Browsing by Subject "Resource Allocation"
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Item Assessment of the effectiveness of the advanced programmatic risk analysis and management model (apram) as a decision support tool for construction projects(Texas A&M University, 2007-09-17) Imbeah, William Kweku AnsahConstruction projects are complicated and fraught with so many risks that many projects are unable to meet pre-defined project objectives. Managers of construction projects require decision support tools that can be used to identify, analyze and implement measures that can mitigate the effects of project risks. Several risk analysis techniques have been developed over the years to enable construction project managers to make useful decisions that can improve the chances of project success. These risk analysis techniques however fail to simultaneously address risks relating to cost, schedule and quality. Also, construction projects may have scarce resources and construction managers still bear the responsibility of ensuring that project goals are met. Certain projects require trade-offs between technical and managerial risks and managers need tools that can help them do this. This thesis evaluates the usefulness of the Advanced Programmatic Risk Analysis and Management Model (APRAM) as a decision support tool for managing construction projects. The development of a visitor center in Midland, Texas was used as a case study for this research. The case study involved the implementation of APRAM during the concept phase of project development to determine the best construction system that can minimize the expected cost of failure. A risk analysis performed using a more standard approach yielded an expected cost of failure that is almost eight times the expected cost of failure yielded by APRAM. This study concludes that APRAM is a risk analysis technique that can minimize the expected costs of failure by integrating project risks of time, budget and quality through the allocation of resources. APRAM can also be useful for making construction management decisions. All identified component or material configurations for each alternative system however, should be analyzed instead of analyzing only the lowest cost alternative for each system as proposed by the original APRAM model. In addition, it is not possible to use decision trees to determine the optimal allocation of management reserves that would mitigate managerial problems during construction projects. Furthermore, APRAM does not address the issue of safety during construction and assumes all identifiable risks can be handled with money.Item Dynamic resource allocation for energy management in data centers(2009-05-15) Rincon Mateus, Cesar AugustoIn this dissertation we study the problem of allocating computational resources and managing applications in a data center to serve incoming requests in such a way that the energy usage, reliability and quality of service considerations are balanced. The problem is motivated by the growing energy consumption by data centers in the world and their overall inefficiency. This work is focused on designing flexible and robust strategies to manage the resources in such a way that the system is able to meet the service agreements even when the load conditions change. As a first step, we study the control of a Markovian queueing system with controllable number of servers and service rates (M=Mt=kt ) to minimize effort and holding costs. We present structural properties of the optimal policy and suggest an algorithm to find good performance policies even for large cases. Then we present a reactive/proactive approach, and a tailor-made wavelet-based forecasting procedure to determine the resource allocation in a single application setting; the method is tested by simulation with real web traces. The main feature of this method is its robustness and flexibility to meet QoS goals even when the traffic behavior changes. The system was tested by simulating a system with a time service factor QoS agreement. Finally, we consider the multi-application setting and develop a novel load consolidation strategy (of combining applications that are traditionally hosted on different servers) to reduce the server-load variability and the number of booting cycles in order to obtain a better capacity allocation.Item Essays on multichannel marketing(2009-05-15) Kushwaha, Tarun LalbahadurMultichannel marketing is the practice of simultaneously offering information, goods, services, and support to customers through two or more synchronized channels. In this dissertation, I develop an integrated framework of multichannel marketing and develop models to assist managers in their marketing resource allocation decisions. In the first essay of the dissertation, I investigate the factors that drive customers multichannel shopping behavior and identify its consequences for retailers. In the second essay, I build on this work and develop a model that enables firms to optimize their allocation of marketing resources across different customer-channel segments. In the first essay, I develop a framework comprising the factors that drive consumers? channel choice, the consequences of channel choice, and their implications for managing channel equity. The results show that customer-channel choice is driven in a nonlinear fashion by a customer demographic variable such as age and is also influenced by consumer shopping traits such as number of categories bought and the duration of relationship with a retailer. I show that by controlling for the moderating effects of channel-category associations, the influence of customers? demographics and shopping traits on their channel choices can vary significantly across product categories. Importantly, the results show that multichannel shoppers buy more often, buy more items, and spend considerably more than single channel shoppers. The channel equity of multichannel customers is nearly twice that of the closest single channel customers (online or offline). In the second essay, I propose a model for optimal allocation of marketing efforts across multiple customer-channel segments. I first develop a set of models for consumer response to marketing efforts for each channel-customer segment. This set comprises four models, the first for purchase frequency, the second for purchase quantity, the third for product return behavior, and the fourth for contribution margin of purchase. The results show that customers? responses to firm marketing efforts vary significantly across the customer-channel segments. They also suggest that marketing efforts influence purchase frequency, purchase quantity and monetary value in different ways. The resource allocation results show that profits can be substantially improved by reallocating marketing efforts across the different customer-channel segments.Item Information Infrastructures in Distributed Environments: Algorithms for Mobile Networks and Resource Allocation(2013-10-28) Chung, Hyun-ChulA distributed system is a collection of computing entities that communicate with each other to solve some problem. Distributed systems impact almost every aspect of daily life (e.g., cellular networks and the Internet); however, it is hard to develop services on top of distributed systems due to the unreliable nature of computing entities and communication. As handheld devices with wireless communication capabilities become increasingly popular, the task of providing services becomes even more challenging since dynamics, such as mobility, may cause the network topology to change frequently. One way to ease this task is to develop collections of information infrastructures which can serve as building blocks to design more complicated services and can be analyzed independently. The first part of the dissertation considers the dining philosophers problem (a generalization of the mutual exclusion problem) in static networks. A solution to the dining philosophers problem can be utilized when there is a need to prevent multiple nodes from accessing some shared resource simultaneously. We present two algorithms that solve the dining philosophers problem. The first algorithm considers an asynchronous message-passing model while the second one considers an asynchronous shared-memory model. Both algorithms are crash fault-tolerant in the sense that a node crash only affects its local neighborhood in the network. We utilize failure detectors (system services that provide some information about crash failures in the system) to achieve such crash fault-tolerance. In addition to crash fault-tolerance, the first algorithm provides fairness in accessing shared resources and the second algorithm tolerates transient failures (unexpected corruptions to the system state). Considering the message-passing model, we also provide a reduction such that given a crash fault-tolerant solution to our dining philosophers problem, we implement the failure detector that we have utilized to solve our dining philosophers problem. This reduction serves as the first step towards identifying the minimum information regarding crash failures that is required to solve the dining philosophers problem at hand. In the second part of this dissertation, we present information infrastructures for mobile ad hoc networks. In particular, we present solutions to the following problems in mobile ad hoc environments: (1) maintaining neighbor knowledge, (2) neighbor detection, and (3) leader election. The solutions to (1) and (3) consider a system with perfectly synchronized clocks while the solution to (2) considers a system with bounded clock drift. Services such as neighbor detection and maintaining neighbor knowledge can serve as a building block for applications that require point-to-point communication. A solution to the leader election problem can be used whenever there is a need for a unique coordinator in the system to perform a special task.