Resource allocation within the National AIDS Control Program of Pakistan: a qualitative assessment of decision maker's opinions

BACKGROUND: Limited resources, whether public or private, demand prioritisation among competing needs to maximise productivity. With a substantial increase in the number of reported HIV cases, little work has been done to understand how resources have been distributed and what factors may have influenced allocation within the newly introduced Enhanced National AIDS Control Program of Pakistan. The objective of this study was to identify perceptions of decision makers about the process of resource allocation within Pakistan's Enhanced National AIDS Control Program. METHODS: A qualitative study was undertaken and in-depth interviews of decision makers at provincial and federal levels responsible to allocate resources within the program were conducted. RESULTS: HIV was not considered a priority issue by all study participants and external funding for the program was thought to have been accepted because of poor foreign currency reserves and donor agency influence rather than local need. Political influences from the federal government and donor agencies were thought to manipulate distribution of funds within the program. These influences were thought to occur despite the existence of a well-laid out procedure to determine allocation of public resources. Lack of collaboration among departments involved in decision making, a pervasive lack of technical expertise, paucity of information and an atmosphere of ad hoc decision making were thought to reduce resistance to external pressures. CONCLUSION: Development of a unified program vision through a consultative process and advocacy is necessary to understand goals to be achieved, to enhance program ownership and develop consensus about how money and effort should be directed. Enhancing public sector expertise in planning and budgeting is essential not just for the program, but also to reduce reliance on external agencies for technical support. Strengthening available databases for effective decision making is required to make financial allocations based on real, rather than perceived needs. With a large part of HIV program funding dedicated to public-private partnerships, it becomes imperative to develop public sector capacity to administer contracts, coordinate and monitor activities of the non-governmental sector

Evolutionary-based coverage control mechanism for clustered wireless sensor networks

Many clustering protocols have been proposed for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). However, most of these protocols focus on selecting the optimal set of Cluster Heads (CHs) in order to reduce or balance the network’s energy consumption and unfortunately, how to effectively cover the network area is often overlooked. Coverage optimization in WSNs is a well-known Non-deterministic Polynomial (NP)-hard optimization problem. In this paper, we propose a Genetic Algorithm (GA)-based Coverage Control Mechanism (GA-CCM) for clustered WSNs. GA-CCM provides an add-on mechanism that is designed to be integrated with any centralized clustering protocol to enhance its energy efficiency. GA-CCM finds the optimal set of active nodes that provides full area coverage and puts the redundant sensors into sleep mode to save energy. Extensive simulations of GA-CCM on 25 different WSNs topologies are conducted. Performance results are evaluated and compared against several well-known clustering protocols as well as a coverage-aware clustering protocol. Results show that GA-CCM always achieves full area coverage while minimizing the redundancy degree and the number of active nodes. To further evaluate the performance of GA-CCM as an add-on to existing clustering protocols, we integrate it with a Particle Swarm Optimization based CH selection protocol (PSO-CH), a comprehensive clustering protocol that considers many clustering objectives. To the best of our knowledge, PSO-CH has the lowest overall energy consumption among well-known clustering protocols. Experimental results show that this integration of GA-CCM to PSO-CH further improves its performance in terms of energy efficiency and packets delivery rate