Search results

The purpose of this paper is to create a model of FM and location variables in the dimensions of location and recessions.

The approach is based on statistical analysis and quantitative methodology.

Significant differences and correlations argue for four settings with different features, first, in the dimension of single or multiple site locations, and second, the dimension in low and high growth of GDP, here termed “recession” and “boom”, respectively.

This paper is a relevant study for growth firms in multiple facilities management perspectives.

A better knowledge and decision basis related to relocation and behaviour of FM during fluctuations of GDP is expected.

The paper presents a survey of FM‐related data that covers an entire nation and all major business sectors, collected concerning two successive periods, and analysed.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a model for a target searching problem in a two-dimensional region with time constraints. The proposed model facilitates the search operation by minimizing the mission time and fuel usage, and the search operation is performed by a set of agents divided into a number of groups.

The authors have applied optimization techniques, Cartesian product, inclusion–exclusion principle, cooperative strategy, Shapley value, fuzzy Shapley function and Choquet integral to model the problem.

The proposed technique optimizes the placement of base stations that minimizes the sortie length of the agents. The results show that the cooperative strategy outperforms the non-cooperative strategy. The Shapley values quantify the rewards of each group based on their contributions to the search operation, whereas the fuzzy Shapley values determine the rewards of each group based on their contributions and level of cooperation in the search operation.

The proposed model can be applied to model many real-time problems such as patrolling in international borders, urban areas, forests and managing rescue operations after natural calamities, etc. Therefore, defence organizations, police departments and other operation management sectors will be benefitted by applying the proposed approach.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, determining the optimal locations of base stations in a region is not explored in the existing works on target searching problems with fuel constraints. The proposed approach to cooperatively search the targets in a region is new. Introducing the Shapley function and fuzzy Shapley function is a novel idea to quantify the rewards of each group based on their contributions and level of cooperation in the search operation. This paper addresses these unexplored areas.

Determination of new warehouse locations is an important managerial decision. The problem typically involves a number of considerations such as cost per distance of distribution to and from the warehouse, volume of distribution, fixed and variable site costs, service performance of the warehouse and potential increases in demand (or service), as well as many other factors. The economic significance of warehouse location decisions is increasing, particularly due to expected increases in transportation costs, competition for market share and changing demand patterns.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the major challenges to managing multiple project environments (MPE) in Australia.

The views from Australian project management practitioners drawn from various industrial sectors were collected via an e‐mailed questionnaire survey. The respondents were asked to rate a total of 22 challenges that affect the management of multiple project environments as identified from the literature review. The results of the questionnaire were analysed using ranking analysis.

The findings show that “commitment and responsibility”, “leading projects”, “planning”, and “conflict and communication” are perceived as the four challenges of most importance. Furthermore, the 22 challenges could be classified into 11 sub groupings: project management processes; competencies of project managers; project assignments; human resource allocation; resource availability; organisational culture; problem solving; competition among projects; information sharing; management of a single project; and project location.

The study forms the basis for further research. Replication of this study to other parts of the industries and world about how identification of major challenges in managing multiple projects could be used as a basis for developing appropriate strategies aimed at improving the competencies of project managers.

Based on the findings, the project management practitioners could develop a better understanding of the challenges needed to be overcome in order to perform effectively. Furthermore, the identification of these challenges could form the basis for the development of guidelines and provision of useful information for development of strategies aimed at improving the effectiveness and efficiency of project managers operating within the multiple projects environments in Australia.

In this paper, major challenges to improving the effectiveness and efficiency of project managers in managing MPEs in Australia are identified and analysed.

Prior to 2020, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Library's research services spanned multiple service points. Multiple locations were staffed by Library Student Research Assistants (LSRAs) and each location was supervised independently. While efforts to increase collaboration had been underway, much of the work and services remained siloed and often duplicated training and service hours.

With the onset of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), UCLA Library rapidly transitioned from entirely in-person to entirely online services. With multiple service points pivoting, UCLA was redundant to have multiple online desks providing Zoom appointments and that quickly became apparent. Moreover, transitioning in-person student work to remote work was paramount to providing both normal services to users and allowing LSRAs to keep jobs during a time of uncertainty and insecurity.

While the authors' original consolidation of services and implementation of shared supervision was a result of the pandemic and primarily involved online services, the authors have maintained this shared approach and collaborative vision in returning to in-person services. For the past year, the authors have offered shared in-person (at two library locations) and online services. As subject-specific library locations begin to reopen their desks, the authors continue to identify ways to leverage shared supervision and a robust referral model for those on-site services while negotiating student staffing and the need for both general and subject-specific services.

The authors present a novel approach to peer-to-peer teaching and learning and research services and shared student worker supervision with services coordinated across multiple locations and disciplines within a large academic library serving a large student population.

This study aims to thoroughly examine the trends and developments of crane layout planning (CLP) in the construction field and reveal future research directions for modular integrated construction (MiC).

Through a rigorous systematic mixed-review methodology that integrates bibliometric, scientometric and qualitative analysis, this study explored the crane layout research trend; the scientometric analysis of journal sources and keywords occurrence network; the research contributions and links between influential countries; the classification of research articles based on the type of problems and solution approaches; the qualitative analysis of existing findings and research gaps; and the future research direction for CLP in MiC.

This study found five categories under the CLP domain, namely, crane selection, crane location, integrated crane selection and location, integrated crane location and allocation of supply points and hybrid problems. The major research approaches used to solve CLP is optimization (43%), visualization (23%), decision support systems (16%), simulation (11%) and qualitative techniques (7%). The possible future research directions include artificial intelligence-based models, multi-crane locations, CLP for MiC re-use, dynamic models representing real-life scenarios and building information modeling-based virtual reality models.

Through a mixed-review methodology, this study provides a comprehensive analysis of problem settings and solution methods of CLP while mitigating the subjectivity of traditional review methods. Also, it presents a repertoire on CLP and illuminates future directions for seasoned researchers in the context of MiC.

Numerical simulations are performed to determine the heat transfer characteristics of slot jet impingement of air on a concave surface. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of protrusions on the heat transfer by placing semi-circular protrusions on the concave surface at several positions. After identifying appropriate locations where the heat transfer is a maximum, multiple protrusions are placed at desired locations on the plate. The gap ratio, curvature ratio (d/D) and the dimensions of the plate are varied so as to obtain heat transfer data. The curvature ratio is varied first, keeping the concave diameter (D) fixed followed by a fixed slot width (d). A surrogate model based on an artificial neural network is developed to determine optimum locations of the protrusions that maximize the heat transfer from the concave surface.

The scope and objectives of the present study are two-dimensional numerical simulations of the problem by considering all the geometrical parameters (H/d, d_p, Re, θ) affecting heat transfer characteristics with the help of networking tool and numerical simulation. Development of a surrogate forward model with artificial neural networks (ANNs) with a view to explore the full parametric space. To quantitatively ascertain if protrusions hurt or help heat transfer for an impinging jet on a concave surface. Determination of the location of protrusions where higher heat transfer could be achieved by using exhaustive search with the surrogate model to replace the time consuming forward model.

A single protrusion has nearly no effect on the heat transfer. For a fixed diameter of concave surface, a smaller jet possesses high turbulence kinetic energy with greater heat transfer. ANN is a powerful tool to not only predict impingement heat transfer characteristics by considering multiple parameters but also to determine the optimum configuration from many thousands of candidate solutions. A maximum increase of 8 per cent in the heat transfer is obtained by the best configuration constituting of multiple protrusions, with respect to the baseline smooth configuration. Even this can be considered as marginal and so it can be concluded that first cut results for heat transfer for an impinging jet on a concave surface with protrusions can be obtained by geometrically modeling a much simpler plain concave surface without any significant loss of accuracy.

The heat transfer during impingement cooling depends on various geometrical parameters but, not all the pertinent parameters have been varied comprehensively in previous studies. It is known that a rough surface may improve or degrade the amount of heat transfer depending on their geometrical dimensions of the target and the rough geometry and the flow conditions. Furthermore, to the best of authors’ knowledge, scarce studies are available with inclusion of protrusions over a concave surface. The present study is devoted to development of a surrogate forward model with ANNs with a view to explore the full parametric space.

The purpose of this study is to solve NP-Hard drone routing problem for the last-mile distribution. This is suitable for the multi-drones parcel delivery for the various items from a warehouse to many locations.

This study conducts as a mission assignment of the single location per flight with the constraint satisfactions such as various payloads in weight, drone speeds, flight times and coverage distances. A genetic algorithm is modified as the concurrent heuristics approach (GCH), which has the knapsack problem dealing initialization, gene elitism (crossover) and gene replacement (mutation). Those proposed operators can reduce the execution time consuming and enhance the routing assignment of multiple drones. The evaluation value of the routing assignment can be calculated from the chromosome/individual representation by applying the proposed concurrent fitness.

This study optimizes the total traveling time to accomplish the distribution. GCH is flexible and can provide a result according to the first-come-first-served, demanded weight or distance priority.

GCH is an alternative option, which differs from conventional vehicle routing researches. Such researches (traveling time optimization) attempt to minimize the total traveling time, distance or the number of vehicles by assuming all vehicles have the same traveling speed; therefore, a specific vehicle assignment to a location is neglected. Moreover, the main drawback is those concepts can lead the repeated selection of best quality vehicles concerning the speed without considering the vehicle fleet size and coverage distance while this study defines the various speeds for the vehicles. Unlike those, the concurrent concept ensures a faster delivery accomplishment by sharing the work load with all participant vehicles concerning to their different capabilities. If the concurrent assignment is applied to the drone delivery effectively, the entire delivery can be accomplished relatively faster than the traveling time optimization.

This paper examines the role of location‐specific (L) advantages in the spatial distribution of multinational enterprise (MNE) R&D activity. The meaning of L advantages is revisited. In addition to L advantages that are industry‐specific, the paper emphasises that there is an important category of L advantages, referred to as collocation advantages.

Using the OLI framework, this paper highlights that the innovation activities of MNEs are about interaction of these variables, and the essential process of internalising L advantages to enhance and create firm‐specific advantages.

Collocation advantages derive from spatial proximity to specific unaffiliated firms, which may be suppliers, competitors, or customers. It is also argued that L advantages are not always public goods, because they may not be available to all firms at a similar or marginal cost. These costs are associated with access and internalisation of L advantages, and – especially in the case of R&D – are attendant with the complexities of embeddedness.

The centralisation/decentralisation, spatial separation/collocation debates in R&D location have been mistakenly viewed as a paradox facing firms, instead of as a trade‐off that firms must make.

The efficient delivery of environmental information to wayfinders in complex environments is a challenge for information designers. Wayfinding tasks can be quite strenuous and frustrating in the visual absence of dedicated wayfinding information. This study aims to explore the behaviour regarding the use of wayfinding information by navigators in complex environments.

An experiment has been conducted in which participants have performed wayfinding tasks in a spatially complex university campus. The participants were instructed to use the think-aloud protocol during the experiment. The behaviour has been recorded using the head-mounted video recorder (GoPro), mobile phone screen (audio\video) recorder and interview. Twelve university students have been selected based on the equal level of spatial ability using the Santa Barbara Sense of Direction scale. Each participant performed three wayfinding tasks to locate the unknown locations inside the campus using a mobile wayfinding application and other information sources.

The results of this study demonstrated significant behavioural preferences in acquiring wayfinding information. Most of the participants synthesised the static and mobile wayfinding information sources, while some preferred only the static ones. Gender differences have also been found for planning and route finding. This study recommends the syntheses of static and mobile wayfinding information for designing an efficient institutional wayfinding system.

The sample size has been kept small because of the qualitative exploration of the wayfinding behaviour regarding the wayfinding information syntheses behaviour. The experiment findings can be further explored with larger data set and controlled behavioural metrics. This study can help understand the user requirements in facilities management for spatially complex institutional environments.

The current findings can be further used to develop a framework for wayfinding information designers to assist them in understanding the current practices and incorporate them for improving institutional wayfinding systems. The management of the offered facilities within an institution can be further improved to make the space more efficient by saving users’ time and efforts.

Information syntheses or symbiosis of environmental information with the beacon-based digital wayfinding system is a new concept. This study explores the potential of such information syntheses for enhancing the legibility of complex institutional environments.