Lino Guimarães Marujo

Using fuzzy logic to implement decision policies in system dynamics models

A fuzzy logic-system dynamics methodology is proposed to enhance learning within virtual worlds.Theoretical discussion on the motivation and advantages of the integration.Case study applying the FL-SD methodology to a virtual world model of a Dynamic Balanced Scorecard. This paper aims to show how the use of fuzzy systems can enhance the application of system dynamics (SD), with the construction of virtual worlds, for organizational learning. By doing so, the main contribution is to propose a fuzzy-SD integrated methodology that allows a natural language modeling of decision policies. At first it will be revised the recent literature with practical and theoretical fuzzy-SD integration showing that the motivation and purpose of this article have not been explored yet. Following, it will be scrutinized the origin of system dynamics to theoretically justify the proposed fuzzy-SD integration for organizational learning. Finally, it will be presented a hypothetical case study based on the balance scorecard model to illustrate the methodology in action.

Análise de modelo intermodal para escoamento da produção da soja no centro oeste brasileiro

Assuming as a premise the integration with another transportation mode, and assuming the city of Sorriso, the greatest soy manufacturer of the State of MT as the origin, the intermodal mathematic model of minimization of origin-destination transportation cost was applied. For such, the optimization software GUSEK was used, which allows the solution of models of Linear Programming or Mixed Integer Linear Programming. Six intermodal routes were found and the number of voyages for the destination ports were: Santos - SP (26.277.800 voyages/year - modes: Road -Railway), Paranagua - PR (4.865.560 voyages/year- modes: Road - Railway), Sao Francisco do Sul - SC (8.278.890 voyages/year- modes: Road - Railway), Vitoria - ES (4.062.220 voyages/year - modes: Road - Railway), Manaus - AM (7.990.830 voyages/year - modes: Road - Waterway) e Sao Luiz - MA (226.667 voyages/year - modes: Road -Railway).

Using fuzzy NPV evaluation to justify the acquisition of business interruption insurance

Offshore platforms oil and gas day to day operations themselves involve an undeterminable list of risk. Some of them can be prevent or at least mitigate as a result of an experience of a former disaster. Indeed, although computational mathematical technologies grows so fast helping the engineers to estimate and mitigate the risk much uncertainties remains in a way of vagueness, which is many times impossible to measure precisely due to the imprecision and the lake of data. In such cases fuzzy logic is the mathematical treatment indicated to deal with these problems. As insurance is one of the most important economic form to mitigate risk the purpose of this paper is to verify the viability of purchasing a business interruption cover (BIC) for an offshore production unit using the fuzzy net present value (FNPV) that results of the discounted cash flow (DFC) involving much vagueness and uncertainties in these available information.

Evaluation of Best Practices Introduction for the Managerial Improvement in Urban Freight Transport

Abstract The last mile of parcel deliveries is a key process to service providers, with global costs that reach up to 70 billion euros per year. Moreover, due to urban population growth and to the rise of e-commerce, the importance of last-mile deliveries and its impacts to the environment and quality of life in cities tend to increase even more. This chapter proposes a more comprehensive methodology to assess alternative last-mile distribution strategies in terms of environmental and economic aspects and presents an application to the distribution of a postal company located in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. We evaluated the use of small electric vehicles (i.e., tricycles) in the last mile deliveries by assessing two scenarios: (1) the baseline scenario using a light commercial vehicle and (2) a scenario using electric tricycles. Results indicated that the use of electric tricycle is a more feasible alternative regarding the economic and environmental aspects as well as to maintain the service level of the company.

Process parameter prediction via markov models of sub-activities

This work aims to fill a lacunae in the project-oriented production systems literature providing a formal analytic description of the rework effects formulae and the determination of the extended design time due to a certain degree of overlapping in a pair of activities. It is made through the utilization of concepts of workflow construction with hidden (semi) Markov models theory and establishing a way to disaggregate activities into sub-activities, in order to determine the activity parameters used by the project scheduling techniques. With the aim to make a correlation between the entropy of the state transitions and the probability of changes, the information theory is also used, and the concept of impact caused by the probability of changes is provided. Numerical examples are shown for the purpose to demonstrate the applicability of the concepts developed, and one example of overlapping of two activities is shown. The original contributions of this work are shown on the last section.