Resource Flexibility for Uncertainty Mitigation in Production and Service Systems

这笔赠款为旨在确定组织如何最好地利用灵活的资源来应对需求、供应和能力的不确定性的研究提供资金。该项目的重点是，但不限于，可以建模为排队网络的组织，其中吞吐量是主要的性能指标。目标是在当前市场环境下实现最佳性能，同时有能力在任何两个任务、产品或服务之间转移能力，以应对环境中不可控的变化。这一目标是通过使用适当的灵活性结构来实现的，该结构指定了针对哪些任务培训或配置个别员工和其他资源。项目的三个主要组成部分是：(I)提供标准，以确定给定的灵活性结构是否满足先前所述的目标，如果不满足，则确定如何增强灵活性结构；(Ii)开发可预测哪些灵活性结构最有效的指标；以及(Iii)确保我们的标准和指标在计算上有效并广泛适用。在这一过程中，我们将确定应如何灵活地将资源实时分配到任务中，以实现可能的最佳表现。如果成功，这项研究将产生一些技术，可以通过更好地利用现有资源，以低成本提高美国生产和服务部门的竞争力。具体地说，该项目涉及制定有效的标准和衡量标准，从业者可以使用这些标准和衡量标准来评估个别灵活性结构的优点，并研究如何增强它们。这些技术在计算上将是高效的，并广泛适用于不同的组织，包括呼叫中心、医疗保健服务、计算机服务和供应链。

This grant provides funding for research aimed at determining how an organization can best use flexible resources to prepare for uncertainty in demand, supply, and capacity. The project is focused on, but not limited to, organizations that can be modeled as queueing networks and where throughput is the primary performance measure of interest. The goal is to achieve the best possible performance in the present market environment, while simultaneously having the ability to shift capacity between any two tasks, products, or services in response to uncontrollable changes in the environment. This goal is realized through the use of an appropriate flexibility structure that specifies what tasks individual workers and other resources are trained or configured for. The three major components of the project are to (i) provide criteria for determining whether a given flexibility structure satisfies the previously-stated goal, and if not, identify how the flexibility structure may be enhanced; (ii) develop metrics that can predict which flexibility structures are most effective; and (iii) ensure that our criteria and metrics are computationally efficient and broadly applicable. In the process, we will determine how flexible resources should be assigned to tasks in real time to achieve the best possible performance.If successful, this research will lead to techniques that can be used to increase the competitiveness of the U.S. production and service sectors at low cost through better use of available resources. Specifically, the project involves developing effective criteria and metrics that practitioners can use to assess the merits of individual flexibility structures and study how they may be enhanced. These techniques will be computationally efficient and broadly applicable to different organizations, including call centers, healthcare delivery, computer services, and supply chains.