Shaligram Pokharel

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Qatar University

Aesthetic control is concerned with the visual appearance of the built environment, specifically in the urban setting. The built environment aesthetics can directly influence place identity, property values and the business owners' financial status in the area. People's behavior in terms of choosing a place to live or do business is also affected b...

Strategic projects are critical for the sustenance of an organization; however, they are subject to different types of constraints in terms of risk, management capabilities, resources, and political and cultural factors. Therefore, prioritizing and selecting these projects becomes a challenging task in each organization that focuses on multiple str...

With the increasing need for cooling and the concerns for pollution due to fossil fuel-based energy use, renewable energy is considered an add-on to cooling technologies. The climatic condition in the Middle East, analyzed in this paper, provides the potential to integrate solar energy with the cooling system. Due to the availability of various sol...

The greenhouse gas emissions due to the energy use in production and distribution in a supply chain are of interest to industries aiming to achieve decarbonization. The industry subjected to carbon regulations require recycling and reusing materials to promote a circular economy through a closed-loop supply chain (CLSC). In this research, we propos...

Strategic projects are large scale, complex, and require significant investments and resources. These projects aim at gaining long-term social and economic benefits. Therefore, organizations focusing on strategic projects should use a consistent approach that suits their strategy, capability, and long-term expectations. Based on the four research q...

In this paper, we address the assignment problem of skills to servers (e.g., repairmen) in a multi-server repair shop of a spare parts supply system. This type of assignment problems tends to be hard in general, due to the lack of analytical queuing models with skill-based item-server assignments. In this paper, we propose a joint skill-server assi...

This paper investigates the capacitated green vehicle routing problem (GVRP) with time-varying vehicle speed and soft time windows. The GVRP is developed as a multi-objective mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model that incorporates a fuel consumption calculation algorithm. The proposed model considers the vehicle load and capacity as wel...

Carbon footprinting of products and services is getting increasing attention due to the growing emphasis on carbon related policies in many countries. As a result, many enterprises are focusing on the design of green supply chains (GSCs) with research on supply chains (SCs) focused not only on cost efficiency, but also on its environmental conseque...

This is the information from the Journal to download a free copy until May 25, 2019. "To help you access and share this work, we have created a Share Link – a personalized URL providing 50 days' free access to your article. Anyone clicking on this link before May 25, 2019 will be taken directly to the final version of your article on ScienceDirect...

This is the information from the Journal to download a free copy until May 25, 2019. "To help you access and share this work, we have created a Share Link – a personalized URL providing 50 days' free access to your article. Anyone clicking on this link before May 25, 2019 will be taken directly to the final version of your article on Science Direct...

An effective spare part supply system planning is essential to achieve a high capital asset availability. We investigate the design problem of a repair shop in a single echelon repairable multi-item spare parts supply system. The repair shop usually consists of several servers with different skill sets. Once a failure occurs in the system, the fail...

Purpose: In most countries, development, growth, and sustenance of industrial facilities are given utmost importance due to the influence in the socio-economic development of the country. Therefore, special economic zones, or industrial areas or industrial cities are developed in order to provide the required services for the sustained operation of...

The required talent of 21 st century engineering and technology human resource is significantly different and more complex than what has been needed ever before. Numerous relevant studies have been conducted during the last decade or two. The studies generally follow a needs based approach rather than a systemic study. In a systemic study for under...

Recent studies emphasize the needs of a wider set of skills engineers require than ever thought. In this paper, authors report on a systematic literature review on this issue. Findings of the review are spanned over two main folds: 1-A conceptual ontological framework of engineering skills in the context of generic-and employability-skills of KBS a...

Prepositioning of resources for humanitarian assistance to the victims of natural disaster is an important consideration to mitigate the problem that occurs due to the shortage in the supply of resources. Prepositioned resources should be distributed in the affected areas. Although prepositioning of the resources in natural cases like an earthquake...

Elsevier Science Lld Copyrieht '{'' 1995 United Nations Printed in G r m Brilain. All rights rcurvcd 0165-0203(95)00039-9 Cooking is the major energy end use in most developing countries. A general model to calculate energy-use cost for cooking with I S combinations of fuel and end use device based on prevailing market conditions is proposed by thi...

In this study, we address the design problem of a single repair shop in a repairable multi-item spare part supply system. We propose a sequential solution heuristic to solve the joint problem of resource pooling, inventory allocation, and capacity level designation of the repair shop with stochastic failure and repair time of repairables. The pooli...

Over the years, modeling and simulation have become conventional methods, tools and techniques that are used by engineers, building owners (managers), building tenants, and environment authorities to understand the behavior and characteristics of energy in buildings. In this chapter, a simulation‐based parametric study on the thermal comfort and co...

This chapter discusses energy audit practices, techniques, and implementations in infrastructures. Energy audit requirements and classifications are explained. Audit is applied on building lighting, with different lighting technologies, such as lights and luminaires. Room index is illustrated to show how it is used to obtain utilization factor of l...

We study a spare part supply system for repairable spare parts where parallel repair servers may have multiple skills (can repair different failed parts). Demands for the spares occur according to Poisson processes with different rates. The failed spare parts are immediately replaced from the inventory. Otherwise, failed parts are backordered and f...

This research proposes a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) framework and demonstrates the impact of competitive conditions on supplier evaluation process for construction supply chains. The paper focuses on the supply chain of a large-scale housing project in order to illustrate the role of competitive capability and suppliers’ profile and its...

We propose a decision support framework to design a single repair shop in a single echelon repairable spare part supply system. The framework integrates heuristics or meta-heuristic techniques to solve the joint problem of skill-server assignment (cross-training), inventory and capacity level designation of the repair shop.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the use of Petri nets in a job shop setup for the improvement in the utilization of machines. Design/methodology/approach The study discusses concepts such as reachable state, token and matrix equations set, and demonstrates the improvements in machines’ utilization in a job shop. It makes use of...

The emergence of concerns over environmental protection, resource conservation as well as the development of logistics operations and manufacturing technology has led several countries to implement formal collection and recycling systems of solid waste. Such recycling system has the benefits of reducing environmental pollution, boosting the economy...

A spare part supply system for repairable spares in a repair shop is modeled as a set of heterogeneous parallel servers that have the ability to repair only certain types of repairables. The proposed model minimizes the total cost of holding inventory for spare parts, cost for backorder arising from downtime of the system due to the lack of spare p...

An ADP is a production and delivery plan LNG suppliers to fulfill contractual requirements. It is subject to random disturbances during the implementation, which may increase the planned costs. We develop a model simulating the ADP implementation along with contingency plans, and compare alternative ADPs using the model.

Government legislation and consumer awareness on carbon emissions have required industries to seek alternative ways to reorganize their supply chains. Therefore, industries have to consider not only the activities in the forward supply chain but also in the reverse supply chain. An integrated supply chain, that combines the activities of both the f...

We extend the classical economic order quantity model to address the joint replenishment of multiple products under substitution. The proposed model optimizes ordering quantities for each product under substitution effects with the objective of minimizing the total cost associated with the setup, holding, and shortage of products, while partially m...

Carbon emission is a concern across the industry due to its environmental impact. In order to reduce carbon emissions, industry have to look not only at their processes but also in the generation of emissions in the whole supply chain that it belongs to. This is more necessary when various forms of carbon emissions policies are faced by the industr...

Resource planning in emergency response phase is challenging primarily because the resources have to be delivered to the affected regions in a timely manner and in right quantities. Disasters such as the hurricanes, epidemics and chemical explosions in general impact large regions and emergency supplies are needed for several days. Demand for the r...

In this paper, a three-echelon network model is proposed for integrated emergency preparedness and response planning for the distribution of emergency supplies. The model minimizes the social cost to identify a set of potential supply points (SPs) at the highest echelon, where supply items are consolidated and sent to the prepositioning facilities....

The main challenge of new product-service supplier (PSS) selection is the lack of historical performance information of the suppliers. As one of the most popular techniques in supplier evaluation, the analytic network process (ANP) has an advantage in organising and analysing PSS pre-evaluation problems. However, the decision information distortion...

Developing a cost-effective annual delivery program (ADP) is a challenging task for liquefied natural gas (LNG) suppliers, especially for LNG supply chains with large number of vessels and customers. Given significant operational costs in LNG delivery operations, cost-effective ADPs can yield substantial savings, adding up to millions. Providing an...

We propose a network flow model for dynamic selection of temporary distribution facilities and allocation of resources for emergency response planning. The model analyzes the transfer of excess resources between temporary facilities operating in different time periods in order to reduce deprivation. Numerical analysis shows that the location of tem...

This paper proposes an environmental assessment framework that integrates the conventional life cycle assessment (LCA) with risk assessment for the purpose of evaluating energy conservation systems in buildings from environmental and societal perspectives. The inclusion of the potential risks raised by the different stakeholders in this framework w...

The work provided herein involves a comparison of natural gas and hydrogen fuels for the purpose of energy conservation for buildings via alternative energy generation methodologies. A case study simulation was developed for an average type of commercial building, a nine storey hotel located in Toronto. The two alternative energy source case studie...

Energy use in residential and commercial buildings and towers represents more than 30% of energy consumption. The increase in number of buildings and towers in most of the major cities worldwide led to several initiatives for energy conservation programs with the main objective to achieve energy savings. Most energy strategies include energy conser...

The thermal losses in buildings are significant energy sinks. The Energy Semantic Network (ESN) is a new method for finding these losses at the design stage, as well as for the existing structures. The research purpose of ESN is to take into consideration the governing factors of building thermal performance (i.e. the insulation materials, the dime...

The work presented herein illustrates the use of computational intelligence and optimization approaches for improving the fuzzy controller׳s performance in architectural heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system (HVAC). The primary purpose of the performed research is to find a method to moderate the energy use without compromising the comf...

In order to support the growing interest in demand response modeling and analysis, there is a need for physical-based building load models. This work presents a new approach for simulating electrical power flow in buildings. The new approach handles the power flow capacity shortage in existing building simulation programs, which have been used for...

The required talent of 21st century engineering and technology human resource is significantly different and more complex than what has been needed ever before. Numerous relevant studies have been conducted during the last decade or two. The studies generally follow a needs based approach rather than a systemic study. In a systemic study for unders...

The main objectives of this paper are to: identify key performance indicators (KPIs) related to intelligent buildings (economical, environmental, reliability, and quality), and; propose a simulation framework for evaluation of these KPIs. Energy simulation of a building is a key to study the energy efficiency in the building. This paper presents an...

In this paper, a parametric study on the thermal comfort and cooling performance of residential buildings is reported. The study was carried out in the hot arid climatic conditions of Qatar. The influence of diurnal variation of the solar flux, changes in the ambient temperature profiles and the thermal inertia of the building energy system were an...

In this paper, an analysis and evaluation of the operations of a typical shopping mall in Qatar was carried out. The aim is to optimize operations towards high energy performance with respect to cooling energy. For the study, a comparison of the energy consumption of two cooling system operation strategies, i.e., scheduled and unscheduled district...

Recent studies emphasize the needs of a wider set of skills engineers require than ever thought. In this paper, authors report on a systematic literature review on this issue. Findings of the review are spanned over two main folds: 1- A conceptual ontological framework of engineering skills in the context of generic- and employability- skills of KB...

Demand uncertainty leads to fluctuations in inventory position at each echelon of a supply chain causing bullwhip effect, which can lead to significant cost and loss of efficiency and waste of resources. One of the aspects that can reduce potential bullwhip effect is the sharing of real time information for which the recently mass produced Radio Fr...

Energy is an important driver for the socio-economic development of a country. Only a sufficient amount of quality energy can promote economic development and satisfy energy demand of the people. Therefore, one important aspect of energy planning is to devise policies that can promote a justifiable use of energy consumption. In order to be able to...

Background and Objectives: Congestion in outpatient departments (OPD) in Qatar's public hospital system is a major problem due to the demographics of the country. Despite the congestion in the general registration and assessment areas, the utilization of doctors' time is considerably low. This paradigm is propagated by (i) the inefficiencies in the...

Natural gas is distributed in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG) when transported across long distances. Delivery planning of LNG offers challenging multi-origin vehicle routing problems, with vessels of various capacities and fuel performance. There are also unique challenges due to the nature of LNG trading and shipping. We propose a framewo...

In this paper, an analytical model is proposed to evaluate optimal acquisition price and quantity policy based on the quality of returned used products that are subsequently used for remanufacturing. The model is developed from the perspective of a consolidation center, which facilitates the collection of used products in various collection centers...

Optimization modeling has become a powerful tool to tackle emergency logistics problems since its first adoption in maritime disaster situations in the 1970s. Using techniques of content analysis, this paper reviews optimization models utilized in emergency logistics. Disaster operations can be performed before or after disaster occurrence. Short-n...

The rising cost of resources within an organization, increasing capability of information technology, the need to conduct project at different places and availability of competent and inexpensive manpower elsewhere have promoted many companies to adopt project development in a virtual environment. Large scale projects have several full fledged proj...

Demand uncertainty leads to fluctuations in inventory position at each echelon of a supply chain causing bullwhip effect, which can lead to significant cost and loss of efficiency and waste of resources. One of the aspects that can reduce potential bullwhip effect is the sharing of real time information for which the recently mass produced Radio Fr...

Return of used products is becoming an important logistics activity due to government legislation and increasing awareness among the people to protect the environment and reduce waste. For industries, the management of return flow usually requires a specialized infrastructure with special information systems for tracking and dedicated equipment for...

Cooking is the major energy end use in most developing countries. A general model to calculate energy-use cost for cooking with 15 combinations of fuel and end use device based on prevailing market conditions is proposed by this paper. The model has been implemented to develop an independent computer software which ranks the combinations on the bas...

Nepal's economic activity is dominated by agriculture. The volume of exports is small. About a quarter of the foreign exchange earned from export is required to cover costs of imported fossil fuels. Fossil fuels supply less than 7% of total energy consumption. More than 90% of primary energy consumption is supplied by biomass resources, and forests...

Remanufacturing is one of recovery options for used products. As remanufacturing requires a continuous supply of used products, the economic incentive is required to attract customers to return their used products (called cores) and the problem of pricing a core becomes an important issue. Such a pricing problem is analogous to pricing an option, w...

Establishment of reverse logistics (RL) networks for various original equipment manufacturers (OEM’s) is gaining significant importance. Various green legislations are forcing OEMs to take back their used, end-of-lease or end-of-life products, or products under warranty to minimize wastes and conserve resources. Therefore OEMs have turned to a bett...

This paper investigates the current development in research and practice in reverse logistics (RL) through content analysis of the published literature. We have used various web based search engines, books and conference proceedings to locate and review the literature. The review finds that research and practice in RL are focused on all aspects of...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a case study for professionals who are in research and practice in maintenance engineering. Design/methodology/approach – This is a case study. Therefore, on-site involvement in the development of steps for maintenance projects has been included. Findings – The case study shows that, if project mana...

Strategic decisions on establishing a supply chain network (SCN) encompass more than one criterion, for example, minimization of costs and maximization of customer service levels. These criteria have to be analyzed along with constraints such as capacity commitment by the suppliers and the manufacturers for the production of a particular product. I...

Supply contract helps in coordinating the supply of quantities from different suppliers in order to meet the demand for a product. In this paper, supply contract models are developed by considering an assembly system operated under a centralized and a decentralized control modes. The centralized control mode considers a single decision maker and of...

Today's manufacturers strive to design and produce a large number of customized products at low cost and quick turnround in order to survive market competition. The consequence of high product variety manifests itself through an exponentially increased number of process variants, which introduces significant constraints to production planning and c...

Information and communication technology (ICT) refer to a family of technologies that facilitate information capturing, storing, processing, disseminating, and providing a supportive role for human activities to enhance organizational efficiency and effectiveness. With the use of ICT, organizations are expected to have better decision-making capabi...

Information and communication technology (ICT) refer to a family of technologies that facilitate information capturing, storing, processing, disseminating, and providing a supportive role for human activities to enhance organizational efficiency and effectiveness. With the use of ICT, organizations are expected to have better decision-making capabi...

Water available in small watersheds primarily serves household and irrigation needs of the local population. For economical use of water, correct understanding of water availability is necessary mainly because the consequences of such plans are immediate and they could impact the livelihood of people around the watershed. In this paper, a post proj...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate logistics activities in Singapore hospitals. It defines various types of activities handled by a logistics division. Inventory management policy and the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) for logistics purposes are also discussed. The study identifies the nature of strategic alliances...

Product customization leads to an exponentially increased number of product and process variants, which exaggerates the difficulties in building up customization capabilities for make-to-order production systems. It is imperative for companies to configure existing operations routings by exploiting similarities among product and process families so...

The key challenge of implementing mass customization manufacturing lies in the variety dilemma exhibited by frequent design changes and recurrent process variations. A holistic view of variety handling gives rise to the importance of variety coordination from design to production. This paper proposes a concept of process platform for coordinating p...

Nepal has recently ratified Kyoto Protocol, which considers justifiable use of resources to limit or reduce the emission of gases that contribute to green house gas inventory in the atmosphere. Nepal's per capita green gas (GHG) emission from energy use is insignificant. However, it is important for Nepal to adopt environmentally friendly energy op...

Economic growth and energy demand are closely related. A clear understanding of the relation between energy and economic demand would help energy planners to understand the implications of changes in the exogenous variables when the underlying relationships are fairly stable. An understanding of broader impacts of energy use can be of great help in...

Purpose In an e‐manufacturing environment, the acquisition of real time quality data and information is paramount for distributed collaborative manufacturers to make quick and correct actions towards quality problems in a manufacturing process. This paper attempts to assist manufacturers in obtaining such data and information and further to make de...

In regard to global competition, integrated manufacturing and service systems has emerged as a new manufacturing paradigm to assist manufacturers in achieving faster design, manufacturing and delivery of customer-specified products at low costs. The linchpin of realizing an economy of scale in production in such systems lies in routings to be adopt...

Project management is an emerging professional discipline that has received considerable attention even in the boardroom. Senior corporate executives have been increasingly recognizing the value of project management to achieve rapid convergence to enterprise project development and performance. New techniques and tools, and even new mindsets have...

Current practice in developing product platforms only encompasses the design domain. It seldom, if at all, considers the impact of product platforms on production and, in turn, the implication of process data for product platform development. Hence, it is imperative for platform development to synchronise product and process variety from both desig...

One of the pressing needs faced by manufacturers nowadays is quick response to the requirements of individual customers while achieving high quality and near mass production efficiency, namely mass customization (Pine, 1993a). Due to product proliferation, manufacturing organizations are confronted with difficulties in dealing with frequent design...

Traditional mass production offers a limited variety of products, in which order processing mostly concentrates on the acquisition of customer needs, and support for the sales configuration at most. With mass customization, the fulfilment of customized orders involves frequent design changes and recurrent process variations due to product different...

Provision of adequate electricity is one of the major factors for industrial and commercial development. However, decisions on the expansion of electricity are bogged down by high investment requirements and nonsynchronized expansion between electricity generation and transmission systems. As a rule, the investment requirements for these types of p...

Purpose Logistics companies have benefited from the use of information and communications technology (ICT) in their business processes. Although ICT is being promoted in the Singapore logistics industry, details on status and perception towards ICT are not well‐known. Therefore, in order to understand ICT penetration, a study is necessary. Design/...

Decisions on electric power generation and transmission investments may have crucial effects on the development of industrial and residential areas. Decisions made on the infrastructure should have economically beneficial consequences for producers and consumers. The aim of this paper is to propose a model that considers transmission and generation...

Mass customization results in proliferation of products and the corresponding routings. It thus necessitates a coordination issue regarding product and process variety. In addition to coping with product and process variety individually, the linchpin of variety coordination lies in the mapping relationships between the product and process domains....

In nowadays' changing manufacturing environment, designing product families based on product platforms has been well accepted as an effective means to fulfill product customization. The current production practice and academic research of platform based product development mostly focus on the design domain, whereas limited attention is paid to how...