Indian Institute of Management Calcutta

About: Indian Institute of Management Calcutta is a education organization based out in Kolkata, India. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Supply chain & Context (language use). The organization has 415 authors who have published 1354 publications receiving 21725 citations. The organization is also known as: IIMC & IIM Calcutta.

Public Health System Performance Challenges in India: A Systems Thinking Approach

Abstract: Public health is a means of preventing disease and providing curative care to promote citizens’ health through organized efforts of various stakeholders. Performance challenges in public health in developing countries continue to surround access, availability and quality. The public health system in India is plagued additionally by under-investment, sub-optimal utilization of resources and failure of accountability in general. These have resulted in uneven use of curative facilities and increasing out-of-pocket expenditures intensely disfavoring economically weaker citizens. Using systems thinking approach, we identify the different constituents of public healthcare system in India and their interlinkages. We qualitatively map the underlying structure to two specific systemic behaviors – the excessive use of referrals and, the co-occurrence of overburdened tertiary care centers and the under-utilization of primary care centers. The analysis draws upon the ‘fixes that fail’ and ‘shifting the burden’ archetypes in system dynamics to argue the need for more fundamental solutions to resolve performance challenges in public healthcare system in India.

Finding pareto-optimal set of distributed vectors with minimum disclosure

Abstract: A set of alternatives along with their associated values is available with individual parties who do not want to share it with others. Algorithms to find the feasible set (i.e. common subset) X and the pareto-optimal subset of X with minimum disclosure in presence or absence of a third party are explored. These are useful in multiparty negotiations.

A rule-based approach for minimizing power dissipation of digital circuits

Abstract: Minimization of power dissipation of VLSI circuits is one of the major concerns of recent digital circuit design primarily due to the ever decreasing feature sizes of circuits, higher clock frequencies and larger die sizes. The primary contributors to power dissipation in digital circuits include leakage power, short-circuit power and switching power. Of these, power dissipation due to the circuit switching activity constitutes the major component. As such, an effective mechanism to minimize the power loss in such cases often involves the minimization of the switching activity. In this paper, we propose an intelligent rule-based algorithm for reducing the switching activity of the digital circuits at logic optimization stage. The proposed algorithm is empirically tested for several standard digital circuits with Synopsys EDA tool and the results obtained are quite encouraging.

Diesel locomotive fueling problem (LFP) in railroad operations

Abstract: About 75 % of the world’s railroads operate with diesel fuel. Even though European railroads rely on electric traction to a large extent, US railroads rely mostly on diesel fuel (100 % of US freight is hauled by diesel locomotives). Like in other industries there is intense competition to keep costs low; and in railroad operations based on diesel locomotives, the cost of fuel and its delivery is the major component of the overall cost. Since the cost of fuel is highly location dependent (due to local taxes and transportation costs between supply and demand points), locomotive fueling problem discussed in this paper is a critical problem in railroad operations. Given: the set of yards, the set of trains to operate, the locomotive assignments to trains, and the fuel cost and capacity data; this problem deals with finding the fueling plan for the various trains to minimize the total cost of fueling the locomotives. We describe three different algorithms, two based on greedy method and one using MIP model, that we used to solve this problem and highlight the summary of solutions obtained by each of them for comparisons of these algorithms.