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Operations management.

This case study is intended for MBA, final year industrial engineering and 1st year PhD students, for use in graduate engineering, post graduate and executive level management programs. The case study illustrates operational and participative management control system in a matrix and flexible organization structure.

Satish Arora (CEO) and Praveen Arora (Director Finance), a husband and wife team, own and operate Go-Goal Hydro Power Ltd (Go-GoalHPL) as a small medium enterprise (SME). Go-GoalHPL renovates hydro power generating machines up to 250 MW rating. Their current renovation/overhauling projects are located at different sites in India. Go-GoalHPL has grown its business by pursuing new avenues that include execution of major renovation projects and construction of new projects on a turnkey basis. Go-GoalHPL's management, despite their on-going successes, are concerned about severe capacity shortages if immediate actions were not taken. They have identified three capacity expansion options: continue current operating practices and obtain additional production space; undertake a make-versus-buy study and consider outsourcing parts; and implement world-class manufacturing techniques through adoption of focused factories. The first two options represented simple incremental changes while the third presents a radical alternative that required a major reorganization of the company operations and support functions.

These include knowledge about competitiveness, corporate survival, sustainable business, operations management, productivity, performance.

Teaching notes are available for faculty. Please consult your librarian.

The continuous increase in the discharges of carbon emissions (CO₂) in the global atmosphere and the likely negative consequences of this practice on the atmosphere draw the attention of researchers and policymakers to argue on the causes and perpetrators of CO₂ emissions. This paper aims to examine the impacts of hydropower consumption, FDI and manufacturing performance on CO₂ emissions in the Association of southeast Asian nations (ASEAN)-4 countries.

The study uses the data on variables, such as hydro-power consumption, FDI, manufacturing value added and CO₂ emissions spanning the period 1980–2015. Autoregressive Distributive Lag Bound test approach was used to assess the relationships among the variables.

The long run estimation of elasticities for all the countries indicates that the coefficient of hydro power consumption was found to be significantly related to CO₂ emissions only in Malaysia. Additionally, the coefficients manufacturing performance were found to be significant in influence the amount of CO₂ emission in all the ASEAN-4 countries. Furthermore, the coefficients of FDI inflows were found to be significant in explaining CO₂ emissions in Malaysia and the Philippines, respectively. In the short run, the estimated results show that all the variables were found to be significant in explaining CO₂ emissions in the countries under study.

Singapore is excluded from the ASEAN-4 due to insufficient data on hydro energy consumption.

The study recommends that as Hydro power energy is a clean source of renewable electricity. Its consumption indicates a negative relationship with CO₂ emissions. The countries should emphasize more on the use of hydro source of energy than the other sources which increase the rate of CO₂ emissions in the atmosphere.

As most of the relevant previous studies did not consider the simultaneous impact of hydro energy consumption, FDI and manufacturing value added on CO₂ emissions in the ASEAN-4, this study is an important contribution to the existing relevant literature.

In this work, generation control of an isolated small hydro plant (SHP) is demonstrated by applying optimal controllers in speed governor and hydraulic turbine system. A comparative analysis of application of fuzzy PI (FPI) and PID controller is conferred for generation control (both power and terminal voltage) of an SHP. The controllers are designed optimally by using crow search algorithm (CSA) and novel hybrid differential evolution crow search algorithm (DECSA). The purpose of this paper is to settle the voltage and real power to improve the quality of the power.

In this work, the controllers (PID and FPI) are implemented in speed governor and excitation system of SHP to regulate power and terminal voltage. Differential evolution and CSA are hybridized to enhance the performance of controller to refurbish the power and terminal voltage of SHP.

The proposed DECSA algorithm is applied to solve ten benchmark functions, and the effectiveness of DECSA algorithm over CSA and DE is demonstrated in terms of best value, mean and standard deviation. CSA and DECSA algorithms optimized controllers (PID and FPI) are used to design SHP with the capability to contribute power and voltage of better quality. The comparative analysis to substantiate the competence of DECSA algorithm and FPI controller is demonstrated in terms of statistical measures of power and voltage of SHP. Robustness analysis is performed by varying all system parameters to prove the effectiveness of the proposed controller.

The proposed algorithm and FPI controller are applied individually to improve the quality of the power of SHP. DE, CSA and DECSA algorithms are implemented to solve benchmark equations. The solutions of all benchmark equations contributed by DECSA algorithm is converged rapidly and having minimum statistical measures as compared to DE and CSA algorithms. The DECSA algorithm and FPI controller are proposed with superior competence to enhance the generator performances by conceding undershoot, overshoot and settling time of power and terminal voltage. DECSA-based FPI controller contributes a noticeable improvement of the performances over other approaches.

Señor Ruiz‐Morales emphasized at the outset the diversity of the economy of Spain. Not only was Spain cut off from the rest of the European continent by the Pyrenees, but land communications between one region of Spain and another were greatly handicapped by the mountainous nature of the country. The centres of both industrial and agricultural activity lay along the coastal belt, from Bilbao in the north to Barcelona in the south. In the centre was the meseta, the high plateau, dominated by Madrid. In the case of agriculture it was important to distinguish between the land distribution of the south (on the latifundia system) and the very small holdings (minifundia) of the north. Crop growing was concentrated in the valleys and the semi‐tropical climate of the south enabled Spain to export citrus fruits. Most of Spain's mines had been worked for a long time and were nearly exhausted. The country's deficiency was in two vital sources of power—coal and oil. Hydro‐power was, however, being utilized in the Pyrenees (for the Barcelona industrial region) and where the Douro and the Tagus dropped into Portugal. In the early ‘thirties Spain had a considerable gold reserve, but this had been lost to Russia, for the gold had been sent to that country at the time of the Spanish Civil War. Foreign aid was providing an important incentive to economic progress.

The study aims to identify the severe socioeconomic, environmental, and ecological impacts caused by the construction of mega and large hydro-power plants in Uttarakhand, India. In addition to identifying the attributes, the study creates an integrated index that will assist in the development of sustainable hydro-power.

The methodology used for this impact identification was based on extensive literature review, focused expert discussions and further validation through a primary survey among the stakeholders in the hydropower sector. The sustainability index (SI) was estimated using the fuzzy logic theory.

The study area SI shows that few projects are in extreme zones, and through suggestive measures, few project sites can be made viable for long-term sustainable project site. A Hydropower Sustainability Assessment Protocol–based conceptual model is also proposed for mitigation of impacts.

Hydropower plays an essential role in access to cleaner and cheaper sources of energy; it defines the usage of water resources toward inflation-free green energy and holds spectacular operational flexibility. Despite the significant advantages associated with hydroelectric power projects, there are adverse side effects as well. The water-based power sector industry contributes to any nation through both economic and environmental ways. Although one-third of the power business in India is carried out through water-based hydropower projects, recent trends in water-based hydropower projects show significant socioeconomic and environmental impacts that create a debate about the sustainability of these projects.

There are several approaches trying to explain the diffusion of renewable energy technologies (RET). The most commonly used instruments are learning and experience curves, followed by further economic, policy- and barrier-related analyses. In order to gain a more comprehensive understanding, additional influence factors on RET diffusion have to be studied. This paper aims to contribute to research on RET diffusion by adding the raw material price perspective.

The authors develop a regression model to test the influence of raw material prices on RET diffusion, using investments in RET capacities as indicators of diffusion, and crude oil and natural gas prices as well as public R&D subsidies as main independent variables. The model is then applied to emerging RET (wind and solar power) for electricity generation in 18 OECD-countries.

In the case of wind power, the model shows an adequate fit and a highly significant impact of oil as well as gas prices on investments in RET capacity. In the case of solar power, the impact of raw material prices proves to be highly significant as well, but the weak model fit demands further adjustments of the parameters.

Theoretical implications include the expansion of existing RET diffusion models to a raw material price component. From a practical point of view, the authors provide a starting basis for the systematic integration of raw material price developments into companies' planning and forecasting processes.

The purpose of this paper is to solve economic emission dispatch problem in connection of wind with hydro-thermal units.

The proposed hybrid methodology is the joined execution of both the modified salp swarm optimization algorithm (MSSA) with artificial intelligence technique aided with particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique.

The proposed approach is introduced to figure out the optimal power generated power from the thermal, wind farms and hydro units by minimizing the emission level and cost of generation simultaneously. The best compromise solution of the generation power outputs and related gas emission are subject to the equality and inequality constraints of the system. Here, MSSA is used to generate the optimal combination of thermal generator with the objective of minimum fuel and emission objective function. The proposed method also considers wind speed probability factor via PSO-artificial neural network (ANN) technique and hydro power generation at peak load demand condition to ensure economic utilization.

To validate the advantage of the proposed approach, six- and ten-units thermal systems are studied with fuel and emission cost. For minimizing the fuel and emission cost of the thermal system with the predicted wind speed factor, the proposed approach is used. The proposed approach is actualized in MATLAB/Simulink, and the results are examined with considering generation units and compared with various solution techniques. The comparison reveals the closeness of the proposed approach and proclaims its capability for handling multi-objective optimization problems of power systems.

Offers a case study describing how the Fossil and Hydro Power (F&HP) Organization of the Tennessee Valley Authority ‐ a finalist for the 1995 Presidential Award for Quality ‐ has taken information from feedback reports and other sources, and developed a strategy for implementing areas of opportunity into its core business. The strategy expands the plan‐do‐check‐act logic into a plan‐do‐knowledge‐act model which couples assessment information with theory ‐ in the form of the conceptual guidelines of the Baldrige criteria ‐ to create knowledge. Details how the model has been implemented at F&HP over the past three years, and describes the resulting accomplishments.