Archive for October, 2008
Distributed Leadership as a Strategy for School Improvement: A Case Study
Current educational literature suggests that distributing leadership in schools can leverage individual and organizational development, however, this model of leadership is far from the dominant practice of leadership in most schools. The paper presents a case study of implementation efforts to develop distributed leadership as a planned strategy for building school’s leadership capacity in support of instructional improvement in high schools in Slovenia. Using a recently developed framework designed to study distributed leadership development and implementation in schools, this study examines an in-service professional development program and its role in promoting distributed leadership practice and improvement of school’s instructional capacity.
Trapping and releasing of telecom rainbow
We show how the graded grating structures developed for “trapped rainbow” in THz domain can be transferred to telecom frequencies for future possible optical communication and various nano photonic applications.
Decomposition of Large Scale Man-power Planning Problems: Assignment, Loading and Scheduling
Model decompositions for manpower planning problems utilizing time-based hierarchical structuring of the decisions and predictor-corrector iterative control schemes are investigated. Our proposed method consists of 3 stages: (1) determination of the number of employees for stochastic demand data in a given service region, (2) the loading problem in which jobs are distributed to appropriately skilled employees, (3) scheduling to shifts, subject to work rules and back-up requirements.
Network Simplex-like Algorithms for Stochastic Appointment Scheduling
Scheduling appointment times when appointment durations are random is a common problem. Given the sequence of appointments, and scenarios generated from duration distributions, optimizing appointment starting times is an LP. We develop a “network simplex-like” algorithm to solve it, and contrast with previous algorithms based on the L-shaped method.
Stochastic Sequencing & Scheduling of Operating Rooms
We study sequencing and scheduling problems for a single OR when surgery times are random variables. We first present a network flow based algorithm that solves the scheduling problem for a given sequence of surgeries with multiple scenarios. Next we address the sequencing problem using different heuristic methods.