An Evaluation of the Impact of Solitary Confinement on Offenders with Mental Illness

The primary goal of the current study is to examine the impact of solitary confinement (SC) on institutional misconducts in offenders with mental illness. The presentation focuses on the following questions: Does the experience of SC reduce institutional misconducts in offenders with mental illness? Does the length of time spent in SC influence subsequent institutional misconducts in offenders with mental illness

Designing Personalized Treatment: An Application to Anticoagulation Therapy

In this study, we develop an analytical framework for personalizing the anticoagulation therapy of patients who are taking warfarin. Consistent with medical practice, our treatment design consists of two stages: (i) the initiation stage, modeled using a partially-observable Markov decision process, during which the physician learns through systematic belief updates about the unobservable patient sensitivity to warfarin, and (ii) the maintenance stage, modeled using a Markov decision process, during which the physician relies on his formed belief about patient sensitivity to determine the stable, patient-specific, warfarin dose to prescribe. We develop an expression for belief updates in the POMDP, establish the optimality of the myopic policy for the MDP, and derive conditions for the existence and uniqueness of a myopically optimal dose. We validate our models using a real-life patient data set gathered at the Hematology Clinic of the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. The proposed analytical framework and case study enable us to develop useful clinical insights, for example, concerning the length of the initiation period and the importance of correctly assessing patient sensitivity

Contribution of Unresolved Point Sources to the Diffuse X-ray Background below 1 keV

We present here the analysis of X-rays point sources detected in several observations available in the XMM-Newton public archive. We focused, in particular, on energies below 1 keV, which are of particular relevance to the understanding of the Diffuse X-ray Background. The average field of all the exposures is 0.09 deg^-2. We reached an average flux sensitivity of 5.8x10^-16 erg s^-1 cm^-2 in the soft band (0.5-2.0 keV) and 2.5x10^-16 erg s^-1 cm^-2 in the very soft band (0.4-0.6 keV). In this paper we discuss the logN-logS results, the contribution to the integrated X-ray sky flux, and the properties of the cumulative spectrum from all sources. In particular, we found an excess flux at around 0.5 keV in the composite spectrum of faint sources. The excess seems to be a general property of all the fields observed suggesting an additional class of weak sources is contributing to the X-ray emission at these energies. Combining our results with previous investigations we have also quantified the contribution of the individual components of the diffuse X-ray Background in the 3/4 keV band.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ; 27 pages, 8 figure

Constraint on Cosmic Density of the String Moduli Field in Gauge-Mediated Supersymmetry-Breaking Theories

We derive a constraint on the cosmic density of string moduli fields in gauge-mediated supersymmetry-breaking theories by requiring that photons emitted from the unstable moduli fields should not exceed the observed X-ray backgrounds. Since mass of the moduli field lies in the range between $O(0.1)$keV and $O(1)$MeV and the decay occurs through a gravitational interaction, the lifetime of the moduli field is much longer than the age of the present universe. The obtained upperbound on their cosmic density becomes more stringent than that from the unclosure condition for the present universe for the mass greater than about 100keV.Comment: 7 pages, a LaTeX2e file and two postscript figure

A strongly changing accretion morphology during the outburst decay of the neutron star X-ray binary 4U 1608−52

It is commonly assumed that the properties and geometry of the accretion flow in transient low-mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs) significantly change when the X-ray luminosity decays below ∼10⁻² of the Eddington limit (L_(Edd)). However, there are few observational cases where the evolution of the accretion flow is tracked in a single X-ray binary over a wide dynamic range. In this work, we use NuSTAR and NICER observations obtained during the 2018 accretion outburst of the neutron star LMXB 4U 1608−52, to study changes in the reflection spectrum. We find that the broad Fe–Kα line and Compton hump, clearly seen during the peak of the outburst when the X-ray luminosity is ∼10³⁷ erg s⁻¹ (∼0.05 L_(Edd)), disappear during the decay of the outburst when the source luminosity drops to ∼4.5 × 10³⁵ erg s⁻¹ (∼0.002 L_(Edd)). We show that this non-detection of the reflection features cannot be explained by the lower signal-to-noise ratio at lower flux, but is instead caused by physical changes in the accretion flow. Simulating synthetic NuSTAR observations on a grid of inner disc radius, disc ionization, and reflection fraction, we find that the disappearance of the reflection features can be explained by either increased disc ionization (log ξ ≳ 4.1) or a much decreased reflection fraction. A changing disc truncation alone, however, cannot account for the lack of reprocessed Fe–Kα emission. The required increase in ionization parameter could occur if the inner accretion flow evaporates from a thin disc into a geometrically thicker flow, such as the commonly assumed formation of a radiatively inefficient accretion flow at lower mass accretion rates

A MIP Model and Several Approaches to Schedule Maintenance in Wind Farms on a Short-term Horizon

Taking into account wind prediction when scheduling maintenance on wind turbines can lead to potential gains. Preemption, transfer times for resources, and outsourcing are considered in this problem. The objective is concerned with maximizing the difference between the profits of wind farms related to the estimated production and the costs associated with outsourcing and resources transfers. A MIP model, a benders decomposition technique and a constraint programming approach are proposed

Scheduling Maintenance in Wind Farms

International audienc

A Benders-based branch-and-cut approach to solve a wind turbine maintenance scheduling problem

We deal with a maintenance scheduling problem rising in the onshore wind power industry. We address the problem on a short-term horizon considering an individual management of the technicians through a space-time tracking. The objective is to find a maintenance planning that maximizes the production of the turbines while taking into account wind predictions, multiple task execution modes, and task-technician assignment constraints. We introduce an exact method to solve this challenging problem. We first propose integer linear programming (ILP) formulations of this problem. Then, on this basis, we build up a Benders-based branch-and-cut approach making use of Benders cuts as well as problem-specific cuts. Our method solves to optimality most of the instances or delivers solutions with a small average gap with respect to upper bounds. The results suggest that our method significantly outperforms the direct resolution of ILP models

A branch-and-check approach to solve a short-term maintenance scheduling problem faced by the onshore wind industry

International audienc

Maintenance scheduling in the electricity industry: A literature review

The reliability of the power plants and transmission lines in the electricity industry is crucial for meeting demand. Consequently, timely maintenance plays a major role reducing breakdowns and avoiding expensive production shutdowns. By now, the literature contains a sound body of work focused on improving decision making in generating units and transmission lines maintenance scheduling. The purpose of this paper is to review that literature. We update previous surveys and provide a more global view of the problem: we study both regulated and deregulated power systems and explore some important features such as network considerations, fuel management, and data uncertainty