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We address the stochastic multi-mode resource-constrained project scheduling problem in the case where the project activities require multiple renewable resources, constrained by total availability. In our study, we introduce uncertainty by characterizing, in each activity, each required resource with a work content following some known distribution. Furthermore, the set of feasible resource allocations is a continuous and well defined interval of real values. In turn, any allocation must also comply with the resource maximum total availability at any point during the project execution. We propose a mathematical model that relies on a discrete and finite partition of the timespan when evaluating activity schedules and enforces equal durations yielded by each required resource, within each activity, in expectation. The objective is to determine the start times and the mode (defined by the resource allocations) which minimize the expected total project cost. We implemented a method relying upon two global optimization metaheuristics - the electromagnetic-like mechanism and the evolutionary algorithm to solve the problem.

Wei, Z.; Xiao, X., and Pei, P., 2018. Design of mobile interactive terminal system for ship's remote wireless scheduling. In: Liu, Z.L. and Mi, C. (eds.), Advances in Sustainable Port and Ocean Engineering. Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 83, pp. 770–775. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208. At present, the mobile interactive terminal system based on metaphor understanding for ship's remote wireless scheduling has slow response and high energy consumption. Therefore, a design method of mobile interactive terminal system based on Android for ship's remote wireless scheduling is proposed. First of all, the design elements of the mobile interactive terminal system is discussed, the overall design scheme of mobile interactive terminal system for ship's remote wireless scheduling is determined, and the system in the A/D conversion module and storage module are designed. Finally, the system software module is designed by analyzing the work content of the system, and the software comp...

Background: Workshifting is a new model for redistributing tasks due to the shortage of health professionals such as registered nurses (RNs). Therefore, this study aim to describe registered nurses' experiences with workshifting in a medical ward at a university hospital in Sweden.Methods: Manifest qualitative content analysis with an inductive approach was used based on seven semi-structured interviews with RNs working in a medical ward at Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden.Results: One category, communication skills for increased cooperation, and three subcategories, Manage different skills, Changed work content and Lack of holistic nursing, were described. A healthy work environment (reasonable workload, interesting work tasks/content) is an important factor for attracting health professionals such as RNs.Conclusion: Workshifting redistributes tasks to added staff members such as pharmacists and assistant nurses, which decreases the RN workload; however, task-oriented work results in the lack of a holistic view of nursing. Moreover, enlarged teams need well-developed communication arenas to ensure patient safety and efficient work organization.

Job satisfaction results from the worker’s perception that the work content associate degreed context truly gives what an employee values within the work scenario. It is outlined as “a gratifying or positive emotion ensuing from the appraisal of one’s job or job experiences”. This positive emotion is extremely causative to associate degree employee’s physical and mental well-being. Organizationally speaking, a high level of job satisfaction reflects an extremely favorable structure climate leading to attracting and holding higher employees. The current study aims to seek out the work Satisfaction and mental state among Bank staff of Chidambaram city. Samples of one hundred respondents chosen at random were studied. Primary knowledge was collected by employing a structured interview scheduled. All the respondents were asked identical queries within the same fashion and that they were conversant regarding the aim of the study. Descriptive statistics and analysis of variance, t-test and Chi-square analysis were applied. The findings and observations are the result and outcome of the interpretations created throughout the study of research.

This article is a companion piece to another article appearing in this special edition of Social Work with Groups on group work content for the generalist practice curriculum. In this article, techniques that assist the instructor in presenting the material on group work in the classroom are identified. These techniques, which include case material and classroom exercises, also help students connect their field and classroom learning about group work. The activities discussed in this article derive from the core group work content discussed in the previous article.

Currently, methods for the evaluation of human reliability are mainly applied in safety critical industries (aerospace engineering, nuclear engineering). The Expert System for Task Taxonomy (ESAT) was developed to evaluate the error rate of control and surveillance activities in safety critical areas. In contrast, currently industrial assembly processes are mainly developed concerning an optimal use of the time factor. In this article, the suitability of ESAT for the evaluation of human reliability in manual assembly operations will be examined. By the analysis of an exemplarily considered assembly process it is shown whether and how its work content can be depicted by the ESAT method. In this context, it is also analysed how a modification of the marginal conditions – e.g. the level of specification – affects the calculation results. In the first analysis six manual assembly operations from the automotive industry were analysed and appropriate ESAT-data for its sequences of action were calculated. As a r...

Aims To identify fatiguing tasks and develop a model of sources of fatigue in nursing work. Background Research has identified multiple factors contributing to occupational fatigue; however, comprehensive consideration of diverse factors identified by nurses as contributing to fatigue in nursing work systems is lacking. Methods Content and frequency analyses were performed on previously unpublished data from an online survey of registered nurses. Responses from 100 registered nurses to questions related to the most fatiguing tasks in their work and factors that cause those tasks to be most fatiguing were analysed. Results Physically demanding patient care tasks, and organisation, management and logistics tasks, respectively, were listed as the most frequent physically and mentally fatiguing. Time and multitasking demands were listed frequently as sources of both fatigue dimensions. Conclusions Registered nurses reported working in environments that include physically and mentally fatiguing tasks. They identified factors related to work content demands, including physical and mental task demands as well as time and multitasking demands, as most frequently contributing to fatigue. Implications for nursing management This work and our conceptual model of sources of fatigue provide a framework to support nurses, nursing managers and administrators to develop strategies to reduce fatigue among RNs.

The mechanical equipment after failure should be fast repaired with high quality and restoration of its performance indicators. The varieties and selection principles of mechanical equipment repairing technology are studied. The technological process of repair work, the work content,the implementation steps, the implementation methods, the operation skills, the matters needing attention in various aspects are analysed in detail.

This paper explores the potential for the concepts of time and space, together with the analogy of landscapes, to aid the exploration and understandings of women's careers. Drawing upon case studies of women who chose to opt in to self-employment, we examine how the multi-faceted histories of these women are drawn upon as they remember the past, explain contemporary experiences, and anticipate their futures. All the women spoke of opting in to self-employment as the best of times; they talked of greater control over work content, the relationship between family, gender and paid work, and self-determinism and autonomy. They noted times when their careers were frayed but only in retrospect could they assess the context, consequences and impact of events. The framework of careerscapes — our unique blending of the notion of careers along with socio-economic and geographical interpretations of scapes — offers a framework to examine frayed careers and multiple aspects of working and caring over time and space.

Preventive maintenance (PM) plays an essential role in keeping the equipment in control and performing in the long term in semiconductor manufacturing. However, the impact of this activity on the cycle time of a specific toolset or even the entire fab can be detrimental. Hence, there is a strong incentive for determining the best way to carry out the required PM work content so as to optimize cycle time. In this paper, a model is proposed that optimizes the number and frequency of PMs for a predetermined PM work content, with the consideration of attached setups.

The basic assumption in this article is that growing older does not mean only, or even necessarily, a decline in one’s labour capacities. Some capacities increase over the years, although this development is clearly not the same for each and every individual. The older workers’ “enriched” capabilities are determined by certain aspects of job design. Older employees find, however, that their ability to learn and grow is hardly respected or addressed by their employer. Through action research in collaboration with a team of older female care workers with low educational levels, a new learning process was launched in a health care institution. The programme was designed in line with the team’s own needs and experience. Thus, the initiative and learning demand lay with the participants. Their experiences and interests were key to the learning programme, which consisted of experimental and collective learning with the opportunity of self-direction. With the development of their capacities in the job and their improved performance, a change arose both in the employment relationship (the delegation of power and a more coaching oriented management style) and in the work content (the possibility of organising and cooperating in order to solve problems together). Due to new cutbacks and quality requirements in the standardisation of care processes, however, most of the changes have since disappeared.

The Diabetes Clinic at VA Pittsburgh has been redesigned through an innovative systems-oriented approach to delivering integrated, multidisciplinary diabetes care founded on Principles of Perfecting Patient Care (PPCSM), which derive from Toyota Production Systems’ methods. The four elements of PPCSM (highly specified work content and sequence, unambiguous work flow connections, predefined pathways, and continuous process improvements based on scientific method) are incorporated into a model for delivering integrated multidisciplinary patient-centred care calibrated to each individual patient’s abilities, needs, preferences, and goals. The model, which we term the “Individualized Multidisciplinary Team-Care Model”, provides all the essential care elements in a multi-provider clinic visit comprising four sequential 15 min encounters with four providers possessing specific skills in DSME, MNT, BP and Lipid Management, and Glycaemic Management. Ongoing collaborative dialogue ensures that interventions are coordinated, calibrated to patient need and aligned with risk stratification. Documentation of all required care components is assured by templated component notes, which are assembled into a single, integrated, multiple-provider visit note in the electronic medical record. The clinic redesign has achieved unprecedented success, with 100 % documentation in all ADA specified process-of-care domains in diabetes care (HbA1c, LDL, blood pressure, annual creatinine and urinary microalbumin levels, annual foot and eye exams, and aspirin and statin use/contraindications/alternatives). It has also achieved significant improvements in HbA1c (decreased by 0.6 %), LDL ( 130 mmHg, or LDL >100 mg/dl there was documentation of action to intensify therapy, or the reason for inaction. The redesigned model can be adapted to a variety of needs, ranging from basic diabetes management, through more complicated management strategies, all the way up to the most advanced strategies for patients on insulin pumps. It delivers care that is both comprehensive and effective by combining the advantages of the established models (coordinated care emphasizing DSME and MNT of Group Visits and individualized attention in the Single Provider-Patient dyad) while eliminating their disadvantages (the impersonality of Group Visits and the fragmented inefficiencies of the Single Provider-Patient dyad).

A transparent, reliable early estimation of work contents is crucial for capacity planning in shipyards. Yet most of the shipyards rely on practical experience of specialized production planners, for the early capacity estimation, which are prone to errors, as a bill of material is not available in the early stages of production planning in the one-of-a-kind production. This is due to a yet unfinished construction of the ship. This paper will discuss a method for creating a computer-supported, transparent, more reliable way for the estimation of work content, at an early planning stage of a one-of-a-kind production, using a generated bill of material. The bill of material is generated automatically using parametrized templates and contains steel and outfitting parts. Therefore a tool has been developed that generates steel and outfitting parts from parametrized templates. From the bill-of-material, the work content in hours is estimated by linking the parts in the bill-of-material to a process. The operation time can then be calculated by dividing the work content by the capacity of the work system. The operation time can then be used for scheduling the one-of-a-kind production.

The term “synchronization” in manufacturing refers to the provision of the right components to the subsequent production steps at the right moment in time. It is still unclear how manufacturing system characteristics impact synchronization. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of manufacturing systems’ characteristics on the emergence of logistics synchronization in them. We conduct a discrete-event simulation study to examine the effect of three system characteristics: (1) material flow network architecture, (2) work content variation, and (3) order arrival pattern. Our findings suggest that the material flow network architecture and the work content variation are related to logistics synchronization. Linear manufacturing systems with stable processing times such as flow shops operate at high logistics synchronization levels, while highly connected systems with high variability of processing times such as job shops exhibit lower synchronization levels.

Activities carried out in Research Organizations (ROs), as in other organizations, becomes more oriented to efficient use of limited resources by transforming them into high quality R&D products. Traditional methods for performance assessment cannot be applied to ROs successfully as they differ from business enterprises in their different nature, work content, specificity and multi-dimensionality of created products, spontaneity of activities, data time lag and other features. The paper presents the ROs productivity assessment scheme, which allows the evaluation of activities carried out in ROs from the perspective of their activity types. The created scheme is tested empirically using Multi-Criteria Decision Making analysis methods.

The majority of published research about EMR systems regarding nurses and their clinical tasks have centered on their attitudes toward EMR systems, which have generally been positive and accepting. There is a lack of studies that would consider dimensions of clinical tasks, human factors, and available equipment to determine how nurses work with EMRs. The goal of this study was to investigate how suitable the design of computer workstations is in terms of hardware selection for nurses’ work content. This was a mixed-method study (focus groups and online survey) to collect data. The survey tool was distributed among 600 nurses in a rural hospital and a series of two-way, three-way chi-square and logistic regression analysis were conducted to investigate the correlation between the human factors aspects of the clinical tasks (work content) and nurses’ preference of computing device and location. The findings from 61 responses illustrated a significant correlation between cognitive and interaction design aspects and the preferred type of computer workstations. This means that better understanding of cognitive and interaction design aspects of clinical tasks by nurses as well as managers and computer software developers is critical in workstation design, resource allocation, better quality of care and patient safety.

Quality of work life is a process of work organizations, which enables its members at all levels to actively participate in shaping the organization, environment, methods and outcomes. This value-based process is aimed towards meeting the twin goals of enhanced effectiveness of organization and improved quality of life at work for employee. The paper conducted study on work life quality of workforce in the banks of district Yamuna Nagar, Haryana where the aim was to find out the different factors which influences the job performance. The result of the study shows that there is high impact of quality of work life on the performance of the employees and out of the perceptual factors of quality of reward, management support, challenging work content and career & growth opportunity are the main factor which the employees think are the important factors of quality of work life which leads them to perform well.

The aims of this thesis were threefold: to explore and increase knowledge of managerial working conditions in Swedish municipalities, to extend the job demands-resources (JD-R) model, and to provide information that public sector decision-makers and human resources departments can use and apply in promoting sustainable managerial working conditions. The argument in this thesis is that a contextual perspective on managerial work is needed, entailing a shift in focus from managers and their individual differences, to the conditions that public sector managers work under. In order to address these questions, a strategic sample of organizations and managers that allowed for comparison and examined systematic differences and similarities among them was used, accompanied by contextual quantitative and qualitative methods that included both subjective appraisals and more objective assessments and data on several levels. The main theoretical framework was based on the latest development in the work stress field, where theoretical and empirical insights from several decades have been developed into the JD-R model. The model takes a balanced approach in explaining negative as well as positive aspects of occupational well-being. Unlike previous models, the JD-R model can be adapted and tailored to the specific context and study group. This thesis comprises four empirical studies with specific aims. In the first study, the main aim was to explore different types of naturally occurring psychosocial work situations for municipal managers, based on the combination of job demands and job resources, by means of cluster analysis. Certain focus was also given to investigating how the work situations could be differentiated regarding sustainability indicators for managerial health, motivation, and performance. In the second study, these psychosocial work situations were followed up 2 years later, and the main aim was to investigate how the situations longitudinally predict managerial turnover using logistic regression and thereby identify groups that are at a high risk or a low risk for turnover, actual as well as intended. The main aim of the third study was to establish how the span of control – that is, the number of subordinates per manager as one of several possible organizational determinants of psychosocial working conditions – affects operational public sector managers’ job demands, using multilevel regression analysis. In the fourth and final study, the main aim was to deepen the understanding of first-line human service managers’ work assignment and psychosocial working conditions by qualitatively and externally assessing the job demands and job resources as well as the balance between them, through work content analysis, in order to provide explanations of the current work strain of this group of managers. The first overall conclusion of this thesis is that public sector managers work in a wide array of diverse situations, including balanced as well as unbalanced psychosocial working conditions in terms of job demands and job resources. An unbalanced work situation, characterized by a lack of correspondence between the job demands posed and the job resources provided, was found to be a reality for a large number of the managers, especially within human services. The psychosocial working conditions were found to be related to consequences for managerial sustainability in terms of health, performance, motivation, and turnover. In addition, the contextual approach applied contributed to identifying organizational and structuring factors – in other words, the type of service the manager works in and the manager’s span of control, managerial position, gender, age, and managerial experience – that provide reasons for the variation in psychosocial working conditions and their consequences. Taken together, the results can provide guidance for actions to be taken in order to promote sustainable psychosocial working conditions for public sector managers, thus reducing both significant individual and organizational costs.

Using a discrete choice experiment and a mixed-effects logit model, this article analyses the job preferences of 300 dairy farmers in the eastern part of Switzerland who intend to stay in milk production. The results show that a shift to suckler cow husbandry plus additional employment or to a job completely outside of agriculture would only be considered by dairy farmers in exchange for compensation of around 52,900 Swiss francs (CHF), equal to one-and-a-half times the annual on-farm income of a full-time family work unit. At CHF 45,800, the compensation required for farming without cattle is slightly lower, whilst giving up self-employment would require compensation of CHF 32,300. Dairy farmers would be willing to sacrifice around one-fifth of their annual income for an additional week’s holiday, which shows how precious leisure time is for them. Overall, we conclude that the farmers interviewed are passionate about dairy production and that they clearly prefer to remain self-employed. Accordingly, there is evidence that these dairy farmers have substantial non-pecuniary job preferences.

In today's era with the development of knowledge, each country in the world is vigorously developing its economy, and without necessary innovation capacity, it is hard for a country to compete with others. Therefore, the strength of innovation capacity directly determines the strength of a country's comprehensive power. Innovation is a dominant force in national development, foster innovation in any job are essential, a person or a company's work, the work content is immutable, over time, will lose important because no features , and this is the so-called comfort lethal it, we need to continue to have input will become new elements of passion. At the request of quality education, in order to implement the strategic plan of building an innovative country, the primary task is to improve students' ability to innovate. College students to receive higher education is an important period, but also the innovative ability of the most effective period, they have a higher accumulation of knowledge than ever before and more time and effort. For schools, the need to reform the teaching mode, innovative education model to inspire students to create enthusiasm, only to achieve the purpose of this innovative education. This paper describes the importance of innovation education and through analyzing various examples of innovation education at colleges and universities, studies the purpose and requirement for cultivating innovative talents in colleges and universities, and then obtains the measures and paths to cultivate innovative talents in colleges and universities in this new era.

In current debates about the future of work and organisations, digitisation and virtualisation move to centre stage. The terms ‘Digital Revolution’ (Rifkin 2011) or ‘Second Machine Age’ (Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014) equates the ongoing changes with those of the industrial revolution. In ‘Digital Capitalism’ (Schiller 2000) or ‘Cognitive Capitalism’ (Moulier-Boutang 2012), the internet of things, Weiser’s (1991) foresighted vision, is becoming true much sooner than expected. Regarding a future of ‘virtual realities’, or ‘real virtualities’ as Castells (1996) emphasises, place does not seem to be of any interest. The spread of the internet nourished the idea that time and place (of work) would no longer matter. New topologies of work emerge, which demand a rethinking of notions of space and place. This paper reflects on empirical evidence of automotive engineering to draw a picture of these new topologies of work. Engineering work is facing crucial changes as a new phase of informatisation has been entered through the development of digitisation and virtualisation techniques and the use of information and communication technologies (ICT). Collaborative engineering methods are being increasingly applied and global engineering seems to be a reachable goal. Engineering seems to be becoming spatially flexible: any time—any place. The empirical findings to be presented are based on two empirical research projects in automotive engineering. Four case studies have been conducted using document analysis and more than 40 guided qualitative interviews with experts in engineering management and engineers at the operational level in engineering centres or units. In summary, we found heterogeneous strategies to deal with the challenges of global competition and the financial crisis. The case companies try to enhance their global strategies, intensify the international division of labour in engineering and focus more on processes than on products. The aims of the companies could be characterised as locally-bounded and globally distributed at the same time, where globally distributed means within the same company and focused on nearshore locations. Consistent changes in automotive engineering has ongoing implications for the product development process and engineering work in the context of informatisation, digitisation and virtualisation. On the one hand, we find changes in work organisation, work content and the status of engineers, whilst, on the other hand, we find tendencies of relocating work through information spaces. Before presenting the empirical findings some thoughts on the differentiation of space and place will be put forward to demonstrate why we need a clear understanding of both and how these terms were used. The differences between and meanings of the terms: informatisation, digitalisation and virtualisation will also be clarified. These terms can be regarded as the central references of this paper and crucial to understanding the current changes in work and organisations.

With the rapid development of our country's economy, the per capita level of material life has improved significantly, the corresponding power consumption is also growing sharply, which brings a severe test to the stable operation of power grid system. As the mainstream trend of the current power grid construction, intelligent substation gathers many advanced technologies, wherein the communication technology plays a more and more significant role in it, and how to ensure the communication network security has become the currently primary work content. Thus, this article mainly analyzes the communication security technology in the intelligent substation, objectively sets forth the structure of the intelligent substation by integrating the actual situation, puts forward a safer and more reliable technical solution according to the characteristics of IED, so as to provide more solid guarantee for the intelligent substation, make sure the data transmission is securer, and promote the healthy and sustainable development of power utility.

We consider the project scheduling problem where each project activity has a prescribed work content that must be completed by a so-called work-content resource, and the activities' resource usage may be varied over time. In each period, the amount of resources allocated to an activity must lie within a prescribed range and cannot be changed for a minimum number of consecutive periods. The amount allocated determines an activity's requirements for further resources. The activities must be scheduled such that the project makespan is minimized. For this problem, we devise an MIP-based heuristic that schedules the activities sequentially. To determine more efficient resource allocations among multiple activities, subsets of activities are rescheduled periodically. Our computational results for a standard test set from the literature indicate that the proposed approach provides very good feasible solutions for small-sized instances, and that it outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for large-sized instances.

Work placements profiles and emerging conflicts resolution: Case study of work placements in legal translationThis article presents a qualitative analysis of the optional work placements — envisaged here as a learning activity — that form part of the Postgraduate Diploma in Legal Translation offered by the Department of Translation, Interpreting and East Asian Studies at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. The authors divide the placements into five profiles, according to the type of organi­sation hosting the students on the programme: sworn translation providers, law firms, translation agencies, non-governmental organisations such as associations and institutions and, finally, univer­sity research groups. The analysis is followed by an examination of the conflicts arising in each profile and proposals for dealing with these. In their conclusions, the authors state that the heteroge­neous nature of the work placements in specialised legal translation should be seen as an argument supporting the same heterogeneous nature of work content in non-specialised, general translation.

Many reverse-logistics systems that collect and reprocess end-of-life products require a disassembly stage. The nature of variability in incoming products, and damages, which are more likely to occur during disassembly than assembly, create a significant uncertainty in disassembly tasks, namely, possibility of failed tasks. Such failures may lead to some successor tasks being infeasible, which changes work contents of downstream stations. To improve the profitability of such a disassembly line, a mixed-integer-programming-based, predictive-reactive approach is proposed: first a predictive balance is created and then given a task failure, the tasks of the core with that task failure are re-selected and re-assigned to the stations (i.e. the line is rebalanced) so that an objective function that simultaneously models the profit obtained from that core and the possible increase in any station’s workload beyond the predictive cycle time is optimized. The solutions for a large number of realistic instances are found and analysed. Since this rebalancing approach affects the work content of stations, a discrete-event simulation study is also carried out to analyse how the line performs if it uses these optimally found line-balances (predictive and reactive). The results under a wide variety of instances show that, with the proposed approach, up to 59%-69% of the monetary throughput lost due to not taking corrective action can be recovered.

The proportion of men at senior management level in social work in Sweden, especially in social services, is explored based on three sources: questionnaires to all men who graduated in social work at Lund University, Sweden 1980–85 and 1993–2003, qualitative interviews with male social workers and secondary statistics on leadership in municipalities. The questionnaires revealed that the 1980s group were managers to a greater extent than the 1990s group. This finding is consistent with official statistics that show an essential decrease in the proportion of men in senior management in social services. Three reasons for this are found. First, the interviewees emerge as the new man to whom family is more important than gainful employment and work content more important than income. Second, due to new management working conditions for managers have deteriorated. The third reason is new kinds of careers. Instead of a vertical career male social workers can choose a horizontal career and thereby increase their professionalism. (Less)

Job-shop production in an individual and small-batch manufacturing environment demands producing simultaneously different products in many customised versions and in small numbers. The associated variability of the time-phased work content leads to a high degree of complexity and turbulence in the manufacturing process of such a production type. Therefore, production control becomes significantly more complicated, and many theories on how to cope fail in the real world. Despite the many technological and conceptual advances in the field of job-shop control over the past few decades, there is still a remarkable lack of practical control approaches for job-shop production. For this reason the Push-Kanban production control concept will be introduced in this article. It combines robust push scheduling along with a kanban-driven, decentralised inventory control mechanism to create a holistic control approach, integrating all production control tasks. Thus, it offers a feasible option for controlling job-shop ...

Maintenance is an activity of growing interest specially for critical systems. Particularly, aircraft maintenance costs are becoming an important issue in the aeronautical industry. Managing an aircraft maintenance center is a complex activity. One of the difficulties comes from the numerous uncertainties that affect the activity and disturb the plans at short and medium term. Based on a helicopter maintenance planning and scheduling problem, we study in this paper the integration of uncertainties into tactical and operational multiresource, multi-project planning (respectively Rough Cut Capacity Planning and Resource Constraint Project Scheduling Problem). Our main contributions are in modelling the periodic workload on tactical level considering uncertainties in macro-tasks work contents, and modelling the continuous workload on operational level considering uncertainties in tasks durations. We model uncertainties by a fuzzy/possibilistic approach instead of a stochastic approach since very limited data are available. We refer to the problems as the Fuzzy RoughCut Capacity Problem (FRCCP) and the Fuzzy Resource Constraint Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP).We apply our models to helicopter maintenance activity within the frame of the Helimaintenance project, an industrial project approved by the French Aerospace Valley cluster which aims at building a center for civil helicopter maintenance.

Purpose: To examine factors related to turnover of new graduate nurses in their first job. Design: Data were obtained from a 3-year panel survey (2006–2008) of the Graduates Occupational Mobility Survey that followed-up college graduates in South Korea. The sample consisted of 351 new graduates whose first job was as a full-time registered nurse in a hospital. Methods: Survival analysis was conducted to estimate survival curves and related factors, including individual and family, nursing education, hospital, and job dissatisfaction (overall and 10 specific job aspects). Findings: The estimated probabilities of staying in their first job for 1, 2, and 3 years were 0.823, 0.666, and 0.537, respectively. Nurses reporting overall job dissatisfaction had significantly lower survival probabilities than those who reported themselves to be either neutral or satisfied. Nurses were more likely to leave if they were married or worked in small (vs. large), nonmetropolitan, and nonunionized hospitals. Dissatisfaction with interpersonal relationships, work content, and physical work environment was associated with a significant increase in the hazards of leaving the first job. Conclusions: Hospital characteristics as well as job satisfaction were significantly associated with new graduates’ turnover. Clinical Relevance: The high turnover of new graduates could be reduced by improving their job satisfaction, especially with interpersonal relationships, work content, and the physical work environment.

Article history: Received March 7, 2011 Received in Revised form August, 25, 2011 Accepted 25 August 2011 Available online 28 August 2011 The main aim of this study is to assess the physical work capacity of bricklayers with focus on the energy expenditure during work. Eighty Nine bricklayers’ working on various sites in Ibadan and Eruwa towns of Oyo State, Nigeria are used for the study. Correlation and regression analysis using SPSS 16.0 Statistical Package was used to determine the relationship between VO2 given the age and weight of the subjects; % RHR(Relative Heart Rate) and working heart rate (HRW) given weight; VO2 and %RHR given Body Mass Index (BMI). The results showed that the mean energy expenditure of bricklaying was 1.5l/min of oxygen (7.23Kcal/min, using a conversion factor of 4.82) which classified bricklaying as “heavy work”. A rest allowance of 64.45% (38.67 minutes rest for 60 minutes work duration) was calculated . It was concluded that there is a need to redesign the work content of the aforementioned occupation in order to reduce excessive strain on the workers, which in turn will increase productivity. © 2012 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

The current study aims at evaluating the reorganization of work processes on the basis of studies of three assembly lines in a well known component manufacture of the German automotive industry. It is of particular interest to evaluate the impact of the introduction of Chaku-Chaku assembly lines on the production goals, distribution of activities during one typical work day and psychosocial characteristics of the work environment. Findings indicate that the Chaku-Chaku assembly lines could represent a successful production strategy in order to enhance the output levels of work systems. However, the data show that interviewed assembly workers have spent more time on value added activities than before. The intensive perception of the time spent on main work activities (direct value added activities) and a simultaneous decrease of available discretionary time between work tasks seem to be related to the low level of the reported psychosocial work characteristics.

Bucket brigade order picking is a method for retrieving orders from a storage rack where workers follow a fixed sequence and dynamically adjust to variability in work content along the rack. The method is simple and has been shown to provide superior performance in many applications. In this article, we analyze how the location in which products are stored in the rack affects throughput. We identify conditions where storage decisions have a large impact on throughput (e.g., a 20% increase in productivity) and conditions where the impact is minimal. Conditions associated with high impact are high variation in worker skill, high variation in SKU volume, and a moderate level of walking-to-picking work content per pick list.

The implications of thermodynamics for economic theory have been a source of debate for 40 years. Adopting the framing used in modern engineering rather than physics suggests that the market place has already recognised most of these thermodynamic truths as self-evident rather than challenging basic concepts. The exception is the relatively small market for heat where the idea of thermodynamic grade, conveniently represented by the exergy or available work content of a heat source, exposes inconsistencies especially in monopoly supply and economic instruments. Earlier commentators were not wrong in the thrust of their criticisms of economic theory but may have been overly elaborate in their attack.

This paper summarizes the connotation, the work objective and the main work content of the ILS (Integrated Logistic Support) technology which belongs to the transmission system by using a template for the development experience of tail rotor drive system of the certain-type helicopter. It introduces a primary way which is about how to improve the work efficiency and reduce the maintenance cost of tail rotor drive system of the certain-type helicopter by using the technology. It expounds the relation between the ILS technology and the reliability, the safety, the maintainability, the supportability and the testability, the ideology of the technology.

Work sharing between stations in assembly lines can reduce cycle time and improve throughput rate. This research addresses assembly lines in which tasks may be shared with their immediate upstream or downstream stations only. This study consists of three stages. In the first stage, we assume that all work content in the line can be shared. Then, the balanceability of the line, which is defined as its ability to achieve a perfect balance (identical workload in all workstations) via work sharing, is examined. An algorithm and a linear programming formulation is proposed to provide the sharing proportion, namely, the percentage of the cycles each station performs the shared task. In the second stage, a line with partial sharing is investigated; conditions for balanceability are provided as well as a solution approach for obtaining the sharing proportions of the shared tasks. The last stage considers the most practical model in which sharing costs are involved, and the identity of the shared tasks is to be de...

This paper applied stopwatch to measure the work time of workstations on lamp assembling line. It studied issues effecting line production capability such as bottleneck workstations and superfluous capability. To overcome these shortcomings this paper suggests new line balancing schema. The schema includes reallocation of the work content, adjustment of the equipment and workers of each workstation. This improvement saves extra work shifts and reduces labor cost.

Epilepsie ist nach Schlaganfall die zweithäufigste neurologische Erkrankung mit einer Vielzahl von Ursachen, Symptomen und Behandlungsmöglichkeiten. In Epilepsie-Zentren gibt es zudem eine Gruppe von Patienten, die unter psychogenen, nicht-epileptischen Anfällen (PNEA) leiden. Menschen mit Epilepsie müssen die medikamentöse Therapie in ihren Alltag integrieren, mit Symptomen umgehen und anfallsprovozierende Faktoren vermeiden. Menschen mit PNEA müssen lernen psychotherapeutische Hilfe anzunehmen. Dazu benötigen die Betroffenen eine kompetente, kontinuierliche pflegerische Begleitung. Pflegende brauchen ein breites Fachwissen über diese Erkrankungen und ihre Therapien sowie vertiefte Fähigkeiten in der Begleitung und Beratung von Menschen mit Anfallserkrankungen und ihren Angehörigen. Das Ziel dieses Artikels ist, erste Erfahrungen der Praxistätigkeit einer Advanced Practice Nurse (APN) zu beschreiben. Die Aufgabenbereiche der APN und Veränderungen nach einem Jahr Erfahrung mit APN werden vorgestellt. Die Praxistätigkeit der APN bestand aus klinischer Tätigkeit und Projektarbeiten, Coaching von Pflegenden und Unterstützung der Stationsleitung. Die Veränderungen seit der Implementierung einer APN sind die Wissenserweiterung und zunehmende pflegerische Handlungskompetenz der Teammitglieder, sowie positive Äusserungen von Patienten zur pflegerischen Beratung und Betreuung. Die Erfahrung im Schweizerischen Epilepsie-Zentrum zeigt, dass die Integration einer APN in das Pflegeteam einer Station zur Pflegeentwicklung beitragen und die Betreuung von Menschen mit Epilepsie verbessern kann.

Work content, working tools and spatial arrangements of the equipment as well as musculoskeletal complaints were studied for 69 employees of a fiscal office using questionnaires. In addition, a work-physiological field investigation regarding muscular strain and fatigue was performed during total working days under normal working conditions in the office for a subgroup of 13 subjects. Surface electromyograms (EMG) of 4 shoulder and arm muscles were recorded during the total working shift; simultaneously the workflow was documented applying an encoding procedure. At four points in time, acute musculoskeletal complaints were documented using a specific questionnaire. The work under study is characterised by a fast changing between the use of documents in paper form and the use of a computerised data processing system. Accordingly, spatial problems result for the concurrent arranging of the documents and the keyboard and mouse on the table within the eye focus and the reach. About 50% of the 69 persons indicated complaints for at least 8 days during the last year for the neck and the lower back and 30% for the thoracic region; 40% and 30% of the persons stated complaints for the right and left shoulder region, respectively. EMG analyses were performed for 11 of the 13 participants of the work-physiological part of the study. For the shoulder region, the highest myoelectrical activity was observed during paper work and for the forearm during mouse application. Time-related changes in the EMG amplitude and frequency spectrum were analysed in order to determine potential changes in the fatigue and force-production status. For several persons muscular fatigue was observed, in particular, for the hand extensor during keyboard operations and for the trapezius during paper work. For the major part of the persons, however, force decrease was found for all muscles under test. Persons with a decrease in myoelectrical activity in the shoulder region reported shoulder complaints less frequently than persons with constant or increasing activity. This finding suggests that persons with less number of complaints perform a self-adjustment of physical activity aiming for the avoidance of pain. It is therefore concluded that self-organisation of the work by the subjects, e.g. by changing the working posture or the work sequence and pace resulting in a decrease in muscular activation in the course of the working day is helpful to prevent muscular complaints. For about half of the persons a decrease in the rest time, i.e. periods with very low muscular activity, in the course of the day was found. Considering the “gap hypothesis” stated in the literature, an increase in the risk for the development of muscular complaints with increasing working time may be inferred. Relevance to industry Results of electromyographical field investigations on office workers suggest that self-organisation of the work on the employee’s own responsibility comprising a reduction of the actual muscular activation in the course of a working day may be an effective mean for preventing musculoskeletal complaints.

Background Since 1991 the German psychiatry personnel regulation act (PsychPV) defines the number and tasks of medical doctors and nursing staff on a psychiatric ward. However, there is the suspicion that there are differences, especially with regard to an increased proportion of activities not involving patients, such as documentation and administrative work. Methods To detect differences between requirements from the PsychPV and the actual amount of time spent on different activities, a task analysis was performed on a general psychiatric and a gerontological psychiatric ward. In this study the proportions of working time spent on five different types of activities with time that should have been spent according to the PsychPV were compared. Results Discrepancies were found on both psychiatric wards and for medical doctors as well as for nursing staff. Tasks of documentation and administrative work took significantly higher proportions of working time than required in the PsychPV. On the other hand psychiatric personnel spent less time for treatment or nursing in direct contact with the patients. Conclusion The results of this study confirmed the suspicion that shifting tasks on psychiatric wards has led to changed treatment settings., Hintergrund Die Psychiatrie-Personalverordnung (PsychPV) liefert seit dem Jahre 1991 die Bemessungsgrundlage für die Personalausstattung stationärer psychiatrisch-psychotherapeutischer Einrichtungen. Es besteht allerdings die Vermutung, dass eine Tätigkeitsverschiebung des pflegerischen und ärztlichen Personals hin zu patientenfernen, administrativen Tätigkeiten stattgefunden hat, die durch die Kalkulationen der PsychPV nicht abgebildet wird. Methodik Um den Übereinstimmungsgrad der PsychPV-Vorgaben mit den realen Tätigkeiten für ärztliches und pflegerisches Personal zu bestimmen, wurde eine Tätigkeitsanalyse auf einer allgemeinpsychiatrischen und einer gerontopsychiatrischen Station in einer psychiatrischen Einrichtung durchgeführt. In 5 Tätigkeitskategorien wurden prozentuale Verteilungen der tatsächlichen Arbeitsinhalte mit den Vorgaben der PsychPV abgeglichen. Ergebnisse Auf beiden Stationen fand sich sowohl für das ärztliche als auch für das pflegerische Personal eine Abweichung der Tätigkeitsanteile im Vergleich zu den Vorgaben der PsychPV. Während indirekte Behandlungen sowie Tätigkeiten der Dokumentation und Administration einen übermäßig hohen Anteil der Arbeitszeit einnahmen, unterschritt der Anteil von Tätigkeiten im direkten Patientenkontakt die zeitlichen Vorgaben deutlich. Schlussfolgerung Die vorliegende Studie konnte den Verdacht bestätigen, dass die Vorgaben der PsychPV aufgrund einer Veränderung der Tätigkeitsinhalte von Ärzten und Pflegekräften nicht mehr erfüllt werden können. Eine Hilfestellung, um dem therapeutischen Personal mehr Zeit für den direkten Patientenkontakt zu gestatten, könnte die Einführung von Stationssekretariaten bieten.