Amar Ramudhin

Harrisburg University of Science and Technology

In November 2016, Siemens Gamesa started construction of its £310-million, off-shore wind turbine blade assembly facility in the city of Kingston upon Hull in the UK. This paper adopted a mixed method approach, that is, maps, charts and tables and meta analysis to investigate the social acceptability of local residents to such investments using fee...

With growing concerns about sustainability, competing companies in the food supply chain are compelled to engage in non-traditional forms of collaboration. Coopetition (i.e. horizontal collaboration with competitors) is gaining attention as a means of improving sustainability performance in supply chains. However, little is known in the existing li...

This paper proposes a framework for evaluating the strategic importance of container ports based on their connectivity. The Container Port Connectivity Index is computed and decomposed into components according to the Liner Shipping Connectivity Index —each reflecting its contribution to the overall port importance score. The framework produces sep...

The management of seafood processing by-products (SPBPs) is an interesting but underexplored topic in the circular economy (CE) research stream. The extant CE literature is mainly devoted to the topic's theoretical aspects and largely neglects the linkages between theory and practice, particularly in developing countries. This paper aims to empiric...

In recent years, there have been significant efforts to examine the organization and performance of health systems. This study’s main purpose is to compare health systems and analyze the health status of the citizens of Comoros, Mauritius, and Seychelles, with the intention of providing policy recommendations for Comoros. Peer- reviewed studies and...

Purpose The COVID-19 outbreak has imposed extensive shocks embracing all stages of the food supply chain (FSC). Although the magnitude is still unfolding, the FSC responds with remarkable speed, to mitigate the disruptive consequences and sustain operations. This paper aims to investigate how operationalising supply chain agility (SCA) practices ha...

Circular Economy (CE) aims to retain the maximum value of products and materials for a longer time in a closed-loop manner, thereby decoupling natural resource usage from economic growth. Food waste reduction is one of the top priorities under the recent European Union’s CE Package. It also contributes to achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable D...

The growing plastic waste problem has been highlighted by nature programmes like the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) War on Plastic series with the World Economic Forum (WEF) 2016 report estimating that by 2050, there could be more plastic than fish in the world's oceans. This has prompted the call for a shift from the linear model of tackli...

The supply chain plays an essential role in the cost reduction of offshore wind energy. Supply chain complexity is a major driver of end-to-end supply chain costs and at the same time a source of competitive advantage. In this study, a strategic complexity management approach is suggested for analysing and controlling the complexity of the supply c...

Renewable energy is a sustainable solution for reducing environmental impacts resulted from total energy production and consumption. The offshore wind energy as a clean energy choice of electricity production has been growing fast. There is a large amount of literature on the cost reduction strategies of offshore wind energy. In this study, the key...

In this paper, we provide a model which optimizes the allocation of electricity generation systems, in terms of their number and location, in a disaster relief camp. The objectives that this model takes into account are minimization of the total cost of the project and prioritization of those generation systems that perform favourably. Energy and s...

The availability of wind resources around the world makes it an interesting alternative for clean energy. Offshore wind energy with considerable evolution in technology and investment becomes a sustainable source of renewable energy in the future. Technical feasibility and geographical constraints, demand for energy and the stability of regions for...

Offshore wind turbines (OWTs) are subjected to different sort of failures due to harsh operation environment. Thus, risk analysis of OWTs is a critical task for making wind energy competitive to conventional sources and achieving the desirable renewable targets. Researches in the field of risk analysis of wind turbines have gained dramatically incr...

While the technology of offshore wind production is more or less mature, there are still many issues to be solved for mass production and deployment of wind farms at reasonable costs. Hence, one of the challenging topics in developing a supply-chain strategy of offshore wind energy is efficiency on the one hand and meeting the requirements of stabi...

Offshore wind turbines (OWTs) are subjected to different sort of failures due to harsh operation environment. Thus, risk analysis of OWTs is a critical task for making wind energy competitive to conventional sources and achieving the desirable renewable targets. Researches in the field of risk analysis of wind turbines have gained dramatically incr...

Sustainable city logistics plans could significantly affect the quality of life in the urban environment. Evaluating sustainable city logistics initiatives such as urban distribution centres, congestion pricing, delivery timing and access restrictions is a complex problem since several subjective and objective criteria and constraints should be tak...

The offshore wind industry is expanding rapidly around the world due to several factors enabling this source of renewable energy. Stronger wind resources in offshore areas, lack of social and geographical constraints related to onshore wind power, the evolution of technology, and increasing demand for electricity in coastal regions as a result of a...

We propose a new index, the Container Port Connectivity Index, to measure the trade connectivity of ports within the network of container shipping. This index is based on both economics and network topology, and a distinctive feature is that the strength of a port is based on its position within the global structure of the shipping network, and not...

This paper represents an initial step in considering the challenges of supporting the competitiveness and growth of the Humber's economy, focusing on those factors that are known to influence GVA and productivity in localities. The paper is not intended to provide a comprehensive comparative analysis of the Humber with comparable regions, nor to id...

The aim of this paper is to present an optimization model for the design of supply chain network with special consideration paid to the bills of materials (BOM). We consider the design of a multi-echelon supply chain network in a single period, multi-country and deterministic context for a company in the aeronautic industry. The network comprises o...

Sustainable Supply Chain Network Design involves taking into account social, economic and environmental objectives at design time. While the social dimension is sometime harder to capture or quantify in mathematical terms, the Emission Trading Schema (ETS) introduces a natural trade-off between the economic and the environmental dimensions. This ar...

The design of a supply chain network is of great importance as it aims at optimizing costs throughout the supply chain. Traditionally, this optimization has considered operations related costs such as sourcing, production, transportation, inventory at each site in the network. Quality related costs were either ignored or considered indirectly. In a...

Increase in environmental concerns together with legislations are forcing industries to take a fresh look at the impact of their supply chain operations on the environment. This paper introduces a mixed-integer linear programming based framework for sustainable supply chain design that considers life cycle assessment (LCA) principles in addition to...

Increasing social awareness together with the new regulations for carbon and waste management are forcing enterprises to reconsider their supply chains with respect to economic, social and environmental objectives. Furthermore, cap and trade legislation for greenhouse gas emissions introduces a new level of complexity. This article presents a compr...

Six-sigma methodology provides real and concrete results in healthcare systems by mitigating and eliminating variations in critical processes. However, using Six-sigma alone in complex environments can lead to unproductive and inefficient work due to a misunderstanding of the process interactions. Combination of both business process modeling and s...

Multi‐criteria decision‐making techniques have been used to solve a range of real world problems in management science and specific supply chain management (SCM) problems (e.g. supply chain design and reconfiguration, purchasing, scheduling, supplier selection). The results obtained are encouraging. Nevertheless, robust approaches for solving multi...

We present a supply chain optimisation model that simultaneously considers sourcing decisions for each part in a complex multi‐level bill of materials (BOM) but decides on which should be assembled into subassemblies or modules. Indeed, some parts in the BOM are flexible in the sense that they can be grouped with other parts or subassemblies to for...

Supply chain modelling is attracting the interest of many researchers and is a topic that has application in real-life management practices. In the aerospace industry, quality is an important factor and suppliers are chosen on the basis of quality as well as cost. By integrating cost of quality (COQ) into supply chain network design (SCND), manager...

Increasing environmental concerns together with legislations are forcing industries to take a fresh look at the impact of their supply chain operations on the environment. This paper introduces a mixed-integer linear programming based framework for sustainable supply chain design that considers life cycle assessment (LCA) principles in addition to...

The synchronization of nursing and pharmacy workflows are essential for rapid and safe initiation of medication therapy. This study describes the situation in a Canadian hospital where the time to initial dose was considered to be too high although both nursing and pharmacy personnel worked hard to ensure the standards and quality of their services...

This paper describes a study of the registration and admission processes of patients in a specialized North American hospital. The methodology employed is comprised of extensive discussions with the hospital administration as well as observations of the current processes, detailed modeling and validation of the processes using specialized medical b...

Increasing regulatory legislations for carbon and waste management and the focus on corporate social responsibility are driving a major focus on supply chain sustainability. In this research, a goal programming model is proposed to address a supply chain design problem with environmental considerations. Carbon emissions (environmental dimension) an...

Increasing regulatory legislations for carbon and waste management and the concerns on corporate social responsibility are driving forces behind sustainable supply chain network design which involves taking into account social, economic and environmental objectives at design time. While the social dimension is sometime harder to capture or quantify...

In the aerospace industry quality is an important factor and suppliers are chosen on the basis of quality as well as cost. By integrating cost of quality (COQ) into supply chain network design (SCND), managers could make decisions based on operational costs and also based on quality non-conformance costs. This paper presents a case study for a lead...

This paper introduces a mixed integer mathematical model formulation for the ¿Carbon-Market Sensitive - Green Supply Chain Network Design¿ problem (CMS/GSCND) where carbon trading considerations are integrated within the supply chain network design phase. The solution methodology allows the evaluation of different strategic decisions alternatives...

Purpose – This paper aims at exploring the challenges of introducing a model integrating the Cost of Quality (COQ) into the modeling of a supply chain network. Design/methodology/approach – This paper introduces a comprehensive supply chain model that minimizes a series of costs, in which COQ is integrated. Findings – The scenario of incorporating...

Radio frequency identification (RFID) has received a lot of attention lately. It is said that RFID tags will provide real time tracking of every item in the supply chain, providing end to end visibility and therefore total control over the supply chain. Yet, the technology is still in its infancy and it is very difficult for practitioners to distin...

Operations Research has addressed a variety of environmental problems outside the traditional supply chain management area such as remanufacturing, reverse logistics, and waste management. Supply chain sustainability, which includes designing green supply chains, will gain much more attention in the future. Indeed, most companies are still in the e...

Systems as complex as healthcare raise several challenges when applying a business process modelling approach within improvement projects. Although there is an abundance of process modelling frameworks, each with their own areas of emphasis, there is still room for a methodology which is specifically able capture all of the dimensions of interest p...

In this paper we study a class of multi-item lot-sizing problems with dynamic demands, as well as lower and upper bounds on a shared resource with a piecewise linear cost. The shared resource might be supply, production or transportation capacity. The model is particularly applicable to problems with joint shipping and/or purchasing cost discounts....

Changing market conditions have forced a major aircraft engine manufacturer to review its entire supply chain and the way it should operate. In this paper we first describe the changes faced by the manufacturer and then present a mathematical programming model that will help the manufacturer in his sourcing decisions for the assembly of an engine c...

The healthcare domain represents unique challenges from the business process perspective. Although there is an abundance of business process modeling tools currently available, each with their own areas of emphasis, there is still room for a tool which is able to capture all of the dimensions of interest particular to healthcare organizations. An i...

We study a 2-machine flowshop in which all processing times are independently and identically distributed, with values known to the scheduler.

This paper is motivated by the availability improvement of a single randomly failing machine whose state is only known through inspection. Jobs to be processed on the machine arrive according to a random distribution and the processing of each job induces a shock whose magnitude depends on the job's desired operating characteristics. These shocks c...

We study a 2-machine flowshop in which all processing times are inde- pendently and identically distributed, with values known to the scheduler. We are able to describe in detail the expected behavior of the flowshop under optimal and under heuristic schedules. Our results suggest that minimizing makespan might be a superfluous objective: Schedulin...

We generalize the Shifting Bottleneck Procedure (SBP), proposed by Adams et al. in 1988 for jobshop scheduling, to solve various types of scheduling problems including openshops, assembly shops and shops where only a partial ordering on operations pertaining to each job or machine is specified. In its original version, SBP uses a clever definition...

Current industrial trends favor distributed manufacturing with extensive use of subcontracting. In this context we present a two—level decision support system for operations scheduling where a set of firms (subcontractors) is competing for the realization of the manufacturing operations pertaining to a product. We consider the case where operation...

We study the problem of generating daily production schedules in a two-stage production system that is typical of many processing industries. We first describe the problem as it occurs in practice, and then present an integer programming model that maximizes a weighted sum of the customer orders to be processed in a day's work when a priori product...

We consider the problem of scheduling a two-stage processing system where each stage consists of a set of independent parallel processors. A job requires processing on a processor from each set and no-wait schedules are required. We show that this problem is hard for it generalizes jobshop and flowshop scheduling. This observation provides a new co...

We study the problem of distributing a set of activities, with precedence constraints in the form of an assembly tree, among a set of competing firms with the objective of minimizing total cost. Each firm bidding for an activity specifies a production cost, an activity duration for its achievement and a maintenance cost for the upkeep of this activ...

This paper presents a simple yet effective approach for unquality-costing in an outsourcing/subcontracting environment. It first presents some of the usual approaches for defining supply relations based on cost-quality issues and then introduces our proposed unquality-costing sampling plans by variables. The approach is derived from the Taguchi los...

Ph.D. H. Donald Ratliff

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia Institute of Technology, 1990. Directed by H. Donald Ratliff (U.M. order no. 91-05,458). Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 156-164).