Abstract: The Taiwan government has started to promote the “Plain Landscape Afforestation and Greening Program" since 2002. A key task of the program was the payment for environmental services (PES), entitled the “Plain Landscape Afforestation Policy" (PLAP), which was certificated by the Executive Yuan on August 31, 2001 and enacted on January 1, 2002. According to the policy, it is estimated that the total area of afforestation will be 25,100 hectares by December 31, 2007. Until the end of 2007, the policy had been enacted for six years in total and the actual area of afforestation was 8,919.18 hectares. Among them, Taiwan Sugar Corporation (TSC) was accounted for 7,960 hectares (with 2,450.83 hectares as public service area) which occupied 86.22% of the total afforestation area; the private farmland promoted by local governments was accounted for 869.18 hectares which occupied 9.75% of the total afforestation area. Based on the above, we observe that most of the afforestation area in this policy is executed by TSC, and the achievement ratio by TSC is better than by others. It implies that the success of the PLAP is seriously related to the execution of TSC. The objective of this study is to analyze the relevant policy planning of TSC-s participation in the PLAP, suggest complementary measures, and draw up effective adjustment mechanisms, so as to improve the effectiveness of executing the policy. Our main conclusions and suggestions are summarized as follows: 1. The main reason for TSC-s participation in the PLAP is based on their passive cooperation with the central government or company policy. Prior to TSC-s participation in the PLAP, their lands were mainly used for growing sugarcane. 2. The main factors of TSC-s consideration on the selection of tree species are based on the suitability of land and species. The largest proportion of tree species is allocated to economic forests, and the lack of technical instruction was the main problem during afforestation. Moreover, the method of improving TSC-s future development in leisure agriculture and landscape business becomes a key topic. 3. TSC has developed short and long-term plans on participating in the PLAP for the future. However, there is no great willingness or incentive on budgeting for such detailed planning. 4. Most people from TSC interviewed consider the requirements on PLAP unreasonable. Among them, an unreasonable requirement on the number of trees accounted for the greatest proportion; furthermore, most interviewees suggested that the government should continue to provide incentives even after 20 years. 5. Since the government shares the same goals as TSC, there should be sufficient cooperation and communication that support the technical instruction and reduction of afforestation cost, which will also help to improve effectiveness of the policy.
Abstract: In this study, we explore the use of information for inventory decision in the healthcare organization (HO). We consider the scenario when the HO can make use of the information collected from some correlated products to enhance its inventory planning. Motivated by our real world observations that HOs adopt RFID and bar-coding system for information collection purpose, we examine the effectiveness of these systems for inventory planning with Bayesian information updating. We derive the optimal ordering decision and study the issue of Pareto improvement in the supply chain. Our analysis demonstrates that RFID system will outperform the bar-coding system when the RFID system installation cost and the tag cost reduce to a level that is comparable with that of the barcoding system. We also show how an appropriately set wholesale pricing contract can achieve Pareto improvement in the HO supply chain.
Abstract: In today-s global and competitive market,
manufacturing companies are working hard towards improving their
production system performance. Most companies develop production
systems that can help in cost reduction. Manufacturing systems
consist of different elements including production methods,
machines, processes, control and information systems. Human issues
are an important part of manufacturing systems, yet most companies
do not pay sufficient attention to them. In this paper, a workforce
planning (WP) model is presented. A non-linear programming model
is developed in order to minimize the hiring, firing, training and
overtime costs. The purpose is to determine the number of workers
for each worker type, the number of workers trained, and the number
of overtime hours. Moreover, a decision support system (DSS) based
on the proposed model is introduced using the Excel-Lingo software
interfacing feature. This model will help to improve the interaction
between the workers, managers and the technical systems in
manufacturing.
Abstract: A novel path planning approach is presented to solve
optimal path in stochastic, time-varying networks under priori traffic
information. Most existing studies make use of dynamic programming
to find optimal path. However, those methods are proved to
be unable to obtain global optimal value, moreover, how to design
efficient algorithms is also another challenge.
This paper employs a decision theoretic framework for defining
optimal path: for a given source S and destination D in urban transit
network, we seek an S - D path of lowest expected travel time
where its link travel times are discrete random variables. To solve
deficiency caused by the methods of dynamic programming, such as
curse of dimensionality and violation of optimal principle, an integer
programming model is built to realize assignment of discrete travel
time variables to arcs. Simultaneously, pruning techniques are also
applied to reduce computation complexity in the algorithm. The final
experiments show the feasibility of the novel approach.