Personnel shift assignment: Existence conditions and network models

The personnel scheduling problem is known to be a five-stage process in which the final stage involves the assignment of shifts to the days worked in the schedule. This paper discusses the existence conditions for both continuous and forward rotating shift assignments and heuristic network algorithms for the determination of such assignments. Results generated for a number of test problems demonstrate, first, that the network devised to search for continuous solutions produces these solutions in a high proportion of cases where such solutions are known to exist. Second, for more general problems, the algorithm is shown to be efficient in its ability to generate either continuous or rotating solutions

Screening Masses and Improvement in Pure SU(2) Lattice Gauge Theory at High Temperatures

From the long-distance behaviour of gluon and Polyakov loop correlation functions we extract masses resp. energies in the electric and magnetic sectors. We discuss their dependence on the temperature and on the momentum as well as the relevance of an improvement of the lattice discretization of the action.Comment: Talk presented at LATTICE97 (Finite Temperature and Density) by J. Rank, 3 pages, LaTeX File, espcrc2.sty Style File and 2 eps figures include