Environmental Audit and Environmental Disclosure Quality

In this study we explore the association between environmental audit and the quality of environmental disclosure as measured by voluntary and timely disclosure. Relying on a multiple theory framework and using a sample of 81 French non-financial companies listed on the SBF 120 index covering the six-year period from 2012 to 2017, we found a positive and statistically significant relationship between the level of voluntary disclosure of environmental information and the environmental audit committee, the environmental auditor's BIG 4, debt levels, firm size, earnings management, and the industry. In addition, findings indicate that the environmental audit committee, CSR committee, the environmental auditor's BIG 4, earnings management, firm size, and the industry have an impact on the timely disclosure of environmental information. However, the regression of the results showed that there is no relationship between CSR committee and the level of the voluntary disclosure of environmental disclosure.JEL Codes - M4

The Impact of Audit Characteristics on Corporate Tax Avoidance: The Moderating Role of Gender Diversity

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relation between audit characteristics and corporate tax avoidance and how board gender diversity (BGDs) moderates this relationship. Using a sample of 270 UK firms over the 2005-2017 period, we find that audit characteristics influence the corporate tax avoidance. Two of them (specialization and audit fees) had a negative effect; the other one (audit opinion, audit rotation) Have a positive effect on tax avoidance. We also find that BGDs moderates the effect of audit characteristics on corporate tax avoidance, except for audit opinion. The impact of the BGDs’ level increases as the presence of woman in the board escalated from 40 to 60 %, but then weakened at 10 % level. This study contributes to the existing literature and auditing practices by extending the auditing and tax literature on the examination of the moderating effect of board gender diversity on the relation between audit characteristics and corporate tax avoidance using the sensitivity analysis.JEL Codes - H26; M14; M

Artificial Intelligence and Data Mining in Healthcare

International audienceThis book presents recent work on healthcare management and engineering using artificial intelligence and data mining techniques. Specific topics covered in the contributed chapters include predictive mining, decision support, capacity management, patient flow optimization, image compression, data clustering, and feature selection. The content will be valuable for researchers and postgraduate students in computer science, information technology, industrial engineering, and applied mathematics

Combinatorial particle swarm optimization for solving blocking flowshop scheduling problem

This paper addresses to the flowshop scheduling problem with blocking constraints. The objective is to minimize the makespan criterion. We propose a hybrid combinatorial particle swarm optimization algorithm (HCPSO) as a resolution technique for solving this problem. At the initialization, different priority rules are exploited. Experimental study and statistical analysis were performed to select the most adapted one for this problem. Then, the swarm behavior is tested for solving a combinatorial optimization problem such as a sequencing problem under constraints. Finally, an iterated local search algorithm based on probabilistic perturbation is sequentially introduced to the particle swarm optimization algorithm for improving the quality of solution. The computational results show that our approach is able to improve several best known solutions of the literature. In fact, 76 solutions among 120 were improved. Moreover, HCPSO outperforms the compared methods in terms of quality of solutions in short time requirements. Also, the performance of the proposed approach is evaluated according to a real-world industrial problem

Operations Research and Simulation in Healthcare

International audienc

An estimation of distribution algorithm for minimizing the total flowtime in permutation flowshop scheduling problems

International audienc

Variable neighborhood search algorithm for the green vehicle routing problem

This article discusses the ecological vehicle routing problem with a stop at a refueling station titled Green-Vehicle Routing Problem. In this problem, the refueling stations and the limit of fuel tank capacity are considered for the construction of a tour. We propose a variable neighborhood search to solve the problem. We tested and compared the performance of our algorithm intensively on datasets existing in the literature