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OVERVIEW: This study examines the temporal attributes, barriers, and outcomes of slack time in R&D organizations. The study findings indicate that slack time has a waved occurrence, organically arising from downtimes in core work and uptimes in personal creativity. Endemic overcommitment of employees and high perceived opportunity costs prevent slack time from being used effectively in many organizations, resulting in merely rhetorical slack time. The findings suggest that genuine slack time requires formally allocating resources to pay for discretionary time and insulating employees from urgent demands. The study identifies three main outcomes of genuine slack time: (1) It diversifies creativity sources, leading to a spectrum of innovativeness and applications; (2) it increases employee motivation through autonomy and empowerment; and (3) it functions as a cultural lever signaling trust. The study contributes a nuanced conceptualization of slack time grounded in practitioner experiences and offers insights for managing slack time to foster innovation and employee engagement. PRACTITIONER TAKEAWAYS: Slack time manifests as pockets of free time that arise opportunistically during slow periods in regular work and when employees experience personal momentum. Genuine slack time requires that employees are not 100 percent committed to core work and that they are protected from urgent demands during slack time usage. Slack time boosts employee motivation and retention and can contribute to a balanced early-stage innovation portfolio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the projects currently being undertaken by PT. XYZ is Dam “X”. Based on project management data obtained from PT. XYZ, the actual project construction process experienced a significant delay from the planned schedule, with a delay duration of approximately 30 days. The delay will have an impact on the duration of the final completion of the project, including the process of delivering project results to consumers. The purpose of this study is to determine the critical path in project implementation and identify activities that do not have slack time because it will affect the duration of the overall project completion. The method used in this study is the Critical Path Method (CPM), which is a network method consisting of a series of activity components with the longest total time and showing the fastest duration of project completion. The results showed that the Manufacturing Project has a total of 11 critical activities out of 37 activities (work packages), with a total critical time of 75 days. The total critical time from the calculation of the CPM method also shows the optimal total project duration which can be used as a reference for the project team for the completion of a fabrication project or a hydromechanical component installation project on Dam "X".

Semi-flexible transit (SFT) is commonly discussed as a cost-effective alternative to serving public transportation users in low-demand conditions. We hypothesize that joint optimization of service headway and slack time per trip for route deviation is essential for designing a schedule for the operation of an integrated SFT that can meet both fixed-route and paratransit demand. An integrated SFT has the potential to lower the cost of transportation for regular transit users (both operators and riders) while redirecting potential paratransit riders to less expensive transit modes; thus, reducing demand for overwhelmed paratransit services operating with limited resources. The optimization problem has three competing objectives: minimizing operator costs, minimizing user costs, and maximizing service benefits. Two state-of-the-art multi-objective evolutionary algorithms NSGA-II and SMPSO are compared to obtain the most representative deterministic Pareto optimal solution set. This study has three major contributions. First, quantile regression is used to suggest multiple slack time values for a given headway that transit planners can consider when generating a static schedule for SFT operation. Second, relationships derived to analyze cost trade-offs suggest that headway governs operator cost and is negatively correlated, user cost is positively and equally influenced by both variables, and slack time governs service benefit and is positively correlated. Third, sensitivity analysis for an integrated SFT operation reveals that low-capacity minivans and standard vans offer higher vehicle occupancy and cost efficiency, mostly economical for low to medium demand (5-20 pass/hr), low permissible deviation from the fixed route is desirable during peak hours to avoid delays for passengers on-board, and extreme weather conditions dramatically and negatively influence costs. Policy recommendations for integrated SFT implementation include a recommendation for fare structure design addressing service equity through surcharges/discounts, vehicle technology and service booking technology advancements for cost reduction, and fleet mix design through estimation of passenger loading profile. The application of the study methodology is demonstrated for a low-demand bus route in Regina, Canada.

I also share results from a pilot study, which offer insights regarding R&D companies' preferred slack time model, the creative work employees perform during slack time, and the perceived success of slack time programs. Keywords: Slack time; Discretionary time; Creativity; Innovation; Innovation portfolio management EN Slack time Discretionary time Creativity Innovation Innovation portfolio management 34 45 12 11/04/22 20221101 NES 221101 Organizations have to deal with surges of activity, adjust to changes in the external environment, and proactively experiment with the development of innovative products, services, processes, or business models. Regardless of how a company categorizes its innovation initiatives, an innovation portfolio is likely to have different degrees of innovativeness and complexity, which can be used as input to determine if the way the company organizes slack time fits well with its innovation portfolio. [Extracted from the article]

Optimum resources utilization in computing devices especially power is among the prime areas of research from the very beginning of computer systems. However, its importance in the current era has been significantly increased due to the diverse nature of devices and their real time applications. On the other hand, paradigm is shifting towards sustainable resources that are green/environment friendly (low emission) in nature and produce relatively low energy/power. Real time systems (RTS) are relatively power-hungry due to their time constrained nature. So, there is room to investigate the scheduling algorithms (schedulers) with minimum (low) power consumption. On the other hand simulators are the software that mimic the real time environment for various parameter testing without actual implementation that could be costly as well as complex to build in the beginning. In this study, we are intended to develop a simulator for scheduling Real-Time Systems (RTS) with Reduced Power Consumptions (RPC). That is potentially an environment where various algorithms can be tested over different case studies to examine their performance pertaining RPC for RTS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the issue of power consumption in parallel and distributed systems has attracted a great deal of attention. Regarding the ever-increasing development data and computing centers due to the contribution of cloud computing systems in such sectors, power consumption has always been of the concerns due to Carbon dioxide emissions and consequently the Negative impact on the environment. In recent years, the notion of power and also ”Green Computing” has found a crucial spot in the tasks scheduling in cloud data centers. The clustering technique, as well as Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) techniques, have focused on the reduction of the consumption of power particularly, and the optimization of the performance parameters. Concerning scheduling Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) of a data center processors equipped with the technique of DVFS, this paper proposes a power and time aware algorithm called PATCDD, to apply the combination of the strategies for clustering along with the distribution of slack-time among the tasks of a cluster. The first phase studies the slack time for non-critical tasks of DAG, extends their execution time and reduces the energy consumption without increasing the task’s execution time as a whole. The main idea of the proposed algorithm involves the achievement of a maximum reduction in power consumption in the second phase. To this end, the slack time is distributed among non-critical dependent tasks. Eventually, a set of data established for conducting the examinations and also different parameters of the constructed random DAG were assessed to identify the efficiency of our proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• • Cost efficiency analysis of vehicle technologies for semi-flexible transit. • • Total system cost estimated includes operator, user, and environmental costs. • • Diesel and battery-electric vehicle technology evaluated for three vehicle sizes. • • Optimal values of service headway and slack time are identified. • • Analysed sensitivity to charging speed, demand, and battery capacity. In low-demand areas, semi-flexible transit system (SFT) operated by battery electric vehicles (BEVs) can reduce operational costs and achieve zero emissions, allowing SFT to be used more widely, and transit agencies to benefit more significantly. This paper is aimed at analyzing the effect of the additional requirements of BEVs on the cost efficiency of SFT services while considering different headways and slack time to accommodate route-deviation. Analytical models are used for detailed estimation of the total cost, including operator, user, and environmental costs, allowing a comparison with internal combustion engine (ICEV) vehicle technology, and three vehicle sizes: minivans, standard vans, and minibuses. Study results can be used to evaluate budget requirements to upgrade an existing ICEV based standard bus service along an underperforming low demand route to a BEV based SFT service. The application of the proposed methodology is demonstrated for a low-demand bus route in Regina, Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Equipping mobile platforms with deep learning applications is very valuable. Providing healthcare services in remote areas, improving privacy, and lowering needed communication bandwidth are the advantages of such platforms. Designing an efficient computation engine enhances the performance of these platforms while running deep neural networks (DNNs). Energy-efficient DNN accelerators use skipping sparsity and early negative output feature detection to prune the computations. Spatial DNN accelerators in principle can support computation-pruning techniques compared to other common architectures, such as systolic arrays. These accelerators need a separate data distribution fabric like buses or trees with support for high bandwidth to run the mentioned techniques efficiently and avoid network on chip (NoC)-based stalls. Spatial designs suffer from divergence and unequal work distribution. Therefore, applying computation-pruning techniques into a spatial design, which is even equipped with an NoC that supports high bandwidth for the processing elements (PEs), still causes stalls inside the computation engine. In a spatial architecture, the PEs that perform their tasks earlier have a slack time compared to others. In this article, we propose an architecture with a negligible area overhead based on sharing the scratchpads in a novel way between the PEs to use the available slack time caused by applying computation-pruning techniques or the used NoC format. With the use of our dataflow, a spatial engine can benefit from computation-pruning and data reuse techniques more efficiently. When compared to the reference design, our proposed method achieves a speedup of $\times 1.24$ and an energy efficiency of $\times 1.18$ per inference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

urpose: This study analyzes the influence of the interactive and the diagnostic use of Management Control Systems (MCS) and slack time on process innovation in incubated companies. Originality/value: Organizational characteristics are associated with processes innovation in organizations with contemporary configuration. The study brings evidence to the contrasting findings of the MCS literature with slack time and process innovation. Design/methodology/approach: A survey was conducted with managers of companies listed on websites of incubators associated with the Associação Nacional de Entidades Promotoras de Empreendimentos Inovadores (National Association of Entities Promoting Innovative Enterprises), obtaining a sample of 106 valid responses. To analyze the data, the Structural Equation Modeling technique was applied to analyze the data. Findings: The results indicated that the interactive use of MCS promotes slack time at work, and the diagnostic use inhibits its creation. However, slack time was not significantly associated with processes innovation, which reveals a dysfunctional role of the slack. The interactive use of MCS had a significant influence on processes innovation. It is concluded that the interactive use prevails when the purpose is to promote processes innovation, as it favors contacts between different hierarchical levels and learning, while the diagnostic use highlights its relevance by inhibiting the creation of slack time, understood as a dysfunction for not leading to processes innovation. This denotes that the interactive and the diagnostic use of MCS are complementary in incubated companies. / Objetivo: Este estudo analisa a influência dos usos interativo e diagnóstico dos Sistemas de Controle Gerencial (SCG) e da folga de tempo na inovação de processos, em empresas incubadas. Originalidade/valor: Características organizacionais são associadas com a inovação de processos em organizações de configuração contemporânea. O estudo traz evidências aos achados contrastantes da literatura dos SCG com a folga de tempo e a inovação de processos. Design/metodologia/abordagem: Pesquisa de levantamento foi realizada com gestores das empresas listadas nos sites de incubadoras associadas à Associação Nacional de Entidades Promotoras de Empreendimentos Inovadores e obteve-se uma amostra de 106 respostas válidas. Para analisar os dados, aplicou-se a técnica de Modelagem de Equações Estruturais. Resultados: Os resultados indicaram que o uso interativo dos SCG promove a folga de tempo no trabalho e o uso diagnóstico inibe sua criação. Porém, a folga de tempo não apresentou associação significativa com a inovação de processos, o que revela um papel disfuncional da folga. O uso interativo dos SCG apresentou influência significativa na inovação de processos. Conclui-se que o uso interativo prevalece quando a finalidade é promover a inovação de processos, pois favorece contatos entre diferentes níveis hierárquicos e aprendizagem, enquanto o uso diagnóstico evidencia sua relevância ao inibir a criação de folga de tempo, entendida como uma disfunção por não levar à inovação de processos. Isso denota complementaridade dos usos interativo e diagnóstico dos SCG nas empresas incubadas.

This paper examines the role of human capital and establishments' practices in fostering food industry innovation across 13 low and middle-income countries. We estimate average marginal effects that also control for the variables traditionally recognized as affecting firm-level innovation, such as R&D expenditures. Our results suggest that establishments' human capital endowments, such as top managers' experience in the food industry and employees' education, alone may not be sufficient to achieve high levels of innovation. In fact, human capital endowments are found to be more effective in delivering innovation when they are combined with establishments' best practices such as providing employees slack time i.e., allocation of work-time on self-chosen projects of personal interests. Our key recommendation to food firms is to support employee slack time and human capital endowments as mutually reinforcing drivers of innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy consumption and performance metrics have become critical issues for scheduling parallel task-based applications in high-performance computing systems such as cloud datacenters. The duplication and clustering strategy, as well as Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling (DVFS) technique, have separately been concentrated on reducing energy consumption and optimizing performance parameters such as throughput and makespan. In this paper, a dual-phase algorithm called EATSDCD which is an energy efficient time aware has been proposed. The algorithm uses the combination of duplication and clustering strategies to schedule the precedence-constrained task graph on datacenter processors through DVFS. The first phase focuses on a smart combination of duplication and clustering strategy to reduce makespan and energy consumed by processors in an effort to execute Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) while satisfying the throughput constraint. The main idea behind EATSDCD intended to minimize energy consumption in the second phase. After determining the critical path and specifying a set of dependent tasks in non-critical paths, the slack time for each task in non-critical paths was distributed among all dependent tasks in that path. Then, the frequency of DVFS-enabled processors is scaled down to execute non-critical tasks as well as idle and communication phases, without extending the execution time of tasks. Finally, a testbed is developed and different parameters are tested on the randomly generated DAG to evaluate and illustrate the effectiveness of EATSDCD. It was also compared against duplication and clustering-based algorithms and DVFS-based algorithms. In terms of energy consumption and makespan, the results show that our proposed algorithm can save up to 8.3% and 20% energy compared against Power Aware List-based Scheduling (PALS) and Power Aware Task Clustering (PATC) algorithms, respectively. Furthermore, there is 16% improvement over Parallel Pipeline Latency Optimization (PaPilo) algorithm with Encur = 1.2Enmin (G). In comparison with Reliability Aware Scheduling with Duplication (RASD) algorithm, the execution time has been reduced in heterogeneous environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In ubiquitous and mobile computing environments, most of user requests have timing constraints. Therefore, for their execution, real-time scheduling mechanisms should be employed. In such environments, some mechanisms, such as Earliest Deadline First and Least Slack Time Rate (LSTR), are the most used real-time scheduling algorithms today. However, these existing mechanisms cannot guarantee the execution of the most critical user tasks. Furthermore, the results of executed tasks should also be provided to users on time so as to not waste the resources processing these tasks. The existing scheduling mechanisms, such as Dynamic Adjustment with Time Constraint and Dynamic Priority-based Heuristic action (DPH), are not suitable for this due to some limitations. The current paper proposes two new lightweight real-time mechanisms for scheduling input tasks (received requests) and output tasks (execution results) and evaluates their performance. The first mechanism satisfies users based on the classification of similar tasks and the use of the LSTR algorithm. The second mechanism is an improved form of the combination of the LSTR and DPH algorithms, and aims provide users with the maximum number of services by considering a possibility matrix. Extensive simulation experiments on real workload data demonstrate the superiority of the proposed mechanisms over existing algorithms, in terms of the percentage of executed tasks, makespan, and average turnaround time criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bus holding strategy is an effective way for alleviating inevitable disruptions along a bus route, including decisions on the control point locations and slack duration. However, at present, the locations of the control points and corresponding slack times are largely determined by engineering experience and therefore lack theoretical optimization. The aim of this study is to develop a model which can jointly optimize the locations of the control points and corresponding slack times under a given number of control points. As locations of the upstream control points will influence the downstream operation states, this optimization problem is modeled as a multi-stage decision process. To evaluate the stability and efficiency of a bus system, we calculate the punctuality rate and travel time at each stage by taking into account the uncertainty along the route and propose a reasonable stage-utilization cost combing these two factors. A numerical case study based on a real bus route in Harbin of China is carried out to demonstrate our approach. The impacts of the weighting factor and slack times on the optimal control point plan are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between slack resources and innovation is complex, with the literature linking slack to both breakthrough innovations and resource misallocation. We reconcile these conflicting views by focusing on a novel mechanism: the role slack time plays in the endogenous allocation of time and effort to innovative projects. We develop a theoretical model that distinguishes between periods of high- (work weeks) versus low- (break weeks) opportunity costs of time. Low-opportunity cost time during break weeks may induce (1) lower quality ideas to be developed (a selection effect); (2) more effort to be applied for any given idea quality (an effort effect); and (3) an increase in the use of teams because scheduling is less constrained (a coordination effect). As a result, the effect of an increase in slack time on innovative outcomes is ambiguous, because the selection effect may induce more low-quality ideas, whereas the effort and coordination effect may lead to more high-quality, complex ideas. We test this framework using data on college breaks and on 165,410 Kickstarter projects across the United States. Consistent with our predictions, during university breaks, more projects are posted in the focal regions, and the increase is largest for projects of either very high or very low quality. Furthermore, projects posted during breaks are more complex, and involve larger teams with diverse skills. We discuss the implications for the design of policies on slack time. The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2018.1215. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cost optimization for workflow scheduling while meeting deadline is one of the fundamental problems in utility computing. In this paper, a two-phase cost-efficient scheduling algorithm called critical chain is presented. The proposed algorithm uses the concept of slack time in both phases. The first phase is deadline distribution over all tasks existing in the workflow which is done considering critical path properties of workflow graphs. Critical chain uses slack time to iteratively select most critical sequence of tasks and then assigns sub-deadlines to those tasks. In the second phase named mapping step, it tries to allocate a server to each task considering task's sub-deadline. In the mapping step, slack time priority in selecting ready task is used to reduce deadline violation. Furthermore, the algorithm tries to locally optimize the computation and communication costs of sequential tasks exploiting dynamic programming. After proposing the scheduling algorithm, three measures for the superiority of a scheduling algorithm are introduced, and the proposed algorithm is compared with other existing algorithms considering the measures. Results obtained from simulating various systems show that the proposed algorithm outperforms four well-known existing workflow scheduling algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]