For the past 4 years, as part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) grant award number UL1TR001436, the Clinical Translational Science Institute of Southeast Wisconsin (CTSI) has used process engineering approaches to identify and understand barriers that local researchers and other stakeholders face when engaging in clinical and translational science. We describe these approaches and present preliminary results. We identified barriers from published and unpublished work at other CTSA hubs, supplemented by surveys and semi-structured interviews of CTSI faculty. We then used a multifaceted approach to organize, visualize, and analyze the barriers. We have identified 27 barriers to date. We ranked their priority for CTSI to address based on the barrier’s impact, the feasibility of intervention, and whether addressing the barrier aligned with CTSI’s institutional role. This approach provides a systematic framework to scope and address the “barriers to research problem” at CTSI institutions.

In this paper, we propose an industrial symbiosis network equilibrium model by usingnonlinear complementarity theory. The industrial symbiosis network consists of industrialproducers, industrial consumers, industrial decomposers and demand markets, which imitatesnatural ecosystem by means of exchanging by-products and recycling useful materialsexacted from wastes. The industrial producers and industrial consumers are assumed to beconcerned with maximization of economic profits as well as minimization of emissions. Wedescribe the optimizing behavior, derive optimality conditions of the variousdecision-makers along with respective economic interpretations and establish the nonlinearcomplementarity model in accordance with the industrial symbiosis network equilibriumconditions. Based on the existence proof of the corresponding nonlinear complementaritymodel under reasonable assumptions, two groups of numerical examples are given toillustrate the rationality as well as the effectiveness of the model.

In this paper, we develop a supply chain network equilibrium model in which electronic commerce in the presence of both B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer) transactions, multiperiod decision-making and multicriteria decision-making are integrated. The model consists of three tiers of decision-makers (manufacturers, retailers and consumers at demand markets) who compete within a tier but may cooperate between tiers. Both manufacturers and retailers are concerned with maximization of profit as well as minimization of risk, whereas consumers take both the prices charged by manufacturers and retailers, along with the corresponding costs of transacting, in making their consumption decisions. Increasing relationship levels are assumed to decrease costs of transacting as well as risk costs. Establishing and maintaining these relationship levels incur some costs that have to be borne by the various decision-makers. We study the interaction among different tiers of decision-makers, describe their multicriteria decision-making behavior and derive the optimality conditions as well as the equilibrium conditions which are then shown to satisfy a finite-dimensional variational inequality problem. We then establish qualitative properties of the equilibrium model under some reasonable assumptions and illustrate the model with several numerical examples.