Resource-sharing Strategies Research Articles

Impact of fairness concerns on resource-sharing decisions: A comparative analysis using evolutionary game models in manufacturing enterprises

In recent years, the resource-sharing model has developed rapidly, and manufacturing enterprises have paid more attention to profit distribution and resource investment. Studying the role of fairness concern behaviour in enterprise resource-sharing decisions can provide strategic references for enterprises to implement resource-sharing. This article considers the fairness concern behaviour of resource-sharing enterprises and constructs two symmetric evolutionary game models for resource-sharing. Based on the resource-sharing strategy when the enterprise is fair and neutral, a comparative study is conducted on the impact of fairness concern behaviour on the resource-sharing equilibrium strategy. MATLAB is used for numerical simulation. The analysis results indicate that: (1) the system cost coefficient, information level coefficient, information loss coefficient, resource conversion ability coefficient, resource collaboration ability coefficient, and penalty factor all have an impact on the strategic evolution results of both parties in the game enterprise, (2) fairness concerns include heterogeneity, directionality, and reinforcement, which affect the resource-sharing strategies of enterprises. This study provides a reference for shared decision-making in manufacturing enterprises and provides recommendations for their business development.

Nexus between accounting and information systems and SMEs` operational efficiency in South Africa

Accounting information systems are critical to any business but especially important to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Such systems are vital to their performance and success. Unfortunately, SMEs make poor decisions, leading to a shortage of accounting information. Hence, this study aims to investigate the impact of accounting information systems on SME operational efficiency in South Africa. Using purposive sampling, data were collected from 109 out of 150 retail SME owners or other appropriate representatives. A quantitative research design that falls under the positivist paradigm was used. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPPS) software version 20.0 was utilized to analyze the collected data, specifically through descriptive and regression analysis. The study found a significant positive correlation between accounting information systems and SME operational efficiency (r-value = 0.579), which had a p-value of 0.0005, according to the intensity of the association with r-value. The study recommends that SME management implement excellent accounting principles into their operations. Furthermore, because SMEs may be unable to afford complicated accounting systems, SMEs functioning in the same region should implement a resource-sharing strategy to reduce expenses.

Ellen R. Grass Lecture: Disparities in Access to Neurodiagnostic Testing

ABSTRACT Limited access to EEG services in rural areas creates health disparities in neurological care, including unnecessary transfers and delays in diagnosis and treatment. Rural facilities face several challenges to expanding EEG resources, including a lack of neurologists, technologists, EEG equipment, and adequate IT infrastructure. Potential solutions include investment in innovative technology, expansion of the workforce, and development of hub-and-spoke EEG networks. Bridging the EEG gap requires collaboration between academic and community practices to advance practical technologies, train competent personnel and develop cost-effective resource-sharing strategies.

A Convolutional Neural Network Accelerator Based on FPGA

This paper analyzes and studies the hardware programmable logic resources on small-scale FPGA chips, providing reasonable hardware resource support for subsequent neural network accelerator designs. A flexible 32-bit instruction set is designed for control by the Processing System (PS) on the Programmable Logic (PL) side, making motion state detection flexible and controllable. When designing the hardware side, this paper uses a resource-sharing strategy, and most of the calculation modules are designed using on-chip DSP resources to reduce the resource consumption of the calculation module. An innovative strategy of partially not caching the data between layers of the neural network is applied to reduce the demand for on-chip cache. To optimize on-chip storage space, this article partitions the limited BRAM space on the chip in a reasonable manner and improves the efficiency of on-chip data reading and writing through parallel processing, thereby improving the real-time performance of the neural network.

The Intersection of Business Innovation and Scientific Exploration to Address Early Mortality in People With Serious Mental Illness

This Viewpoint describes how open innovation has been used by communities to support individual and community health and discusses how scientists and clinicians could apply this idea- and resource-sharing strategy to generate breakthrough advances that may extend the life span of people with serious mental illness (SMI).

Ecotourism as a Resource Sharing Strategy: Case Study of Community-Based Ecotourism at the Tangkahan Buffer Zone of Leuser National Park, Langkat District, North Sumatra, Indonesia

The local community is an essential and key partner in managing protected areas, especially for national parks in Indonesia. Therefore, there is a need to establish adaptive collaborative management (ACM) between the park authorities and the local community. In 2000, several local leaders established a new organization to develop an ecotourism package called the Tangkahan Ecotourism Organization or Lembaga Pariwisata Tangkahan (LPT) and set up the Community Tour Operator to manage the ecotourism activities. Our study used a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis through focus group discussions (FGDs), interviews with related stakeholders and key informants, and carried out a literature review. It was found that ensuring local community could generate alternative income from ecotourism was an effective way to protect the park from any illegal activities. Additionally, the results about sustainability from the FGDs show that all three categories: Social Process, Adaptive Natural Resource Management, and Impact/Condition are interrelated, meaning that the collaboration and adaptive management in Tangkahan have resulted in high levels of humanistic well-being and the maintenance of ecological values, supporting collaboration processes and adaptive levels. Finally, our study can be used as a basis for a model of national parks focusing on ACM.

Effects of different resource-sharing strategies in cloud manufacturing: a Stackelberg game-based approach

Cloud manufacturing (CMfg) aims to realise the sharing of manufacturing resources amongst different stakeholders. Resource-sharing strategies of suppliers are essential in achieving this aim. However, current studies on this topic rarely focus on the sharing of management rights over manufacturing resources. To fill this research gap, this study investigates three resource-sharing strategies: independently, as an alliance and by cooperating with a cloud platform operator. This study explores the effects of these different strategies on meeting client requirements in CMfg. The interactions between the operator and suppliers are modelled as a two-stage Stackelberg game that contains a simultaneous subgame. The equilibrium results indicate that players achieve a lower system profit when suppliers share as an alliance rather than independently, which is why the cloud platform operator strongly opposes it. The extended analysis indicates that considering multiple suppliers complicates the allocation of tasks and profits. Low-cost suppliers have significant advantages in terms of tasks and profits when considering different marginal costs. These findings provide insights for suppliers to select appropriate resource-sharing strategies in CMfg.

Multidepot Recycling Vehicle Routing Problem with Resource Sharing and Time Window Assignment

This study aims to provide tactical and operational decisions in multidepot recycling logistics networks with consideration of resource sharing (RS) and time window assignment (TWA) strategies. The RS strategy contributes to efficient resource allocation and utilization among recycling centers (RCs). The TWA strategy involves assigning time windows to customers to enhance the operational efficiency of logistics networks. A biobjective mathematical model is established to minimize the total operating cost and number of vehicles for solving the multidepot recycling vehicle routing problem with RS and TWA (MRVRPRSTWA). A hybrid heuristic algorithm including 3D k-means clustering algorithm and nondominated sorting genetic algorithm- (NSGA-) II (NSGA-II) is designed. The 3D k-means clustering algorithm groups customers into clusters on the basis of their spatial and temporal distances to reduce the computational complexity in optimizing the multidepot logistics networks. In comparison with NSGA algorithm, the NSGA-II algorithm incorporates an elitist strategy, which can improve the computational speed and robustness. In this study, the performance of the NSGA-II algorithm is compared with the other two algorithms. Results show that the proposed algorithm is superior in solving MRVRPRSTWA. The proposed model and algorithm are applied to an empirical case study in Chongqing City, China, to test their applicability in real logistics operations. Four different scenarios regarding whether the RS and TWA strategies are included or not are developed to test the efficacy of the proposed methods. The results indicate that the RS and TWA strategies can optimize the recycling services and resource allocation and utilization and enhance the operational efficiency, thus promoting the sustainable development of the logistics industry.

Industrial symbiosis: Impact of competition on firms’ willingness to implement

Industrial Symbiosis or By-Product Synergy is defined as a resource-sharing strategy that engages traditionally separate industries in a collective approach that involves a physical exchange of materials, water, energy, and by-products. Inspired by a real-world example of a paper–sugar symbiotic complex, we study the impact of competition on a firm’s willingness to implement an industrial symbiotic system. Sugar and paper firms are symbiotically connected, in the sense that the biomass from the manufacture of one product is used as a raw material for the second product, and vice versa. We characterize the firm’s operational optimal/equilibrium decisions for its two products – both in the presence and absence of a symbiotic system – under monopoly as well as under competition. Our models capture the supply-side (e.g., a fixed production cost and changes in the variable production costs), as well as the demand-side (“green” consumers who value the nature-friendly production process) impact of implementing industrial symbiosis. Our results indicate that firms are more willing to implement industrial symbiosis when (i) the proportion of the green consumers is high; or (ii) consumers’ appreciation for the green variants is high; or (iii) variable production costs after implementation are lower. For a firm, competition from firms that only produce regular products encourages implementation of industrial symbiosis, whereas competition from firms that produce both regular and green products discourages it.

Facility sharing in business-to-business model: A real case study for container terminal operators in Hong Kong port

In maritime shipping, sharing economy could prove to be a valuable approach. Nowadays. because of the prevalence of transhipment, and alliance of ship liners, a port with multiple terminal operators needs to manage a large amount of inter-terminal transfer (ITT) of containers. ITT increases operating cost for both carriers and terminal operators. For Hong Kong Port (HKP), a port with five operators, ITT becomes a major problem and burden. One can reduce ITT by assigning vessels to nearby berths. However, such nearby berths may belong to other terminal operators. Indeed, terminal operators can benefit from each other if facilities can be shared. This paper proposes a novel approach to study how the sharing of facility between terminal operators in HKP – who compete for market share – can benefit each other. Here, we propose two resource-sharing strategies. We have conducted numerical experiments based on real data collected from HKP. We examine the performance of the two strategies with respect to costs, service level, and operations efficiency. We found that the sharing economy concept works well in this business-to-business model. It successfully reduces operating cost, while improving the service quality without sacrificing benefits of individual operators. Lastly, recommendations along with insights are provided.

Research and Exploit of Resource Sharing Strategy at IHEP

At IHEP (Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences), computing resources are contributed by different experiments including BES, JUNO, DYW, HXMT, etc. The resources were divided into different partitions to satisfy the dedicated experiment data processing requirements. IHEP had a local Torqu&Maui cluster with 50 queues serving for above 10 experiments. The separated resource partitions leaded to imbalance resource load. In a typical situation, BES resource partition was quite busy without free slot but still with lots of jobs in idle, while JUNO resources are free and wasted seriously. After moving resources from Torque&Maui to HTCondor in 2016, job scheduling efficiency has been improved a lot. In order to balance the imbalance resource load, we designed an efficient sharing strategy to improve the overall resourceutilization. We created an unified pool shared by all experiments. For each experiment, resources are divided into two parts: dedicated resource and sharing resource. The slots in dedicated resource only run jobs from its own experiment, and the slots in sharing resource are shared by jobs from all experiments. Default ratio of dedicated resource to sharing resource is 1:4. To maximize the sharing effectiveness, the ratio is dynamically adjusted between 0:5 and 4:1 based on the number of jobs submitted by each experiment. We have developed a central control system to decide how many resources can be allocated to each experiment group. This system is implemented at two sides: server side and client side. A management database is built at server side, which is storing resource, group and experiment information. Once the sharing ratio needs to be adjusted, resource group will be changed and updated into database. The resource group information is published to the server buffer in real-time. The client periodically pulls resource group information from server buffer via https protocol And resource scheduling configuration at client side is changed based on the resource group information. With this method, share ratio can be modified and deployed dynamically. Sharing strategy is implemented with HTCondor. ClassAd mechanism and accounting-group in HTCondor facilitate to utilizethe sharing strategy at IHEP computing cluster. With the sharing strategy, resource usage has been improved dramatically.

Competition and Firmss Willingness to Implement Industrial Symbiosis

Industrial Symbiosis or By-Product Synergy is defined as a resource-sharing strategy that engages traditionally separate industries in a collective approach that involves a physical exchange of materials, water, energy, and by-products. Inspired by a real-world example of a paper-sugar symbiotic complex, we study the impact of competition on a firm’s willingness to implement an industrial symbiotic system. Sugar and paper firms are symbiotically connected, in the sense that the waste from the manufacture of one product is used as a raw material for the second product, and vice-versa. We characterize the firm’s operational optimal/equilibrium decisions for its two products – both in the presence and absence of a symbiotic system – under monopoly as well as under competition. Our models capture the supply-side (e.g., a fixed production cost and changes in the variable production costs) as well as the demand-side (“green” consumers who value the nature-friendly production process) impact of implementing industrial symbiosis. Our results indicate that firms are more willing to implement industrial symbiosis when (a) the proportion of the green consumers is high; or (b) consumers’ appreciation for the green variants is high; or (c) variable production costs after implementation are lower. For a firm, competition from firms that only produce regular products encourages implementation of industrial symbiosis, whereas competition from firms that produce both regular and green products discourages it.

Fundamental trade‐offs between resource separation and resource share for quality of service guarantees

There are two possible resource-allocation strategies for the quality of service (QoS) guarantee in the Internet: the resource separation and the resource share. The resource-separation strategy allows a prioritised flow to occupy its own network resource, which is physically or logically separated from resources used by other traffic. The resource-sharing strategy secures some portion of network resources for prioritised traffic, but secured resource is shared by all of prioritised flows. This study compares these two resource-allocation strategies in terms of the provided QoS level. It is found that the two strategies form a striking contrast to each other in terms of the resource usage. The resource share can benefit from the statistical multiplexing gain, but it increases the envelope of each individual multiplexed flow. In contrast to this, the resource separation does not increase the envelope of flows so much, while it does not benefit from the statistical multiplexing gain. That is, the general belief that the resource separation like the IntServ provides better QoS is not always true, and various conditions including network topology or QoS target would determine which strategy is preferable.

Flow-Level Analysis of Energy Efficiency Performance for Device-to-Device Communications in OFDM Cellular Networks

In this paper, the energy efficiency performance of device-to-device (D2D) communications in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing cellular networks is studied. Different from previous work that was based on the static interference model, we assume a dynamic number of competing flows, such as continuous transfers of file transport protocol or web browsing sessions. The complex, dynamic interaction of the amount of backlogged traffic at the D2D and cellular links introduced by the strong impact of interference between them is captured by the coupled-processors server in the formulated model. The energy efficiency and spectral efficiency of the different resource-sharing strategies are analyzed using the semidefinite optimization approach. It is shown that the simulation results match well with the analytical bounds under different traffic loads and topologies.

Buffalograss decreases ramet propagation in infertile patches to enhance interconnected ramet proliferation in fertile patches

Buffalograss ( Buchloë dactyloides) is known for its low-nutrient tolerance. However, in natural habitats, nutrients are usually patchily distributed. For clonal plants like buffalograss, physiological integration is an important strategy to cope with adverse environmental conditions. In order to examine how integration helps buffalograss to survive in patchy conditions, a greenhouse experiment was conducted for 91 days. Interconnected ramet pairs of stoloniferous buffalograss were planted in two partitioned same-sized containers, and subjected to identical or contrasting nutrient supply. In contrast to normally perceived resource-sharing concepts, results showed that buffalograss genets reduced production of new ramets in nutrient-poor patches promoting at the same time propagation of interconnected ramets in nutrient-rich patches. Ramets in nutrient-rich patches gained significant benefit from heterogeneous treatments, whereas nutrient-poor ramets performed even worse than in uniform low-nutrient treatment. Younger ramets developed more biomass than elder ramets with the same amounts of nutrient supply under homogeneous treatment, while elder ramets were more tolerant when nutrients were scarce. Heterogeneity had a particular strong effect on stolons and new ramet production in nutrient-rich patches. Rooted ramets in nutrient-poor patches suffered from a by-pass of nutrients to interconnected ramets on nutrient-rich substrate that probably resulted from different transpiration rates. We conclude that this resource-sharing strategy is advantageous for buffalograss to concentrate more ramets in fertile patches, and facilitate the survivorship of more buffalograss ramets in adverse environments with uneven nutrient supply.