Function Of System Design Research Articles

How Compensation and Benefits Build and Sustain a Customer-Focused Culture

Compensation and rewards systems promote employee behavior that ultimately becomes dominant in an organization. Such behavior influences employees' perceptions and beliefs about the organization’s value systems. It is vital to align the compensation and rewards strategy to support the attributes of a customer-focused culture. Compensation and rewards systems will positively influence behavior only if they are consistent with beliefs and expectations of the organization. Organizational culture and compensation/rewards system design function as complementary elements in directing employees toward achieving the strategic goals of the organization. This research develops a causal relationship between rewards systems and customer-focused culture; identifies matching compensation and rewards system for building a customer-focused culture; and proposes various supporting frameworks.

Effect of air temperature on passive containment cooling system reliability in AP1000

Passive containment cooling system is innovatively used in AP1000 reactor design to enhance the safety. Since the system operation is based on natural circulation, physical process failure induced by uncertainties of physical parameters becomes one of the important failure modes (e.g. natural circulation cannot establish or keep and system design function cannot be accomplished because some parameters such as air temperature deviate from their design values), which should be considered in system reliability evaluation. As the heat sink, air temperature with high uncertainty has important effect on system reliability. In this article, we analyze the pressure variation in the containment along with the air temperature based on system thermal–hydraulic model, and the effect of air temperature on system operation is closely related to the thermal–hydraulic performance of the system. Moreover, the system thermal–hydraulic capacity is influenced by the system component configuration, so we evaluate the system physical process failure probability by Monte Carlo simulation and analyze the effect of air temperature distribution under different system component configurations. Finally, we evaluate the whole system reliability considering the logical relationship between physical process failure and equipment fault by fault tree method. The results illustrate that air temperature distribution has important influence on the system reliability, the system failure probability may be difference by several orders and the main contributors may be different at different plant locations, so climate should be considered in system design and reliability analysis.

Nutrient discharge from aquaculture operations in function of system design and production environment

AbstractIn aquaculture, nutrient loading is defined as the difference between nutrients supplied with fertilizers and feed and nutrients harvested in the form of finfish, crustaceans, molluscs and seaweeds. On average, the production of finfish and crustaceans results in a net nutrient loading, while for the production of molluscs and seaweeds the nutrient loading is negative. In marine and brackish water aquaculture, on a global scale, more nutrients are extracted than added to the environment. However, in freshwater, more nutrients are loaded than extracted. In 2008, the global aquaculture production of finfish and crustaceans resulted in an environmental loading of 1.7 million metric tonnes of nitrogen (N) and 0.46 million metric tonnes of phosphorus (P). This nitrogen loading represents 0.9% of the human input to the N‐cycle and 0.4% of the global N‐cycle. For phosphorus, the loading from finfish and crustacean aquaculture represents 2.3% of the global annual fertilizer supply. With cage aquaculture, nutrients are directly discharged to the environment. Mitigation measures should be shared equally between all polluters involved. For land‐based aquaculture, the development of water re‐use systems is still in its infancy. Although still a minor contributor to global aquaculture production, recirculation technology shows that control and mitigation of pollution from aquaculture is possible. A 15–20 year goal should be to have all inland aquaculture operations applying water re‐use and purification technology and generating useful (waste) outputs in addition to standard aquaculture products.

Comment on “Financial Crisis and the Lost Decade”

Comment on “Financial Crisis and the Lost Decade”

Fiscal implications of population ageing.

In all developed countries the fiscal ties of the tax and benefit system serve to complement, and sometimes substitute for, traditional family bonds between young and old. Older people are major recipients of public pensions and public health care systems. Since these public transfers and services are financed primarily from the taxes paid by people of working age, the welfare system in effect transfers resources from young to old. But rather than see the fiscal interdependency between young and old as being analogous to the ties that bind children, parents and grandparents together in familial networks, it is often interpreted as an oppressive burden that the old place on the young. This paper examines arguments that population ageing will exacerbate this burden, and may lead to the collapse of public welfare systems. It shows that the financial problems currently associated with public pensions are a function of system design rather than demographic change, and that wholesale privatization of pension systems will do little to solve the major dilemma--of persuading people to transfer a larger part of their lifetime income to their later years in order to sustain a reasonable standard of living throughout an ever lengthening period of retirement.

Model for the optimal planning of structural flood control systems

A mixed integer programing approach is described in this paper for the planning and design of composite multiunit flood control systems. The model is intended to be a preliminary selection device permitting the planner to compare alternative configurations and determine roughly the optimal solution to a given flood control problem. Such a solution may then be used to establish the guidelines and specifications for the design of the individual components. The flexibility of the method enables a large number of alternatives to be considered simultaneously, even though they may be at different stages of planning. It also recognizes that optimal operation is a function of system design.