). Volumes are related to 'digital transformation" within agricultural production and provision systems, and in the context of Smart Farming Technology and Knowledge-based Agriculture. Content spans broadly from data mining and visualization to big data analytics and decision making, alongside with the sustainability aspects stemming from the digital transformation of farming. The four volumes comprise the outcome of the 12th EFITA Congress, also incorporating chapters that originated from select presentations of the Congress. The focus in this volume is on the directions of Agriculture 4.0 which incorporates the transition to a new era of action in the Agricultural sector, represented by the evolution of digital technologies in 4 aspects: Big Data, Open Data, Internet of Things (IoT), and Cloud Computing. Under the heading of "Action," 14 Chapters investigate the implementation of cutting-edge technologies on real world applications. It will become apparent to the reader that the penetration of ICT in agriculture can result in several benefits related to the sustainability of the sector and to yield the maximum benefits, successful management is required. The entire discussion highlights the importance of proper education in the adoption of innovative technologies starting with the adaption of educational systems to the new era and moving to the familiarization of farmers to the new technologies. This book covers topics that relate to the digital transformation of farming. It provides examples and case studies of this transformation from around the world, examines the process of diffusion of digital technologies, and assesses the current and future sustainability aspects of digital agriculture. More specifically, it deals with issues such as: Challenges and opportunities from the transition to Agriculture 4.0 Safety and health in agricultural work automation The role of digital farming on regional-spatial planning The enrollment of Social Media in IoT-based agriculture The role of education in digital agriculture Real-life implementation cases of smart agriculture around the world

This book presents innovative operations research applications in business, specifically industrial engineering and its sub-disciplines. It investigates new perspectives in operations research and management science with regard to research methods, the research context, and industrial engineering, offering readers a broad range of new approaches to management problems. The book features the latest work of researchers who have worked with Professor Fusun Ulengin or built upon her work in their academic careers. Written in honor of Prof. Ulengin, this book was edited by her former Ph.D. students, who are now experts in operations research, multiple criteria decision making, competitiveness, logistics, and supply chain management. Prof. Ulengin's impact in academia is visible in the range of topics and methodologies featured in this book: Location and transportation problems, competitiveness of nations, food supply chains, debt collection, mathematical modelling, multiple criteria decision making, data envelopment analysis, random forests, and Bayesian networks.

Operations research tools are ideally suited to providing solutions and insights for the many problems health policy-maker's face. Indeed, a growing body of literature on health policy analysis, based on operations research methods, has emerged to address the problems mentioned above and several others. The research in this field is often multi-disciplinary, being conducted by teams that include not only operations researchers but also clinicians, economists and policy analysts. The research is also often very applied, focusing on a specific question driven by a decision-maker and many times yielding a tool to assist in future decisions. The goal of this volume was to bring together a group of papers by leading experts that could showcase the current state of the field of operations research applied to health-care policy. There are 18 chapters that illustrate the breadth of this field. The chapters use a variety of techniques, including classical operations research tools, such as optimization, queuing theory, and discrete event simulation, as well as statistics, epidemic models and decision-analytic models. The book spans the field and includes work that ranges from highly conceptual to highly applied. An example of the former is the chapter by Kimmel and Schackman on building policy models, and an example of the latter is the chapter by Coyle and colleagues on developing a Markov model for use by an organization in Ontario that makes recommendations about the funding of new drugs. The book also includes a mix of review chapters, such as the chapter by Hutton on public health response to influenza outbreaks, and original research, such as the paper by Blake and colleagues analyzing a decision by Canadian Blood Services to consolidate services. This volume could provide an excellent introduction to the field of operations research applied to health-care policy, and it could also serve as an introduction to new areas for researchers already familiar with the topic. The book is divided into six sections. The first section contains two chapters that describe several different applications of operations research in health policy and provide an excellent overview of the field. Sections 2 to 4 present policy models in three focused areas. Section 5 contains two chapters on conceptualizing and building policy models. The book concludes in Section 6 with two chapters describing work that was done with policy-makers and presenting insights gained from working directly with policy-makers.

The importance of automation in the various industries has increased dramatically in recent years; business process automation serves to enhance product quality, improve process safety and plant availability, and efficiently utilize resources and lower emissions. With almost every industry facing sweeping and unprecedented change, Process Automation Strategy in Services, Manufacturing and Construction responds to a rapid pace of transformation that is both a major challenge and a fantastic opportunity. Customers' expectations grow higher, economic pressures require them to do more with less, and each day new competitors appear. Examining case studies and examples of robotic process automation (RPA) across a range of industries and sectors, the authors explore the links between customer satisfaction and organizational performance, and how automation improves service for the end user. Appealing to business researchers, academics and practitioners, Process Automation Strategy in Services, Manufacturing and Construction brings to life the current trends in process automation and considers what the future holds.