Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
8,714
result(s) for
"Service stations Management"
Sort by:
The other invisible hand
How can we ensure high-quality public services such as health care and education? Governments spend huge amounts of public money on public services such as health, education, and social care, and yet the services that are actually delivered are often low quality, inefficiently run, unresponsive to their users, and inequitable in their distribution. In this book, Julian Le Grand argues that the best solution is to offer choice to users and to encourage competition among providers. Le Grand has just completed a period as policy advisor working within the British government at the highest levels, and from this he has gained evidence to support his earlier theoretical work and has experienced the political reality of putting public policy theory into practice. He examines four ways of delivering public services: trust; targets and performance management; \"voice\"; and choice and competition. He argues that, although all of these have their merits, in most situations policies that rely on extending choice and competition among providers have the most potential for delivering high-quality, efficient, responsive, and equitable services. But it is important that the relevant policies be appropriately designed, and this book provides a detailed discussion of the principal features that these policies should have in the context of health care and education. It concludes with a discussion of the politics of choice.
eBook
Analysis of spatial (in)equality of urban facilities in Tehran: an integration of spatial accessibility
The urban expansion and growth of Tehran have caused many challenges and issues for the city, which has been shown in the form of spatial–social balances with informal expressions, weakness of local governments, biological pollution, etc. The lack of balance in urban service facilities has led to a significant gap in different parts of the city. In this research, main providers of urban facilities concerning spatial inequality were used. The results of this study, using spatial statistics methods and fuzzy logic, showed that the propellants of the city of Tehran are distributed in three ways: cluster, random, and disperse. Hospitals, police stations, subway lines, local governments, and gas stations are clustered. Fire stations, Red Crescent, food and wholesale centers, medical services, housing prices, bus terminals, and hotels are random. Ambulance services and sports clubs are dispersed. These ways of distribution have resulted in a significant difference in the use of services provided by residents of different regions and have contributed to unequal opportunities for citizens in the use of facilities. Deprived districts represent the fact that the urban population is growing faster than the necessary infrastructure which can be built by urban management. The least developed and underdeveloped areas are mostly in the south and southeast of Tehran city, the medium and relatively developed areas are located in the center and west of the city, and the developed areas are located in the north of the city. Findings in this paper are trying to provide main criteria and the results to have a rational assessment of the current situation in the city to solve problems to urban managers and planners, as well as policy and planning strategy for urban development programs to achieve urban sustainability.
Journal Article
A two-level evolutionary algorithm for solving the petrol station replenishment problem with periodicity constraints and service choice
This paper addresses the petrol station replenishment problem with periodicity constraints and introduces the frequency service choice as a decision variable. We present a mathematical optimization model for the problem and we develop first a simple heuristic method that is able to handle the complexity of the problem and then two metaheuristic approaches based on a novel two-level evolutionary algorithm. The first level deals with the periodicity and frequency selection of the visits to the petrol stations. The second level of evolution assigns the stations to the tank-trucks such that the total traveled distance is minimized. The effectiveness of the proposed approaches has been tested by means of a comprehensive experimental study by using first a set of randomly generated test cases and then a real-life problem.
Journal Article
A queueing-inventory system with a repeated-orbit policy during the service
We consider a service system in which customers who arrive at a service station and place an order, are not involved in the processing of their order, which can therefore be executed in their absence. Consequently, customers may leave the service station for some period of time during the processing of their order (i.e., go to orbit), and then return. While the customers are in orbit, they can utilize their time efficiently. If the service is completed before the customer's return from orbit, the ready service (RS) is stored in a designated storage facility until the customer returns and retrieves the RS from the inventory. If, however, the service is not yet completed when the customer returns, the customer can leave to orbit again. Accordingly, the policy is called \"repeated orbit\" (during the service). We formulate and analyze the queueing-inventory-repeated-orbit (QIRO) system using the matrix geometric method. The optimal orbiting time is calculated by maximizing the customer's expected utility. In addition, the optimal RS storage capacity and the optimal investment in preservation technologies (to store the RSs) are derived, both of which serve to increase demand and thus maximize the system's expected profit.
Journal Article
Public transport crowdshipping: moving shipments among parcel lockers located at public transport stations
In view of success stories of unicorn startups from the sharing and gig economy such as Airbnb, DiDi, or Uber, it is not surprising that postal service providers try to transfer the sharing idea toward their last-mile delivery services: owners of under-used assets (here private crowdshippers traveling anyway) are connected with users willing to pay for the use of these assets (here postal service providers having to deliver parcels). In this paper, we consider a special form of crowdshipping where public transport users, steered by a smartphone app, pick up parcels from parcel lockers, take these shipments with them on their subway rides, and deposit these parcels into other lockers. Finally, the actual recipients can pick up their shipments from their most convenient parcel lockers, e.g., on their own way back home from work. We formulate the optimization problem that matches crowdshipping demand and supply and determines the routes along lockers and crowdshippers each parcel takes. Specifically, we allow that each parcel is moved by multiple cooperating crowdshippers and solve this problem with different objective functions capturing the individual aims of the main stakeholders: shippers, crowdshippers, recipients, and the platform provider. We evaluate the relationship of these objectives and quantify the efficiency loss of a more restricted matching policy, where only a single crowdshipper can be assigned to each parcel’s complete path between origin and destination. Finally, we also explore the impact of delays and investigate whether specific objectives protect against unforeseen events.
Journal Article
Infrastructure Planning for Electric Vehicles with Battery Swapping
Electric vehicles (EVs) have been proposed as a key technology to help cut down the massive greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector. Unfortunately, because of the limited capacity of batteries, typical EVs can only travel for about 100 miles on a single charge and require hours to be recharged. The industry has proposed a novel solution centered around the use of \"swapping stations,\" at which depleted batteries can be exchanged for recharged ones in the middle of long trips. The possible success of this solution hinges on the ability of the charging service provider to deploy a cost-effective infrastructure network, given only limited information regarding adoption rates. We develop robust optimization models that aid the planning process for deploying battery-swapping infrastructure. Using these models, we study the potential impacts of battery standardization and technology advancements on the optimal infrastructure deployment strategy.
This paper was accepted by Dimitris Bertsimas, optimization.
Journal Article
A Flexible Reformulation of the Refueling Station Location Problem
Serious environmental and economic problems of using fossil fuels in transportation sections force managers to think of alternative fuels such as hydrogen, ethanol, biodiesel, natural gas, or electricity. Meanwhile, lack of fuel network infrastructures is a major problem, which needs to be investigated considering the number and optimal location of alternative fuel stations. In the literature, two different flow-based demand modeling concepts (the maximum cover and set cover) have been proposed for solving this problem. Because of the huge number of combinations of fuel stations for covering the flow of each path, the models are impractical for the real size problems. In this paper, the flow refueling location model was reformulated and a flexible mixed-integer linear programming model was presented, which was able to obtain an optimal solution much faster than the previous set cover version. The model also could be solved in the maximum cover form in a reasonable time on the large-sized networks.
Journal Article
Optimal service rates of a queueing inventory system with finite waiting hall, arbitrary service times and positive lead times
In this article, we consider a finite capacity queueing-inventory system in which the service rate is subject to control. We assume that the customers arrive according to a Poisson process. The customer who arrives to the service station, when the waiting hall is full, is considered to be lost. The inventory attached with the service facility is replenished according to a (s, Q) policy and the lead times are exponentially distributed. We calculate the optimal service rates to be employed at each service completion epoch so that the long-run expected cost rate is minimized for fixed maximum inventory level, reorder point and capacity of the waiting hall. This problem is modelled as a semi-Markov decision problem. The stationary optimal policy is obtained using linear programming algorithm and the results are illustrated numerically.
Journal Article