Improving operations by leveraging flexibility in internal and outsourced resources and customer behaviour

拟议研究的目的是提供深入了解成本和 性能改进，要么在系统中建立灵活性（冗余），要么利用潜在的 系统的灵活性。目标是为系统运行环境的不确定性做好准备，换句话说，人们希望系统能够对需求、供应或资源可用性的变化做出快速反应。特别令人感兴趣的问题是，如何确定何时可因灵活性低而获得显著的业绩收益。 第一个目标是研究利用潜在的客户灵活性的好处。在以前的论文中，简单的模型表明，平均等待时间的最大改善是在任意小的灵活性水平下实现的。在进一步发展这些见解方面还有很多工作要做，特别是要检查这些见解是否扩展到更接近现实的模型。 在供应链和呼叫中心管理方面，就利用特定形式的有限灵活性（例如所谓的“链接”办法）可以取得的收益做了大量工作。本提案的第二个目标是确定一组服务器在面对环境的不确定性时保持高吞吐量所应具有的最小能力集。 第三个重点是组织如何利用外包能力带来的灵活性。有两个关键问题。第一是战略层面。在给定成本和资源模型以及组织的固定资源的情况下，应该如何（实时地）利用这种可用能力？第二个问题是给出了上述战略控制问题的解决方案，组织应该在固定资源上投资多少？

The objective of the proposed research is to provide insights into the tradeoffs between the costs and performance improvements of either building flexibility (redundancy) into systems or exploiting latent flexibility in a system. The goal is to prepare for uncertainty in the environment in which the system is operating, in other words, one would like to have systems which respond quickly to changes in demand, supply or resource availability. The issue of identifying when significant performance gains can be gained as a result of low flexibility is of particular interest. The first goal is to examine the benefits of exploiting latent customer flexibility. In a previous paper, simple models suggested that the maximum improvement in mean waiting times is achieved for arbitrarily small levels of flexibility. There is much that needs to be done in further developing these insights, in particular to examine whether these insights extend to models more closely matching reality. There has been a significant amount of work done in supply chain and call centre management on the gains that can be made by using particular forms of limited flexibility (e.g. the so-called "chaining" approach). The second goal of this proposal is to identify a minimal set of capabilities a set of servers should have to maintain high throughput in the face of uncertainties in the environment. The third focus is how an organization can exploit flexibility due to outsourced capacity. There are two key questions. The first is on a strategic level. Given cost and resource models and an organization's fixed resources, how should one exploit this available capacity (in real-time)? The second question is given the solution of the strategic control problem above, how much should the organization invest in fixed resources?