Operational Flexibility: A Model for Effective Project Management

The aim of this study is to investigate the role of operational flexibility for effective project management in the construction industry. The specific objectives are to: a) Identify the determinants of operational flexibility potential in construction project management b) Investigate the contribution of each of the determinants to operational flexibility potential in the construction industry c) Investigate on the moderating factors of operational flexibility potential in a construction project environment d) Investigate whether moderated operational flexibility potential mediates the path between predictors and effective construction project management e) Develop and test a conceptual model of achieving operational flexibility for effective project management The purpose of this study is to findout ways to utilize flexibility inorder to manage uncertain project environment and ultimately achieve effective project management. In what configuration these operational flexibility determinants are demanded by construction project environment in order to achieve project success. This research was conducted in three phases, namely: (i) exploratory phase (ii) questionnaire development phase; and (iii) data collection and analysis phase. The study needs firm level analysis and therefore real estate developers who are members of CREDAI, Kerala Chapter were considered. This study provides a framework on the functioning of operational flexibility, offering guidance to researchers and practitioners for discovering means to gain operational flexibility in construction firms. The findings provide an empirical understanding on kinds of resources and capabilities a construction firm must accumulate to respond flexibly to the changing project environment offering practitioners insights into practices that build firms operational flexibility potential. Firms are dealing with complex, continuous changing and uncertain environments due trends of globalization, technical changes and innovations and changes in the customers’ needs and expectations. To cope with the increasingly uncertain and quickly changing environment firms strive for flexibility. To achieve the level of flexibility that adds value to the customers, firms should look to flexibility from a day to day operational perspective. Each dimension of operational flexibility is derived from competences and capabilities. In this thesis only the influence on customer satisfaction and learning exploitation of flexibility dimensions which directly add value in the customers eyes are studied to answer the followingresearch questions: “What is the impact of operational flexibility on customer satisfaction?.” What are the predictors of operational flexibility in construction industry? .These questions can only be answered after answering the questions like “Why do firms need operational flexibility?” and “how can firms achieve operational flexibility?” in the context of the construction industry. The need for construction firms to be flexible, via the effective utilization of organizational resources and capabilities for improved responsiveness, is important because of the increasing rate of changes in the business environment within which they operate. Achieving operational flexibility is also important because it has a significant correlation with a project effectiveness and hence a firm’s turnover. It is essential for academics and practitioners to recognize that the attainment of operational flexibility involves different types namely: (i) Modification (ii) new product development and (iii) demand management requires different configurations of predictors (i.e., resources, capabilities and strategies). Construction firms should consider these relationships and implement appropriate management practices for developing and configuring the right kind of resources, capabilities and strategies towards achieving different operational flexibility types.

Busway platform bus capacity analysis

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), because of its operational flexibility and simplicity, is rapidly gaining popularity with urban designers and transit planners. Earlier BRTs were bus shared lane or bus only lane, which share the roadway with general and other forms of traffic. In recent time, more sophisticated designs of BRT have emerged, such as busway, which has separate carriageway for buses and provides very high physical separation of buses from general traffic. Line capacities of a busway are predominately dependent on bus capacity of its stations. Despite new developments in BRT designs, the methodology of capacity analysis is still based on traditional principles of kerbside bus stop on bus only lane operations. Consequently, the tradition methodology lacks accounting for various dimensions of busway station operation, such as passenger crowd, passenger walking and bus lost time along the long busway station platform. This research has developed a purpose made bus capacity analysis methodology for busway station analysis. Extensive observations of kerbside bus stops and busway stations in Brisbane, Australia were made and differences in their operation were studied. A large scale data collection was conducted using the video recording technique at the Mater Hill Busway Station on the South East Busway in Brisbane. This research identified new parameters concerning busway station operation, and through intricate analysis identified the elements and processes which influence the bus dwell time at a busway station platform. A new variable, Bus lost time, was defined and its quantitative descriptions were established. Based on these finding and analysis, a busway station platform bus capacity methodology was developed, comprising of new models for busway station lost time, busway station dwell time, busway station loading area bus capacity, and busway station platform bus capacity. The new methodology not only accounts for passenger boarding and alighting, but also covers platform crowd and bus lost time in station platform bus capacity estimation. The applicability of this methodology was shown through demonstrative examples. Additionally, these examples illustrated the significance of the bus lost time variable in determining station capacities.

Algorithm-based continuous pulse duration tuning and performance control of a mode-locked laser diode.

A control algorithm is presented that addresses the stability issues inherent to the operation of monolithic mode-locked laser diodes. It enables a continuous pulse duration tuning without any onset of Q-switching instabilities. A demonstration of the algorithm performance is presented for two radically different laser diode geometries and continuous pulse duration tuning between 0.5 ps to 2.2 ps and 1.2 ps to 10.2 ps is achieved. With practical applications in mind, this algorithm also facilitates control over performance parameters such as output power and wavelength during pulse duration tuning. The developed algorithm enables the user to harness the operational flexibility from such a laser with 'push-button' simplicity.

Dependable wireless real-time communications for open environments

Wireless communication technologies have become widely adopted, appearing in heterogeneous applications ranging from tracking victims, responders and equipments in disaster scenarios to machine health monitoring in networked manufacturing systems. Very often, applications demand a strictly bounded timing response, which, in distributed systems, is generally highly dependent on the performance of the underlying communication technology. These systems are said to have real-time timeliness requirements since data communication must be conducted within predefined temporal bounds, whose unfulfillment may compromise the correct behavior of the system and cause economic losses or endanger human lives. The potential adoption of wireless technologies for an increasingly broad range of application scenarios has made the operational requirements more complex and heterogeneous than before for wired technologies. On par with this trend, there is an increasing demand for the provision of cost-effective distributed systems with improved deployment, maintenance and adaptation features. These systems tend to require operational flexibility, which can only be ensured if the underlying communication technology provides both time and event triggered data transmission services while supporting on-line, on-the-fly parameter modification. Generally, wireless enabled applications have deployment requirements that can only be addressed through the use of batteries and/or energy harvesting mechanisms for power supply. These applications usually have stringent autonomy requirements and demand a small form factor, which hinders the use of large batteries. As the communication support may represent a significant part of the energy requirements of a station, the use of power-hungry technologies is not adequate. Hence, in such applications, low-range technologies have been widely adopted. In fact, although low range technologies provide smaller data rates, they spend just a fraction of the energy of their higher-power counterparts. The timeliness requirements of data communications, in general, can be met by ensuring the availability of the medium for any station initiating a transmission. In controlled (close) environments this can be guaranteed, as there is a strict regulation of which stations are installed in the area and for which purpose. Nevertheless, in open environments, this is hard to control because no a priori abstract knowledge is available of which stations and technologies may contend for the medium at any given instant. Hence, the support of wireless real-time communications in unmanaged scenarios is a highly challenging task. Wireless low-power technologies have been the focus of a large research effort, for example, in the Wireless Sensor Network domain. Although bringing extended autonomy to battery powered stations, such technologies are known to be negatively influenced by similar technologies contending for the medium and, especially, by technologies using higher power transmissions over the same frequency bands. A frequency band that is becoming increasingly crowded with competing technologies is the 2.4 GHz Industrial, Scientific and Medical band, encompassing, for example, Bluetooth and ZigBee, two lowpower communication standards which are the base of several real-time protocols. Although these technologies employ mechanisms to improve their coexistence, they are still vulnerable to transmissions from uncoordinated stations with similar technologies or to higher power technologies such as Wi- Fi, which hinders the support of wireless dependable real-time communications in open environments. The Wireless Flexible Time-Triggered Protocol (WFTT) is a master/multi-slave protocol that builds on the flexibility and timeliness provided by the FTT paradigm and on the deterministic medium capture and maintenance provided by the bandjacking technique. This dissertation presents the WFTT protocol and argues that it allows supporting wireless real-time communication services with high dependability requirements in open environments where multiple contention-based technologies may dispute the medium access. Besides, it claims that it is feasible to provide flexible and timely wireless communications at the same time in open environments. The WFTT protocol was inspired on the FTT paradigm, from which higher layer services such as, for example, admission control has been ported. After realizing that bandjacking was an effective technique to ensure the medium access and maintenance in open environments crowded with contention-based communication technologies, it was recognized that the mechanism could be used to devise a wireless medium access protocol that could bring the features offered by the FTT paradigm to the wireless domain. The performance of the WFTT protocol is reported in this dissertation with a description of the implemented devices, the test-bed and a discussion of the obtained results.

Les bifurcations dans les parcours scolaires des étudiants universitaires québécois

L’objectif de ce mémoire est de proposer une analyse descriptive et explicative des bifurcations scolaires. Si plusieurs chercheurs ont noté la fréquence élevée des réorientations au cours des études postsecondaires au Québec, aucun d’entre eux ne s’est intéressé aux réorientations scolaires radicales et imprévisibles, qui peuvent être désignées par le terme de bifurcation. En s’appuyant principalement sur l’analyse d’une série d’entretiens auprès d’individus ayant vécu une réorientation scolaire au cours de leurs études supérieures, cette recherche explore les faces objectives et subjectives de ces réorientations, les différentes étapes traversées au cours du processus de réorientation, les différentes ressources mobilisées par les étudiants afin de faciliter sa réalisation, ainsi que les différentes raisons pour lesquelles les étudiants bifurquent. L’analyse descriptive montre le rôle décisif de la souplesse de fonctionnement et des ressources des institutions d’enseignement postsecondaire, tandis qu’elle tend à minorer le rôle joué par l’entourage des étudiants, et particulièrement de leurs parents. L’analyse explicative fait apparaitre deux modèles distincts de bifurcation: le modèle de la rectification, dans lequel les étudiants se réorientent vers un programme qui correspond davantage à leurs valeurs; et celui de la rétroaction, dans lequel ils se réorientent vers un domaine pour lequel ils avaient déjà de l’intérêt. In fine, ce mémoire conduit à marquer une distinction entre bifurcation et réorientation stratégique, et à nuancer l’utilisation des critères de radicalité et d’imprévisibilité pour définir les bifurcations scolaires dans la mesure où des conciliations ou des retours sur des centres d’intérêt antérieurs sont souvent possibles.

Teoria das opções reais aplicada a projetos de investimento em prestação de serviços de tecnologia da informação

O objetivo desta tese é analisar a aplicação da Teoria das Opções Reais (TOR) como método para avaliação de projetos de investimentos em prestação de serviços de Tecnologia da Informação (TI), comparando seus conceitos e características, com o método tradicional do cálculo do Valor Presente Líquido (VPL). O estudo apresenta os conceitos básicos, e ilustra através de exemplo numérico, o método de avaliação da TOR aplicado a projetos de prestação de serviços de TI, analisando criticamente suas características, vantagens e limitações. Por meio desta tese, pretende-se mostrar que a Teoria das Opções Reais é uma alternativa mais adequada do que o método do VPL como método de avaliação de projetos de investimentos em serviços de Tecnologia da Informação, integrando estratégia e finanças, ao considerar as opções de flexibilidade operacionais - adiar, expandir, contrair, abandonar, etc. - e o posicionamento estratégico da empresa, ao longo da vida útil do projeto de investimento; opções estas, que não são devidamente tratadas pelo método tradicional do VPL.

Flexibilidade na utilização de diesel ou biodiesel: uma abordagem utilizando a teoria de opções reais

Este trabalho aborda o desenvolvimento do Biodiesel como combustível de fontes renováveis na matriz energética brasileira. Em especial será abordada a flexibilidade de utilização entre o Diesel tradicional de origem petrolífera e o Biodiesel de origem vegetal. Será feita a avaliação do valor da flexibilidade de um equipamento com motor ciclo diesel quando da possibilidade de utilização de Diesel mineral ou Biodiesel. A valoração da flexibilidade operacional será feita utilizando a Teoria de Opções Reais. Por fim, será comentado o potencial de ganho no agregado para um país como o Brasil, com um modal de transportes predominantemente rodoviário movido a Diesel.

Manejo hídrico em viveiro e uso de hidrogel na sobrevivência pós-plantio de Eucalyptus urograndis em dois solos diferentes

O trabalho teve como objetivo avaliar a sobrevivência do clone H13 de Eucalyptus urograndis sob dois manejos hídricos de viveiro, plantados em dois solos, com e sem a adição de polímero hidroabsorvente (hidrogel). O plantio foi realizado em vasos mantidos em estufa, com dois tipos de solo: um arenoso e outro argiloso. Cada vaso recebeu 2,5 L de solo, um litro de água e o hidrogel na proporção de 0,4 g vaso-1 (120 mL de gel). O delineamento experimental adotado foi o inteiramente casualizado, com três repetições. Os sintomas de estresse, nos vários níveis avaliados, sempre se manifestaram primeiro nas plantas no solo argiloso, de modo mais acentuado naquelas que foram mantidas sem estresse de água na fase de viveiro. Isso garantiu que as plantas sobrevivessem por um período menor sem água, variando de 14 a 20 dias (com e sem hidrogel, respectivamente), enquanto, no solo arenoso, a sobrevivência foi maior, de 29 a 34 dias (com e sem hidrogel, respectivamente). Apesar da não significância estatística, os resultados com o hidrogel possibilitam, em ambos os solos, maior flexibilidade operacional na intervenção com novas irrigações.

MARCXML: um padrão de descrição para recursos informacionais em Open Archives

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Incorporação de novas tecnologias no setor sucroalcooleiro: produção de hidrogênio e aumento da oferta de eletricidade

This work studies the incorporation of new technologies in the sugarcane sector. Are considered the ethanol steam reforming and the gasification of sugarcane bagasse(by-product) processes associated with combined cycle systems (Gas Turbine + Steam Turbine), aggregating hydrogen production and increased electricity supply in the sector, respectively. To verify the technical feasibility of the incorporation processes was performed a thermodynamic analysis, considering data from a typical Brazilian Sugar Cane Industry. In another step the economic viability study of the hydrogen production process was made, with consideration on hydrated and anhydrous ethanol steam reform, comparing the cost of hydrogen production. Also considered studies of economic engineering of the gasification process and the generation of electricity associated. As conclusions, it follows that the ethanol steam reforming is a great alternative for hydrogen production, presenting production cost relatively low, especially when is considered the steam reforming of hydrated ethanol. For the gasification process associated with combined cycle, can be observed an increase of 8.56 times of the electricity production in the sugar cane industry, indicating a positive annual saving when the sales price of the supply electricity is greater than 0.070 US$/kWh. Finally it can be concluded that the incorporation of these new processes allow greater profitability and operational flexibility of Brazilian sugarcane mills

Fatores que Influenciam a flexibilidade da produção de veículos comerciais

Pós-graduação em Engenharia de Produção - FEG

Fatores que Influenciam a flexibilidade da produção de veículos comerciais

Pós-graduação em Engenharia de Produção - FEG

A New Reactor Concept for Efficient Solar-Thermochemical Fuel Production

We describe and analyze the efficiency of a new solar-thermochemical reactor concept, which employs a moving packed bed of reactive particles produce of H2 or CO from solar energy and H2O or CO2. The packed bed reactor incorporates several features essential to achieving high efficiency: spatial separation of pressures, temperature, and reaction products in the reactor; solid–solid sensible heat recovery between reaction steps; continuous on-sun operation; and direct solar illumination of the working material. Our efficiency analysis includes material thermodynamics and a detailed accounting of energy losses, and demonstrates that vacuum pumping, made possible by the innovative pressure separation approach in our reactor, has a decisive efficiency advantage over inert gas sweeping. We show that in a fully developed system, using CeO2 as a reactive material, the conversion efficiency of solar energy into H2 and CO at the design point can exceed 30%. The reactor operational flexibility makes it suitable for a wide range of operating conditions, allowing for high efficiency on an annual average basis. The mixture of H2 and CO, known as synthesis gas, is not only usable as a fuel but is also a universal starting point for the production of synthetic fuels compatible with the existing energy infrastructure. This would make it possible to replace petroleum derivatives used in transportation in the U.S., by using less than 0.7% of the U.S. land area, a roughly two orders of magnitude improvement over mature biofuel approaches. In addition, the packed bed reactor design is flexible and can be adapted to new, better performing reactive materials.

A New Reactor Concept for Efficient Solar-Thermochemical Fuel Production

We describe and analyze the efficiency of a new solar-thermochemical reactor concept, which employs a moving packed bed of reactive particles produce of H-2 or CO from solar energy and H2O or CO2. The packed bed reactor incorporates several features essential to achieving high efficiency: spatial separation of pressures, temperature, and reaction products in the reactor; solid-solid sensible heat recovery between reaction steps; continuous on-sun operation; and direct solar illumination of the working material. Our efficiency analysis includes material thermodynamics and a detailed accounting of energy losses, and demonstrates that vacuum pumping, made possible by the innovative pressure separation approach in our reactor, has a decisive efficiency advantage over inert gas sweeping. We show that in a fully developed system, using CeO2 as a reactive material, the conversion efficiency of solar energy into H-2 and CO at the design point can exceed 30%. The reactor operational flexibility makes it suitable for a wide range of operating conditions, allowing for high efficiency on an annual average basis. The mixture of H-2 and CO, known as synthesis gas, is not only usable as a fuel but is also a universal starting point for the production of synthetic fuels compatible with the existing energy infrastructure. This would make it possible to replace petroleum derivatives used in transportation in the U. S., by using less than 0.7% of the U. S. land area, a roughly two orders of magnitude improvement over mature biofuel approaches. In addition, the packed bed reactor design is flexible and can be adapted to new, better performing reactive materials.

Estudio de opciones reales para decisiones de inversión en un proyecto minero de nueva ejecución

El objetivo principal es desarrollar la metodología de opciones reales para evaluar la posible puesta en marcha de un proyecto minero. Para esto, el proyecto se divide en dos partes: En la primera parte, con carácter teórico se analizan las inversiones desde el punto de vista tradicional, comparando la problemática de estas valoraciones en ambientes de incertidumbre y flexibilidad operativa. Se analizan las opciones financieras y se comparan con las opciones reales, en cuanto a similitudes y problemáticas. Se desarrollan también los procesos estocásticos que afectan a las variables del proyecto de inversión. Se explican además, las metodologías para el cálculo de las opciones reales, incluido el cálculo de la volatilidad de las mismas. En una segunda parte, se estudia el yacimiento aurífero de Corcoesto, para el cual se realiza la simulación del plan de negocio según las características necesarias para la explotación, donde los ingresos se modelizan mediante un movimiento geométrico browniano para simular el comportamiento del precio de la onza de oro. Se elige un desarrollo de árboles binomiales para estimar el valor futuro del proyecto, a la vez que se establece un intervalo de precios de la opción para adquirir el proyecto minero. Este intervalo estará determinado por las incertidumbres del proyecto calculadas según las metodologías de Copeland y Antikarov, y Heraht y Park. Abstract This project is aimed mainly to develop real options theory to assess a mining project start-up. The project is divided in two documents: The first document with theorical content, investments are analyzed from the clasical point of view, comparing the advantages and disadvantages of this appraisal in high uncertainity and operational flexibility conditions. Financial options are analyzed and compared to real options, in both similarities and problematics. Stochastical process that affect the project variables are also developed. Methods for estimating real options value, including the methods for volatility estimation are commented. In the second document, the Corcoesto gold deposit has been studied. A bussines plan simulation has been maked according to the characteristics of the extraction, where incomes have been simulated with a geometrical Brownian movement to estimate the gold onze behaviour. The binomial tree method has been generated to study the future project value, as well as a range of option prices, for adquiring the mine project. This interval is determined by the project uncertainity calculated with the theories from Copeland and Antikarov and Herath and Park