Solving rehabilitation scheduling problems via a two-phase ASP approach

A core part of the rehabilitation scheduling process consists of planning rehabilitation physiotherapy sessions for patients, by assigning proper operators to them in a certain time slot of a given day, taking into account several legal, medical and ethical requirements and optimizations, e.g., patient’s preferences and operator’s work balancing. Being able to efficiently solve such problem is of upmost importance, in particular after the COVID-19 pandemic that significantly increased rehabilitation’s needs. In this paper, we present a two-phase solution to rehabilitation scheduling based on Answer Set Programming, which proved to be an effective tool for solving practical scheduling problems. We first present a general encoding, and then add domain specific optimizations. Results of experiments performed on both synthetic and real benchmarks, the latter provided by ICS Maugeri, show the effectiveness of our solution as well as the impact of our domain specific optimization

The PANDORA project: an experimental setup for measuring in-plasma β-decays of astrophysical interest

Experiments performed on Storage Rings have shown that lifetimes of beta-radionuclides can change dramatically as a function of theionization state. PANDORA (Plasmas for Astrophysics, Nuclear Decay Observation and Radiation for Archaeometry) aims at measuring, for the first time, nuclear β-decay rates in stellar-like conditions, especially for radionuclides involved in nuclear-astrophysics processes (BBN, s- processing, CosmoChronometers, Early Solar System formation). Compact magnetic plasma traps, where plasmas reach density ne~10n-1014 cm-3, and temperature Te~0.1-30 keV, are suitable for such studies. The decay rates can be measured as a function of the charge state distribution of the inplasma ions. The collaboration is now designing the plasma trap able to reach the needed plasma densities, temperatures and charge states distributions. A first list of radioisotopes, including tens of physics cases of potential interest is now available. Possible physics cases include, among the others, 2°4Tl, 63Ni, 6°Co, 171Tm, 147Pm, 85Kr, 176Lu and the pairs 187Re-187Os and 87Sr-87Rb, which play a crucial role as cosmo-clock. Physics cases are now under evaluation in terms of lifetime measurements feasibility in a plasma trap

The PANDORA project: an experimental setup for measuring in-plasma β-decays of astrophysical interest

Experiments performed on Storage Rings have shown that lifetimes of beta-radionuclides can change dramatically as a function of theionization state. PANDORA (Plasmas for Astrophysics, Nuclear Decay Observation and Radiation for Archaeometry) aims at measuring, for the first time, nuclear β-decay rates in stellar-like conditions, especially for radionuclides involved in nuclear-astrophysics processes (BBN, s- processing, CosmoChronometers, Early Solar System formation). Compact magnetic plasma traps, where plasmas reach density ne~10n-1014 cm-3, and temperature Te~0.1-30 keV, are suitable for such studies. The decay rates can be measured as a function of the charge state distribution of the inplasma ions. The collaboration is now designing the plasma trap able to reach the needed plasma densities, temperatures and charge states distributions. A first list of radioisotopes, including tens of physics cases of potential interest is now available. Possible physics cases include, among the others, 2°4Tl, 63Ni, 6°Co, 171Tm, 147Pm, 85Kr, 176Lu and the pairs 187Re-187Os and 87Sr-87Rb, which play a crucial role as cosmo-clock. Physics cases are now under evaluation in terms of lifetime measurements feasibility in a plasma trap