A Fuzzy Approach to the Measurement of Leakages for North American Health Systems

This paper uses a fuzzy-fuzzy stochastic dominance approach to compare patients’ leakages in the Canadian and the U.S. health care systems. Leakages are defined in terms of individuals who are in bad health and could not have access to health care when needed. To carry his comparison we rely on the assumption that Canada is a strong counterfactual for the U.S. We first develop a class of fuzzy leakages indices and incorporate them in a stochastic dominance framework to derive the dominance criterion. We then use the derived criterion to perform inter-country comparisons on the global level. To provide more insight, we decompose the analysis with respect to gender, ethnicity, income and education. Intra-country comparisons reveal the presence of income based leakage inequalities in both countries yet, gender, ethnic and education based disparities appear to be present in the U.S. only. As for inter-country comparisons, results are in general consistent with the hypothesis that leakages are less important under the Canadian health care system.Health care resources, Fuzzy sets, Leakage

A Fuzzy Approach to the Measurement of Leakages for North American Health Systems

This paper uses a fuzzy-fuzzy stochastic dominance approach to compare patients' leakages in the Canadian and the U.S health care systems. Leakages are defined in terms of individuals who are in bad health and could not have access to health care when needed. To carry this comparison we rely on the assumption that Canada is a strong counterfactual for the U.S. We first develop a class of fuzzy leakages indices and incorporate them in a stochastic dominance framework to derive the dominance criterion. We then use the derived criterion to perform inter-country comparisons on the global level. To provide more insight, we decompose the analysis with respect to gender, ethnicity, income and education. Intra-country comparisons reveal the presence of income based leakage inequalities in both countries yet, gender, ethnic and education based disparities appear to be present in the U.S only. As for inter-country comparison, results are in general consistent with the hypothesis that leakages are less important under the Canadian health care system.Health care resources, Fuzzy sets, Leakage

Dominance Measuring Method Performance under Incomplete Information about Weights.

In multi-attribute utility theory, it is often not easy to elicit precise values for the scaling weights representing the relative importance of criteria. A very widespread approach is to gather incomplete information. A recent approach for dealing with such situations is to use information about each alternative?s intensity of dominance, known as dominance measuring methods. Different dominancemeasuring methods have been proposed, and simulation studies have been carried out to compare these methods with each other and with other approaches but only when ordinal information about weights is available. In this paper, we useMonte Carlo simulation techniques to analyse the performance of and adapt such methods to deal with weight intervals, weights fitting independent normal probability distributions orweights represented by fuzzy numbers.Moreover, dominance measuringmethod performance is also compared with a widely used methodology dealing with incomplete information on weights, the stochastic multicriteria acceptability analysis (SMAA). SMAA is based on exploring the weight space to describe the evaluations that would make each alternative the preferred one

Multi-objective evolutionary–fuzzy augmented flight control for an F16 aircraft

In this article, the multi-objective design of a fuzzy logic augmented flight controller for a high performance fighter jet (the Lockheed-Martin F16) is described. A fuzzy logic controller is designed and its membership functions tuned by genetic algorithms in order to design a roll, pitch, and yaw flight controller with enhanced manoeuverability which still retains safety critical operation when combined with a standard inner-loop stabilizing controller. The controller is assessed in terms of pilot effort and thus reduction of pilot fatigue. The controller is incorporated into a six degree of freedom motion base real-time flight simulator, and flight tested by a qualified pilot instructor

The Project Scheduling Problem with Non-Deterministic Activities Duration: A Literature Review

Purpose: The goal of this article is to provide an extensive literature review of the models and solution procedures proposed by many researchers interested on the Project Scheduling Problem with nondeterministic activities duration. Design/methodology/approach: This paper presents an exhaustive literature review, identifying the existing models where the activities duration were taken as uncertain or random parameters. In order to get published articles since 1996, was employed the Scopus database. The articles were selected on the basis of reviews of abstracts, methodologies, and conclusions. The results were classified according to following characteristics: year of publication, mathematical representation of the activities duration, solution techniques applied, and type of problem solved. Findings: Genetic Algorithms (GA) was pointed out as the main solution technique employed by researchers, and the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP) as the most studied type of problem. On the other hand, the application of new solution techniques, and the possibility of incorporating traditional methods into new PSP variants was presented as research trends. Originality/value: This literature review contents not only a descriptive analysis of the published articles but also a statistical information section in order to examine the state of the research activity carried out in relation to the Project Scheduling Problem with non-deterministic activities duration.Peer Reviewe

A perspective on the extension of stochastic orderings to fuzzy random variables

International audienceIn this paper we study how to make joint extensions of stochastic orderings and interval orderings so as to extend methods for comparing random variables, from the point of view of their respective location or magnitude, to fuzzy random variables. The main idea is that the way fuzzy random variables are interpreted affects the choice of the comparison methods. We distinguish three views of fuzzy random variables, according to which various comparison methods seem to make sense. This paper offers an approach toward a systematic classification of combinations of stochastic and interval or fuzzy interval comparison methods