341 research outputs found
Earthworks planning for road construction projects: a case study
In this paper we construct earthwork allocation plans for a linear infrastructure road project. Fuel consumption metrics and an innovative block partitioning and modelling approach are applied to reduce costs. 2D and 3D variants of the problem were compared to see what effect, if any, occurs on solution quality. 3D variants were also considered to see what additional complexities and difficulties occur. The numerical investigation shows a significant improvement and a reduction in fuel consumption as theorised. The proposed solutions differ considerably from plans that were constructed for a distance based metric as commonly used in other approaches. Under certain conditions, 3D problem instances can be solved optimally as 2D problems
Performance of LIPS III Attitude Control System
The LIPS III satellite is a spin stabilized sun tracking space platform who\u27s primary mission is to test new space power sources. The attitude control system has two modes of operation, hydrazine gas jet for large attitude errors and an electromagnetic torque rod for nominal operations. The control law will be discussed and examples of inflight data will be given
A mathematical framework for expanding a railway's theoretical capacity
Analytical techniques for measuring and planning railway capacity expansion activities have been considered in this article. A preliminary mathematical framework involving track duplication and section sub divisions is proposed for this task. In railways these features have a great effect on network performance and for this reason they have been considered. Additional motivations have also arisen from the limitations of prior models that have not included them
Tun: Reliable Modalities
Unified ubiquitous models have led to many essential advances, including redundancy and sen- sor networks. In fact, few developers would disagree with the understanding of cache coherence. In order to fulfill this goal, we prove that though the acclaimed homogeneous algorithm for the refinement of superpages by G. Wang et al. [14] is maximally efficient, replication and multicast systems can agree to surmount this issue
Developing A Personal Decision Support Tool for Hospital Capacity Assessment and Querying
This article showcases a personal decision support tool (PDST) called
HOPLITE, for performing insightful and actionable quantitative assessments of
hospital capacity, to support hospital planners and health care managers. The
tool is user-friendly and intuitive, automates tasks, provides instant
reporting, and is extensible. It has been developed as an Excel Visual Basic
for Applications (VBA) due to its perceived ease of deployment, ease of use,
Office's vast installed userbase, and extensive legacy in business. The
methodology developed in this article bridges the gap between mathematical
theory and practice, which our inference suggests, has restricted the uptake
and or development of advanced hospital planning tools and software. To the
best of our knowledge, no personal decision support tool (PDST) has yet been
created and installed within any existing hospital IT systems, to perform the
aforementioned tasks. This article demonstrates that the development of a PDST
for hospitals is viable and that optimization methods can be embedded quite
simply at no cost. The results of extensive development and testing indicate
that HOPLITE can automate many nuanced tasks. Furthermore, there are few
limitations and only minor scalability issues with the application of free to
use optimization software. The functionality that HOPLITE provides may make it
easier to calibrate hospitals strategically and/or tactically to demands. It
may give hospitals more control over their case-mix and their resources,
helping them to operate more proactively and more efficiently.Comment: 33 pages, 11 tables, 17 figure
Analytical Techniques to Support Hospital Case Mix Planning
This article introduces analytical techniques and a decision support tool to
support capacity assessment and case mix planning (CMP) approaches previously
created for hospitals. First, an optimization model is proposed to analyse the
impact of making a change to an existing case mix. This model identifies how
other patient types should be altered proportionately to the changing levels of
hospital resource availability. Then we propose multi-objective decision-making
techniques to compare and critique competing case mix solutions obtained. The
proposed techniques are embedded seamlessly within an Excel Visual Basic for
Applications (VBA) personal decision support tool (PDST), for performing
informative quantitative assessments of hospital capacity. The PDST reports
informative metrics of difference and reports the impact of case mix
modifications on the other types of patient present. The techniques developed
in this article provide a bridge between theory and practice that is currently
missing and provides further situational awareness around hospital capacity.Comment: 20 pages, 11 tables, 6 figure
High-resolution record of climate change in the Owens Lake Basin, California, for the period 52,500 to 12,500 YBP
EXTRACT (SEE PDF FOR FULL ABSTRACT):
High-resolution oxygen-18 and total inorganic carbon (TIC) studies of cored sediments from the Owens Lake Basin, California, indicate that Owens Lake was hydrologically open (overflowing) most of the time between 52,500 and 12,500 carbon-14 YBP. ... The lack of a strong correspondence between North Atlantic climate records and the Owens Lake delta-oxygen-18 record has two possible explanations: (1) the sequence of large and abrupt climate change indicated in North Atlantic records is not global in scope and is largely confined to the North Atlantic and surrounding areas, or (2) Owens Lake is located in a part of the Great Basin that is relatively insensitive to the effects of climate perturbations recorded in the North Atlantic region
The Efficacy of Utility Functions for Multicriteria Hospital Case-Mix Planning
A new approach to perform hospital case-mix planning (CMP) is introduced in
this article. Our multi-criteria approach utilises utility functions (UF) to
articulate the preferences and standpoint of independent decision makers
regarding outputs. The primary aim of this article is to test whether a utility
functions method (UFM) based upon the scalarization of aforesaid UF is an
appropriate quantitative technique to, i) distribute hospital resources to
different operating units, and ii) provide a better capacity allocation and
case mix. Our approach is motivated by the need to provide a method able to
evaluate the trade-off between different stakeholders and objectives of
hospitals. To the best of our knowledge, no such approach has been considered
before in the literature. As we will later show, this idea addresses various
technical limitations, weaknesses, and flaws in current CMP. The efficacy of
the aforesaid approach is tested on a case study of a large tertiary hospital.
Currently UF are not used by hospital managers, and real functions are
unavailable, hence, 14 rational options are tested. Our exploratory analysis
has provided important guidelines for the application of these UF. It indicates
that these UF provide a valuable starting point for planners, managers, and
executives of hospitals to impose their goals and aspirations. In conclusion,
our approach may be better at identifying case mix that users want to treat and
seems more capable of modelling the varying importance of different levels of
output. Apart from finding desirable case mixes to consider, the approach can
provide important insights via a sensitivity analysis of the parameters of each
UF.Comment: 35 pages, 6 tables, 29 figure
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