1,720,964 research outputs found
Smart Lifetime Neighbourhoods: Literature Review and Research Agenda
Full text linkMunicipalities in European Union are ageing fast. Consequently, the development and financing of smart social infrastructure to support the growing number of older adults with declining functional capacities to postpone their moving to nursing homes so that they live longer in the community is a major challenge for European municipalities. In this context, social innovations based on the digital transformation of health care and social care delivery systems can support older adults to live autonomously and independently in their own communities and postpone or even prevent entering nursing homes. The innovations will enable a more efficient combination of existing societal resources in the communities for the provision of health care and social needs of the ageing members of society who are dependent on the help of others due to illness or functional decline. On the supply side, new scientific (optimisation of supply networks), organisational (self-managed communities) and technological innovations such as robotics, domotics and CPS - based on the Internet of Things and cloud computing - offer new utilities and create new businesses for the supply of goods and services to older people while also providing new job opportunities for younger residents. The aim of this paper is to consider the development and financing of community smart social infrastructure with a focus on Slovenia
The response latency in global production and logistics: A trade-off between robotization and globalization of a chain
No full textThe vision of Industry 4.0 foresees also much lower time delays between activities and feedback control. Among factors which influence delays in supply chains are long distances between activities in a complex global supply chain and the response latency of older workers, in the case that there are no properly developed programs for avoiding this phenomenon. The analysis of a trade-off between these factors is the subject of this article. Mitigating the decreasing functional capacities of the ageing workforce, to keep the old workers' productivity on the higher level while their functional capacities are decreasing, collaborative robots and smart workstations are advised. The second solution is to move a part of production to foreign countries where the demographic structure is in favour of young workers, and human resources are much cheaper. In the article, we are developing a model for a trade-off between two solutions: to invest in collaborative robots or to develop early retirement schemes and to move the production plants abroad. Therefore, the basic trade-off is between robotisation, keeping short distances between activity cells in a supply chain, and transportation costs which include also additional costs of delays in a system. The model is based on the skeleton of the extended MRP theory of Grubbström and Bogataj and evaluated by the NPV and, as a novelty, also by the actuarial present value APV in the criterion function. Extended MRP enables to extend the model of multi-echelon systems which is presented by the same authors in the International Journal of Production Economics, under the title: The ageing workforce challenge: investments in collaborative robots or contribution to pension schemes, from the multi-echelon perspective to global supply chains. The article explains why it is important to link the annuities for repaying the investment in robots to the flow of funds for workers' salaries when weighing between early retirement and investment in collaborative robots. The model is applied to a real industrial case of the production of pumps and can be easily implemented also in other international supply chains where the differences in the demographic structure, salaries and automatization between countries are substantial and the eligibility of transport costs is questionable
Ageing workforce management in manufacturing systems: state of the art and future research agenda
Full text linkThe workforce ageing phenomenon is recently affecting most of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries, due to a general ageing of their populations and a higher average retirement age of the workforce. In this paper, the topic of ageing workforce management is addressed from a production research standpoint, with the aim of understanding how older workers can be supported and involved in a manufacturing system. First, the current state of the art related to the ageing workforce in production systems is presented. This is structured according to four main topics: (1) analysis and evaluation of ageing workers’ functional capacities, (2) consideration of ageing workers’ capacities in industrial system modelling and management, (3) analysis and exploitation of ageing workers’ expertise, (4) acknowledgement, analysis, design and integration of supporting technologies. Next, the discussion on the impact of the ageing workforce on manufacturing systems’ performances leads to the comparison of some technological advances that are related to the Industry 4.0 paradigms. Finally, a future research agenda on this topic is proposed, based on the same topics classification proposed for the literature analysis. Five different research areas are derived, suggesting future directions for appropriate research concerning the employ of older workers in production environments
The aging workforce problem in European industrial systems: decision support model and trade-off analysis
No full textCapacity Planning for Ambient Assisted Living
Full text linkHousing services and utilities represent the highest share of the EU Silver Economy. EU Member States are ageing. The demand for specialised housing for older adults and ambient assisted living technologies is expected to triple in the next 40 years. The ageing population is driving the expenditures of health care (HC) and long-term care (LTC) provision without visible improvement in the quality of life of older adults. Ambient assisted living technologies and ambient intelligence can enable residents to live longer in their own homes and in specialised housing in the community while mitigating the increasing public expenditures for health care and long-term care. We present the results of the survey, how older adults in Slovenia perceive the ambient assisted living housing, where large share of older adults, who are already included in municipality home care programs, want to live after a severe decline in their functional capacities. These results enable us to forecast the dynamics of the expected demand for specialised housing for older adults and the expected directions of the development of specialised housing and the supply networks. We present the multiple decrement model to forecast the dynamics of this demand when developing the silver economy. This structure of demand, we show, depends on the demographic and the income of the older adults. Therefore, it influences the probabilities of transitions in a multiple decrement model for forecasting the dynamics of development of specialised housing with embedded AAL technologies for older adults
Interactions between flows of human resources in functional regions and flows of inventories in dynamic processes of global supply chains
No full textAccording to the Ageing Report 2015 (EC, 2015), the number of workers in Europe will decline for 20 million by 2060. The question thus arises how this shrinking pool of workers unequally dispersed in the European regions will influence the competitiveness and profitability of global supply chains and location of the production and distribution nodes. Within the human resource market, commuting costs are compensated, thus influencing wage rates and/or land rent, capitalised in the value of residential properties. These aspects influence the total costs of human resources in the activity cells of supply chains and the stream of profit achieved in a chain. The corporation, whose activity cells are located in the local area which is a net importer of human resources, has to pay higher average wages than the corporation, whose facilities are located in the district from which the labour is exported. If higher wages do not cover these differences, they create incentives to commute into other functional regions. The edges of the functional regions are the lines from which human resources are indifferent regarding commuting to a given central place where the activity cell is located or in the competing central place. These indifference curves move as relative wages change. Therefore, those planning the location and intensity of activities in the nodes of a supply chain should consider the influence of the required level of wages, which depends on the spatial dispersion of dwellings of workers. So, the intensity of the flow of items (inventories in the process) and intensity of the inflow of human resources interact in the area in which the activity cell is located and influence the profit of corporations. Therefore, our aim is to present an innovative approach to the integration of the gravity model of spatially dispersed human resources with the supply systems described by extended MRP Theory. Here the dynamics of delineation of functional regions is assumed to respond immediately to the changes in the differences between wages and commuting costs, which is also a novelty of this compound model. In our study, these two analytical models interact and merge in the compact form for studying the profitability of activities under the volatile intensity of the production flows; this represents a new approach to the evaluation of the present value of chain. Our method enables us to evaluate an expected long-term stream of profit. This is an important tool for managers and owners, who might have different options regarding where to place and invest in an activity cell. They can forecast the influences of the localities and wages on the profit stream before deciding to open or to close and to intensify or not their activities in the particular central place of a functional region
INVESTMENTS IN WORKPLACE ERGONOMICS FROM THE SUPPLY CHAIN APPROACH
No full textIn Europe, the number of people aged 65 and older is growing from 85 million today to more than 151 million in 2060. Therefore, the retirement age of industrial workers is rising. However, many workers are not able to work until they have reached the increased retirement age 70. Often, they are producing fewer products with lower quality. Delays and disruptions in one activity cell of a supply chain can have a ripple effect throughout the entire chain. In the article, we were investigating how investment in robots could influence the Net Present Value (NPV) of a supply chain. The model is based on the Extended MRP skeleton. We have analysed the investments in robots as a share of labour costs which enable decision-makers to a trade-off between NPV decrease and the collaborative robots. In the paper, we study the trade-off between higher investments in ergonomics and lower NPV. Based on an Italian working environment a numerical application of the model is provided
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Supply chain risk at simultaneous robust perturbations
No full textThe focus of this paper is the risk management of total supply chains by identifying the risk drivers that could appear simultaneously, and the determination of their common denominator to mitigate supply chain risk using the Net Present Value (NPV) approach in Extended Material Requirements Planning (Extended MRP) models. Any risk driver that is likely to disrupt the procurement, production, transportation, warehousing, delivery or financing of a good or service constitutes a realisation of supply chain risk. Risk drivers often appear simultaneously. It is imperative, therefore, that an a priori assessment of the risk drivers that pose risk to the global supply chain is undertaken and that contingency plans are developed at every level to monitor and mitigate these risks, even when they appear simultaneously. To avoid the ruin of a supply chain we must ensure the availability of adequate funds in conjunction with safety stock. Therefore, the risk-mitigation approach pursued in our paper follows from our conviction that money is the stock of purchasing power of any activity cell in a global supply chain that could influence the perturbation of material flows—on many stages simultaneously. In the paper, we provide a method appropriate for preventing the long-term disruption of a supply chain with probability determined in advance. How to assure resilience of a global supply chain is the question which has occupied the World Economic Forum since 2009. The Industry Agendas in Davos expressed the need to develop a risk assessment framework for the end-to-end supply chain which has not been developed yet. The article presents how company owners, regulators, and board members of supply chains can build the risk assessment framework on a similar requirement as that accepted in the insurance industry, capturing knowledge from the Solvency II framework, and embed the constraints in the extended MRP model. Such a quantitative tool can be used to exercise the “stress tests” of the total chain according to assumptions and plans. In the presented methodology, as a novelty first developed here, we show how the perturbation of intensity in production and logistics, simultaneous perturbations in the timing of financial flows, information flows, flows of items and market perturbations can be better evaluated simultaneously through Laplace transforms and the NPV expression which allow for a control of physical and financial flows simultaneously. Our paper follows the Davos 2013 conclusions analysed by Forbes that “To maintain effectiveness, supply chain managers can arrange to share strategic stocks, or to enter into joint supply agreements. They can also pre-arrange ways to access critical stocks”. Therefore risks should be evaluated on the level of the end-to-end supply chain, and not only on the level of the companies involved. The paper suggests that resilience of a chain is measured by the probability that the NPV of the chain will not fall under the critical value determined in advance, and the yearly mathematical reservations are derived
- …
