simulation for change management an industrial application

Abstract This paper describes an application of change management in the context of a growing company: the ABC enterprise. The first step of the proposed methodological framework involves the construction of the As-is process model, adopting the standard BPMN language. The model is based on an accurate analysis of the data concerning the resources and activities of the company being analyzed, in order to perform a computational simulation of its business processes. After examining existing solutions for business challenges and technological opportunities, several scenarios can be proposed that include possible changes to existing processes. By simulating these scenarios, the results can suggest to analysts useful information to evaluate possible restructuring actions in a quantitative way, comparing the values of an appropriate set of indicators before and after the model's restructuring

Response to "Imaging to diagnose acute appendicitis".

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The M*-object methodology for information system design in CIM environments : the organisation analysis phase

M*-OBJECT is a methodology for information system analysis, design and implementation developed for CIM environments. It is based on an object-oriented approach and it covers in-depth analysis of static and dynamic aspects of the CIM information system. M*-OBJECT is made of three major phases : organisation analysis, conceptual design and implementation design. The organisation analysis phase provides a structured set of requirements. The conceptual design phase provides executable formal specifications of the information system. The implementation design phase provides the implementation description of necessary databases. Each phase is supported by a dedicated model and set of guidelines which can be computerised. This article focuses on the organisation analysis phase for which an organisation model based on the concepts of agent, event, function (process and activity) and component is proposed

A Simulation-driven Approach in Risk-aware Business Process Management: A Case Study in Healthcare

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The M*-object methodology for information system design in CIM environments : the conceptual design phase

M*-OBJECT is a methodology for the analysis, design and implementation of CIM information systems. In this paper, the conceptual design phase is presented. It starts from users information requirements and provides a conceptual specification, the conceptual schema, of the information system to be used in the integrated manufacturing system to be designed. This methodological phase is supported by the Process and Data Net (PDN) model which integrates an objet-oriented data model, a query and data manipulation language, a process model, and an object behaviour description model. The major features of the specification approach are : static, dynamic, and behavioural properties of information are fully covered, complex data structures and data manipulation can be specified, and specifications are executable for rapid prototyping

Towards Machine Learning-based Quantitative Hyperspectral Image Guidance for Brain Tumor Resection

Complete resection of malignant gliomas is hampered by the difficulty in distinguishing tumor cells at the infiltration zone. Fluorescence guidance with 5-ALA assists in reaching this goal. Using hyperspectral imaging, previous work characterized five fluorophores' emission spectra in most human brain tumors. In this paper, the effectiveness of these five spectra was explored for different tumor and tissue classification tasks in 184 patients (891 hyperspectral measurements) harboring low- (n=30) and high-grade gliomas (n=115), non-glial primary brain tumors (n=19), radiation necrosis (n=2), miscellaneous (n=10) and metastases (n=8). Four machine learning models were trained to classify tumor type, grade, glioma margins and IDH mutation. Using random forests and multi-layer perceptrons, the classifiers achieved average test accuracies of 84-87%, 96%, 86%, and 93% respectively. All five fluorophore abundances varied between tumor margin types and tumor grades (p < 0.01). For tissue type, at least four of the five fluorophore abundances were found to be significantly different (p < 0.01) between all classes. These results demonstrate the fluorophores' differing abundances in different tissue classes, as well as the value of the five fluorophores as potential optical biomarkers, opening new opportunities for intraoperative classification systems in fluorescence-guided neurosurgery.Comment: 22 pages, 8 figure

Acute heart failure in an adult with unrecognized congenital heart disease

We report a case of 46 year-old man, admitted to our Department for a possible massive pulmonary embolism. Instead, diagnosis of Tetralogy of Fallot was established by echocardiography and cardiac catetherization

22Ne and 23Na ejecta from intermediate-mass stars: The impact of the new LUNA rate for 22Ne(p,gamma)23Na

We investigate the impact of the new LUNA rate for the nuclear reaction $^{22}$Ne$(p,\gamma)^{23}$Na on the chemical ejecta of intermediate-mass stars, with particular focus on the thermally-pulsing asymptotic giant branch (TP-AGB) stars that experience hot-bottom burning. To this aim we use the PARSEC and COLIBRI codes to compute the complete evolution, from the pre-main sequence up to the termination of the TP-AGB phase, of a set of stellar models with initial masses in the range $3.0\,M_{\odot} - 6.0\,M_{\odot}$, and metallicities $Z_{\rm i}=0.0005$, $Z_{\rm i}=0.006$, and $Z_{\rm i} = 0.014$. We find that the new LUNA measures have much reduced the nuclear uncertainties of the $^{22}$Ne and $^{23}$Na AGB ejecta, which drop from factors of $\simeq 10$ to only a factor of few for the lowest metallicity models. Relying on the most recent estimations for the destruction rate of $^{23}$Na, the uncertainties that still affect the $^{22}$Ne and $^{23}$Na AGB ejecta are mainly dominated by evolutionary aspects (efficiency of mass-loss, third dredge-up, convection). Finally, we discuss how the LUNA results impact on the hypothesis that invokes massive AGB stars as the main agents of the observed O-Na anti-correlation in Galactic globular clusters. We derive quantitative indications on the efficiencies of key physical processes (mass loss, third dredge-up, sodium destruction) in order to simultaneously reproduce both the Na-rich, O-poor extreme of the anti-correlation, and the observational constraints on the CNO abundance. Results for the corresponding chemical ejecta are made publicly available