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The unprecedented growth of universities in recent years has meant that there are more students with learning disabilities attending courses. Consequently, universities have had to adapt, improve and create new resources to ensure greater inclusivity. These resources, their design, and development are managed by inclusion support services, aiming to the full inclusion of students with disabilities and the promotion of community awareness. This article aims to shed light on the current role of inclusion services in supporting students with learning disabilities, and the link these services have with the different university stakeholders, using a thematic analysis from the experiences of this services staff in eight Spanish universities. The results show that: (1) there is no uniformity in the support services; and (2) more resources and work are needed to ensure increased inclusion and awareness. The discussion and conclusions drawn highlight the trends, challenges, and opportunities for universities improving their inclusion.

The unprecedented growth of universities in recent years has meant that there are more students with learning disabilities attending courses. Consequently, universities have had to adapt, improve and create new resources to ensure greater inclusivity. These resources, their design, and development are managed by inclusion support services, aiming to the full inclusion of students with disabilities and the promotion of community awareness. This article aims to shed light on the current role of inclusion services in supporting students with learning disabilities, and the link these services have with the different university stakeholders, using a thematic analysis from the experiences of this services staff in eight Spanish universities. The results show that: i) there is no uniformity in the support services; and ii) more resources and work are needed to ensure increased inclusion and awareness. The discussion and conclusions drawn highlight the trends, challenges, and opportunities for universities improving their inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews methodological approaches to the design (or redesign) of the supply chain (SC), including comprehensive approaches (proposals concerning the entire process of designing the SC) and those that deal with four specific aspects of the process (definition of the SC objectives, reverse SC, finance, and generation and use of scenarios) that have a decisive influence on the whole design of the SC. The comprehensive approaches include those based on typologies of products, markets and SCs and those that propose a succession of the stages to follow through the design process. The discussion shows that the use of typologies is not adequate to face SC design and that the methods proposing a succession of stages may suit, provided that they are developed and presented in a manner appropriate to their use for practitioners. The discussion leads also to suggest several research lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work studies a novel assembly line balancing problem that has recently appeared in the literature, which we name Accessibility Windows Assembly Line Balancing Problem (AWALBP). AWALBP is a real-world industrial problem that arises in those assembly lines where, as opposed to the most common ones, the length of the workpiece is larger than the widths of the workstation. This means that, at any time, a workstation cannot access one whole workpiece, but only a restricted portion of one or two consecutive workpiece. In our problem the cycle decomposes into stationary stages separated by forward steps, according to a cyclic movement scheme. The aim of this paper is (i) to formalise the AWALBP and its variants, and (ii) to propose a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model using two alternative formulations to solve the variant AWALBP-L2. This variant involves solving the task assignment and the movement scheme sub-problems (with the objective of minimising the cycle time). An extensive computational experiment is carried out to study the behaviour of the proposed model for different instance sizes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work in the literature which provides optimal solutions for AWALBP-L2. In addition, a set of benchmark instances is provided, which can be further used by the research community. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this study, we present a dispatching algorithm to solve a real-world case of the flexible job-shop scheduling problem with transfer batches and the objective of minimising the average tardiness of production orders. The proposed algorithm considers two variants: (i) an ordered variant, where the priority dispatching rules are applied in a predefined order, and (ii) a randomised variant, where the user can assign probabilities (weights) to the priority rules. Using the information of the number of units and due dates requested by the only customer, the algorithm provides the sequence of operations that must be performed on each machine, as well as the start and completion times of operations. In order to reduce the impact of unexpected events on a generated schedule, several robustness rules are considered. The obtained results substantially improve the former method used in the company in terms of minimising average tardiness. Additionally, other important benefits are obtained, including significant saving in the time spent on scheduling, simplicity of use of the proposed procedure, robustness against unexpected events, reduction of idle times, improvement of decision-making information, and improvement of on-time delivery performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]