On Kuhn,Popper and teaching technological innovation management

Technological innovation plays a central role in economic growth and sustained research over the past 25 years has yielded an improved understanding of the multidisciplinary technological innovation process. The current concern of Western developed countries to improve their economies has created an educational need to provide courses on technological innovation management to mixed classes of science, engineering and management students. In teaching to students with diverse disciplinary and professional cultures without shared knowledge bases and value systems, it is useful to identify conceptual and methodological commonalities among the disciplines involved in this innovation process. This paper argues that Kuhn's and Popper's seminal contributions to the social psychology and epistemology of science appear to be implicitly reflected in more recent treatments of technological evolution and the pragmatic managerial evaluation of potential innovations. It explores commonalities and suggests that, by identifying them at the beginning of such a course, students can recognize common underlying psychological and methodological foundations to all aspects of the innovation process and aid their identification of future career paths for themselves in high-technology industries.     

Math MOOC UniTo : an Italian project on MOOCs for mathematics teacher education,and the development of a new theoretical framework

This paper focuses on MOOCs (massive open online courses), a fairly recent paradigm in e-learning educational projects. Despite the high dropout rate, and     

Constructively simple estimating: a project management example

A ‘constructively simple’ approach to estimating uses a decision support modelling paradigm based on project risk management and operational research concepts. It employs probability models selected from a set of alternative stochastic models of uncertainty with a view to maximising the insight provided, given an appropriate level of complexity. It addresses issues that include the joint use of subjective and objective probabilities, subjectivity of model data and structure, bias, data acquisition costs, the importance of getting an estimate right, optimising the estimating processes involved as a whole in approximate but robust terms, and differences in interpretation of what this means to estimators and users of estimates. Specific applications are necessarily context-specific to some extent, but the underlying ideas are of general applicability. This paper uses a simple example involving estimating the uncertain duration of a project activity to illustrate what is involved.     

Operations research practice on logistics management in Taiwan: An academic view

The opinions of logistics educators in Taiwan on OR practices in the domestic logistics industry are explored in this research. In this study, questionnaires were given to 42 pre-screened educators at 10 logistics departments and graduate institutes. According to the 37 valid returned questionnaires, 70% of the responding educators believe the major source of OR techniques in Taiwan’s logistics industry originates from individual employee training, while 92% believe OR is not widely used primarily because companies are unfamiliar with OR techniques. OR techniques were considered helpful in solving problems by 73%. Generally speaking, familiarity with OR techniques is not associated with implementation of OR techniques by educators. Additionally, logistics educators express concern about insufficient training for logistics students in Taiwan. However, they are optimistic about the logistics industry’s willingness to more actively adopt OR techniques in Taiwan in the next two years.     

System dynamics in project management: assessing the impacts of client behaviour on project performance

The influence of client behaviour on a project is complex, including schedule restrictions on milestones, high demand on progress reports, delays in approving documents, and changes to workscope throughout the life-cycle. Quantifying these effects is important to project managers, in particular for effective communication with the client. Traditional planning and control tools have proved ineffective at providing quick and reliable information. Their tendency to incorporate more detail has increased their complexity, inhibiting practical strategic analyses. System Dynamics provides an alternative view in which these major influences are considered and quantified explicitly. This approach dispenses with much of the detail required by the traditional tools, but enables modelling of the systemic effects which traditional tools cannot model. The authors have developed a conceptual framework in which System Dynamics models are combined with traditional tools providing complementary support, and validated it in a large software project. This paper describes the use of this framework to assess and quantify the impacts of client behaviour. A practical example is discussed.     

Finding an efficient solution to linear bilevel programming problem: An effective approach

Multilevel programming is developed to solve the decentralized problem in which decision makers (DMs) are often arranged within a hierarchical administrative structure. The linear bilevel programming (BLP) problem, i.e., a special case of multilevel programming problems with a two level structure, is a set of nested linear optimization problems over polyhedral set of constraints. Two DMs are located at the different hierarchical levels, both controlling one set of decision variables independently, with different and perhaps conflicting objective functions. One of the interesting features of the linear BLP problem is that its solution may not be Paretooptimal. There may exist a feasible solution where one or both levels may increase their objective values without decreasing the objective value of any level. The result from such a system may be economically inadmissible. If the decision makers of the two levels are willing to find an efficient compromise solution, we propose a solution procedure which can generate effcient solutions, without finding the optimal solution in advance. When the near-optimal solution of the BLP problem is used as the reference point for finding the efficient solution, the result can be easily found during the decision process.     

PSPLIB - A project scheduling problem library: OR Software - ORSEP Operations Research Software Exchange Program

We present a set of benchmark instances for the evaluation of solution procedures for single- and multi-mode resource-constrained project scheduling problems. The instances have been systematically generated by the standard project generator ProGen. They are characterized by the input-parameters of ProGen. The entire benchmark set including its detailed characterization and the best solutions known so-far are available on a public ftp-site. Hence, researchers can download the benchmark sets they need for the evaluation of their algorithms. Additionally, they can make available new results. Depending on the progress made in the field, the instance library will be continuously enlarged and new results will be made accessible. This should be a valuable and driving source for further improvements in the area of project type scheduling.     

Some geometrical aspects of the efficient line in vector optimization

Several relations are established between the proper ideal points and the extreme points, and also between the proper ideal points and the denting points. A necessary and sufficient geometrical condition is stated for a point to be a proper ideal point.     

Investment evaluation within project management: an information systems perspective

This paper is seeking to make a contribution through exploring project managementfrom the perspective of information systems (IS) investment evaluation.Organizational investments in IS are significant in financial terms and, as aresult, management would appear set to increasingly scrutinize such expenditurethrough tighter forms of decision-making and corporate governance. Inturn, this has increased the motivation of project managers toappropriately evaluate the impact of their IS before,during and after the investments are signed off. Thisperspective is not restricted to any one industry sector, with the authorseeking motivation for a better understanding of investment evaluation within aproject management context. This paper sets out to explain why andhow investment evaluation should be embedded in project managementin order to support an increase in the effectiveness of project management,thereby increasing the prospects of project success. While doing so,the reader will be provided with several touch-points that serve to outline thepurpose and challenges facing those seeking to evaluate their investments. Theauthor starts off with a contextualization of project management and its phasedactivities, such that a clear understanding of the contribution that investmentevaluation plays within robust project management can be demonstrated. Then, theperspective of investment versus consumption is presented, groundedwithin the strategic grid, which classifies information technology-basedprojects as either: strategic, turnaround, factory or support. The author thenpresents evaluation as a life-cycle process, where evaluation is classified intofour distinctive phases, namely ex-ante evaluation, metrics,command and control and ex-post evaluation, in doing so,emphasizing that evaluation needs to be seen as a process that runs through thelife cycle of a project rather than as a hurdle that needs to be cleared toensure financial approval.     

On the optimal management of project risk

The uncertainty of project networks has been mainly considered as the randomness of duration of the activities. However, another major problem for project managers is the uncertainty due to the randomness of the amount of resources required by each activity which can be expressed by the randomness of its cost. Such randomness can seriously affect the discounted cost of the project and it may be strongly correlated with the duration of the activity.In this paper, a model considering the randomness of both the cost and the duration of each activity is introduced and the problem of project scheduling is studied in terms of the project's discounted cost and of the risk of not meeting its completion time. The adoption of the earliest (latest) starting time for each activity decreases (increases) the risk of delays but increases (decreases) the discounted cost of the project. Therefore, an optimal compromise has to be achieved. This problem of optimization is studied in terms of the probability of the duration and of the discounted cost of the project falling outside the acceptable domain (Risk function) using the concept of float factor as major decision variable. This last concept is proposed to help the manager to synthetize the large number of the decision variables representing each schedule for the studied project. Numerical results are also presented for a specific project network.     

An effective and efficient approach for nonlinear seismic analysis of bridges

A simplified and practical approach for nonlinear seismic analysis of highway bridges is proposed. Efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed model is discussed in detail. The effects of soil-structure interaction, analysis methods, and bridge skews on bridge responses are also carefully examined. The results obtained from the simplified model are compared to those of refined models. The paper concludes with a number of real bridge examples and recommendations.     

ISB-tree: A new indexing scheme with efficient expected behaviour

We present the interpolation search B-tree (ISB-tree), a new cache-aware indexing scheme that supports update operations (insertions and deletions) in $O(1)$ worst-case block transfers and search operations in $O({\log }_B\log n)$ expected block transfers, where B represents the disk block size and n denotes the number of stored elements. The expected search bound holds with high probability for a large class of (unknown) input distributions. The worst-case search bound of our indexing scheme is $O({\log }_{B}n)$ block transfers. Our update and expected search bounds constitute a considerable improvement over the $O({\log }_{B}n)$ worst-case block transfer bounds for search and update operations achieved by the B-tree and its numerous variants. This is also verified by an accompanying experimental study.     

The effect of human agent in project management

The article deals with the effect of a human agent on the activity realization in a project. It does so from the perspective of the Theory of Constraints where the weakest point is the deadline of partial activity. Every existing activity in any project is, to a higher or lower extent, determined by the effect of the human agent. The inefficiency of a number of projects in practice is largely caused by an unsuccessful realization of partial activities. The effect of the human agent is in this respect fundamental. The human agent, as an allocated resource in the activity, is liable to a number of non-specified impacts and stimuli, and as such s/he is rather versatile in his/her behaviour. The versatility of the human agent in projects can be described by the “Student Syndrome” phenomenon and by the first “Parkinson’s law”. Both these qualitative phenomena create a starting point for the introduced theoretical and quantitative research. The findings in this article are based on the set of real data of work effort of the students of daily study programme on one university in the Czech Republic. The article presents, as the authors’ own theoretical contribution, a mathematical model for the “Student Syndrome” phenomenon with a practical use in quantitative methods of project management. This model was derived analytically from a performed data analysis and we can assume that it will be useful for further theoretical development of quantitative methods in project management. In the article we deduce the theoretical differentiation of the “Student Syndrome” phenomenon in work effort into three terminable phases during three different types of resource work allocation. We can regard this original viewpoint as suggestive for the area of human resources management in projects. Its contribution lies in delimitation of time-targeted resource stimulation, which may lead to lower project costs, besides higher work efficiency and compliance with time-targeted deadlines of activity termination. The article brings the quantification of qualitative features of the human agent in project management.     

Preface: Regression methods based on OR techniques and computational aspects in management,economics and finance

Annals of Operations Research -     

On the fallacy of averages in project risk management

Managers recognize the presence of uncertainty in the estimates of the various parameters of their projects, but usually circumvent the required analysis (which can be demanding) by replacing the random variables by their averages. This paper argues against such practice. It demonstrates that gross errors can be committed in cost estimates and in the bids based on them.