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Frontline employee empowerment and perceived customer satisfaction
Get PDFPurpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of structural empowerment, psychological empowerment and intrinsic motivation on perceived customer satisfaction in contact centers. Design/methodology/approach - A questionnaire was conducted among 703 employees of a contact center. Data analysis was based on structural equation modeling. Findings - Structural empowerment results in higher levels of perceived customer satisfaction through psychological empowerment and intrinsic motivation. Furthermore, structural empowerment effect on psychological empowerment is mediated by intrinsic motivation. Practical implications - Previous predictions regarding counterproductive impact of empowerment in a low-service heterogeneity sector, such as contact center are challenged and a transformative message is disclosed in what concerns human resource management (HRM) in contact centers. Originality/value - The research provides valuable insights for both scholars and practitioners regarding the process through which employees' psychological empowerment and intrinsic motivation improves customer satisfaction in the context of contact centers
Novel Multi-Stage Stochastic DG Investment Planning with Recourse
No full textThis paper presents a novel multi-stage stochastic distributed generation investment planning model for making investment decisions under uncertainty. The problem, formulated from a coordinated system planning viewpoint, simultaneously minimizes the net present value of costs rated to losses, emission, operation, and maintenance, as well as the cost of unserved energy. The formulation is anchored on a two-period planning horizon, each having multiple stages. The first period is a short-term horizon in which robust decisions are pursued in the face of uncertainty; whereas, the second one spans over a medium to long-term horizon involving exploratory and/or flexible investment decisions. The operational variability and uncertainty introduced by intermittent generation sources, electricity demand, emission prices, demand growth, and others are accounted for via probabilistic and stochastic methods, respectively. Metrics such as cost of ignoring uncertainty and value of perfect information are used to clearly demonstrate the benefits of the proposed stochastic model. A real-life distribution network system is used as a case study and the results show the effectiveness of the proposed model
A Hybrid Approach for Personalized News Recommendation in a Mobility Scenario Using Long-Short User Interest
Get PDFAccess to information has been made easier in different domains that range from multimedia content, books, music, news, etc. To deal with the huge amount of alternatives, recommendation systems have been often used as a solution to filter the options and provide suggestions of items that might be of interest to an user. The news domain introduces additional challenges due not only to the large amount of new items produced daily but also due to their ephemeral timelife. In this paper, a news recommendation system which combines content-based and georeferenced techniques in a mobility scenario, is proposed. Taking into account the volatility of the information, short-term and long-term user profiles are considered and implicitly built. Besides tracking users' clicks, the system infers different levels of interest an article has by tracking and weighting each action in the system and in social networks. Impact of the different fields that make up a news is also taken into account by following the inverted pyramid model that assumes different levels of importance to each paragraph of the article. The solution was tested with a population of volunteers and results indicate that the quality of the recommendation approach is acknowledged by the users
Simulator for Teaching Robotics, ROS and Autonomous Driving in a Competitive Mindset
Get PDFInterest in robotics field as a teaching tool to promote the STEM areas has grown in the past years. The search for solutions to promote robotics is a major challenge and the use of real robots always increases costs. An alternative is the use of a simulator. The construction of a simulator related with the Portuguese Autonomous Driving Competition using Gazebo as 3D simulator and ROS as a middleware connection to promote, attract, and enthusiasm university students to the mobile robotics challenges is presented. It is intended to take advantage of a competitive mindset to overcome some obstacles that appear to students when designing a real system. The proposed simulator focus on the autonomous driving competition task, such as semaphore recognition, localization, and motion control. An evaluation of the simulator is also performed, leading to an absolute error of 5.11% and a relative error of 2.76% on best case scenarios relating to the odometry tests, an accuracy of 99.37% regarding to the semaphore recognition tests, and an average error of 1.8 pixels for the FOV tests performed
Forest harvest scheduling with clearcut and core area constraints
No full textMany studies regarding environmental concerns in forest harvest scheduling problems deal with constraints on the maximum clearcut size. However, these constraints tend to disperse harvests across the forest and thus to generate a more fragmented landscape. When a forest is fragmented, the amount of edge increases at the expense of the core area. Highly fragmented forests can neither provide the food, cover, nor the reproduction needs of core-dependent species. This study presents a branch-and-bound procedure designed to find good feasible solutions, in a reasonable time, for forest harvest scheduling problems with constraints on maximum clearcut size and minimum core habitat area. The core area is measured by applying the concept of subregions. In each branch of the branch-and-bound tree, a partial solution leads to two children nodes, corresponding to the cases of harvesting or not a given stand in a given period. Pruning is based on constraint violations or unreachable objective values. The approach was tested with forests ranging from some dozens to more than a thousand stands. In general, branch-and-bound was able to quickly find optimal or good solutions, even for medium/large instances
A spatially-explicit methodological framework based on neural networks to assess the effect of urban form on energy demand
No full textUrban form is an important driver of energy demand and therefore of GHG emissions in urban areas. Yet, research on urban form and energy remains sectorial and hasn't been able to deliver a full understanding of the impact of the physical structure of cities upon their energy demand. Most common approaches feature engineering models in buildings, and statistical models in transports. This study aims at contributing to the characterization of the link between urban form and energy considering altogether three distinct energy uses: ambient heating and cooling in buildings, and travel. A high-resolution methodology is proposed. It applies GIS to provide the analysis with a spatially-explicit character, and neural networks to model energy demand based on a set of relevant urban form indicators. The results confirm that the effect of urban form indicators on the overall energy needs is far from being negligible. In particular, the number of floors, the diversity of activities within a walking reach, the floor area and the subdivision of blocks evidenced a significant impact on the overall energy demand of the case study analyzed
High Resolution Melting (HRM) applied to wine authenticity
Get PDFWine authenticity methods are in increasing demand mainly in Denomination of Origin designations. The DNA-based methodologies are a reliable means of tracking food/wine varietal composition. The main aim of this work was the study of High Resolution Melting (HRM) application as a screening method for must and wine authenticity. Three sample types (leaf, must and wine) were used to validate the three developed HRM assays (Vv1-705 bp; Vv2-375 bp; and. Vv3-119 bp). The Vv1 HRM assay was only successful when applied to leaf and must samples. The Vv2 HRM assay successfully amplified all sample types, allowing genotype discrimination based on melting temperature values. The smallest amplicon, Vv3, produced a coincident melting curve shape in all sample types (leaf and wine) with corresponding genotypes. This study presents sensitive, rapid and efficient HRM assays applied for the first time to wine samples suitable for wine authenticity purposes
Sophistication vs Logical Depth
Get PDFSophistication and logical depth are two measures that express how complicated the structure in a string is. Sophistication is defined as the minimal complexity of a computable function that defines a two-part description for the string that is shortest within some precision; the second can be defined as the minimal computation time of a program that is shortest within some precision. We show that the Busy Beaver function of the sophistication of a string exceeds its logical depth with logarithmically bigger precision, and that logical depth exceeds the Busy Beaver function of sophistication with logarithmically bigger precision. We also show that sophistication is unstable in its precision: constant variations can change its value by a linear term in the length of the string
Management and operations maintenance for a water treatment and supply company
No full textThis paper intends to highlight the importance of the maintenance activity for all kind of companies in general and for the water treatment companies in particular. To attain this objective, a literature review on the evolution of the maintenance concept, the relation between the production function and the total productive maintenance (TPM) and the factors that influence the success of TPM is performed. To demonstrate the contribution of the maintenance activity for the improvement of the performance of companies especially for the water treatment companies, a case study of a Portuguese company belonging to the water treatment sector is performed. The water company considered in the case study, regarding management and maintenance activities, has an annual capacity of treatment and distribution of 41 million m3 of drinking water to approximately 438,000 inhabitants spread over a geographic area that represents 15% of the Portuguese territory. Copyright © 2017 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd
Design and Implementation of an Interactive Interface for Demand Response and Home Energy Management Applications
No full textDemand response (DR) implementations have recently found wide application areas in the context of smart grids. The effectiveness of these implementations is primarily based on the willingness of end-users to be involved in such programs. In this paper, an interactive and user-friendly interface is presented in order to facilitate and accordingly to increase the participation of end-users in DR programs. The proposed interface has the capability of providing the targeted information about the DR events to end-users and system operators, as well as allowing end-users to interactively monitor and control the progress of their appliances. In addition to its benefits to system operators and thus to the improved operation of power systems, the proposed interface particularly aims to exploit the potential energy-related cost savings by providing the required information and resources to end-users via mobile phone. A separate interface apart from the mentioned end-user oriented interface has also been developed for the system operator to more effectively check the status of DR applications in detail. The capabilities of the proposed concept are evaluated in a real smart home in terms of various aspects