Sistema de ayuda a la decisión para la gestión de centros educativos: criterios energéticos y ambientales
- Autores: María Otego Prego
- Directores de la Tesis: María Mercedes Pérez de la Parte (dir. tes.), Juan Ignacio Latorre Biel (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universidad de La Rioja ( España ) en 2013
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Emilio Jiménez Macías (presid.), Hipólito Carvajal Fals (secret.), Angel Sánchez Roca (voc.)
- Materias:
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- Resumen
The management of public resources is usually performed under the influence or approach of crisis. Environmental and economic crisis might require the educative authorities to make a special consideration for maximizing the social and educative benefits obtained from invested public resources, as well as minimizing the impact the educative activities might have in the environment.
Moreover, nowadays, the design and redesign of new educative centers require taking into consideration topics such as sustainability, efficient use of the different resources, for example energy, recycling, and waste management. This trend is based in a broad social concern on these aspects, in exigent national regulations and international agreements, as well in common sense, due to the high cost and limited availability of resources and restrictions in the elimination of wastes.
Different approaches are followed by designers, architects, and engineers, when designing educative centers. Among them, it is possible to let experts to advise them, such as commercial executives from specialized companies, to implement technologies that are familiar to the designers making them confident, to improve or modify in a more or less extent previous designs, etc.
Nevertheless, a sustainable design, where a large number of alternatives, technologies, and variables have to be considered, should lead to the best solution, achieved not only from strategic considerations but also from the day-to-day management, based on operational decisions. Only with such an approach, it is possible to include the level of detail in the future operation of decisions that a fine design should take into consideration for avoiding errors that will arise when the construction of the building has finished and the educative activities begin (Latorre and Jiménez, 2012).
Giving autonomy of decisions to the educative institutions or centralizing their management is an issue of debate and research, where there still remains a large number of open questions. Among the advantages of autonomous decision making can be found the swiftness in responding to non-expected situations, the possibility to negotiate directly to local suppliers, the detailed knowledge by the managing board of a school of their students, teachers, suppliers, and specificities of the school and its social and economic environment.
Nevertheless, a centralized management of educative centers in a situation of crisis seems to be especially suitable due to the convenience of sharing resources and services. Among the advantages of a centralized management it can be mentioned the economy of scale when negotiating large volumes of products or services or the better utilization rate of resources such as public transport, or communication networks.
A step further in the centralized management of schools can be the formation of clusters with schools of different educative levels, from basic school to secondary education and vocational training. In this case, more services and products can be shared, increasing the efficiency in their use, the reduction in their cost, the improvement in the quality and the satisfaction of members of the educative community with special needs, such as accessibility for handicapped people or special diets for allergic or intolerant students or members of the staff.
Clustering different educative levels into ¿campuses¿ may lead to a very efficient use of resources, as well as to better services to society, including not only education but also transportation, counseling, accessibility, catering, long-life learning, or leisure, just to give a few examples.
More examples, this time regarding resources that can be shared are the administrative staff and offices, central heating, catering service, waste management and recycling, communication networks and services, or even central heating.
However, the more centralized the management, the more complex the decision making becomes. This fact arises as a consequence of an increase on the information, as well as on the variability of the schools, which determine that a given decision may derive to different outcomes, depending on the educative level, the location of the school, the social background of the members of the educative community, etc.
As a consequence of the previous considerations, the centralization of the management of educative institutions implies the need of a decision support system for the assistance of the managers in the decision making.
In this thesis, it is proposed the development of a decision support system, based on modelling one or several educative institutions by means of the discrete event system formalism called the Petri nets. According to this methodology, the model of the system is complemented with an objective function in order to state an optimization problem, whose resolution is based on the exploration of the solution space, computing the objective function for every selected solution, by means of a simulation of the behaviour of the model of the system. Eventually, the solution showing the best value for the objective function is chosen as a result of the decision support system.
This doctoral thesis, by means of the proposed methodology, aims to provide with tools for overcoming the limitations, mentioned in this introduction, arosen in the management of educative institutions of vocational training and in networks of institutions of this kind by means of a centralization in the decision making.
