Clustering clinical departments for wards to achieve a prespecified blocking probability

When the number of available beds in a hospital is limited and fixed, it can be beneficial to cluster several clinical departments such that the probability of not being able to admit a patient is acceptably small. The clusters are then assigned to the available wards such that enough beds are available to guarantee a blocking probability below a prespecified value. We first give an exact formulation of the problem to be able to achieve optimal solutions. To reduce computation times, we also introduce two heuristic solution methods. The first heuristic is similar to the exact solution method, however, the number of beds needed is approximated by a linear function. The second heuristic uses a local search approach to determine the assignment of clinical departments to clusters and a restricted version of the exact solution method to determine the assignment of clusters to wards

МЕТОДИЧНІ ВКАЗІВКИ З ПРАКТИЧНОГО КУРСУ АНГЛІЙСЬКОЇ МОВИ (вступний фонетичний курс) для студентів 1 курсу (напрям підготовки 0305 “Філологія”, спеціальність 6.030500 “Переклад”)

МЕТОДИЧНІ ВКАЗІВКИ З ПРАКТИЧНОГО КУРСУ АНГЛІЙСЬКОЇ МОВИ (вступний фонетичний курс) для студентів 1 курсу (напрям підготовки 0305 “Філологія”, спеціальність 6.030500 “Переклад”)МЕТОДИЧНІ ВКАЗІВКИ З ПРАКТИЧНОГО КУРСУ АНГЛІЙСЬКОЇ МОВИ (вступний фонетичний курс) для студентів 1 курсу (напрям підготовки 0305 “Філологія”, спеціальність 6.030500 “Переклад”

Improve OR-schedule to reduce number of required beds

After surgery most of the surgical patients have to be admitted in a ward in the hospital. Due to financial reasons and an decreasing number of available nurses in the Netherlands over the years, it is important to reduce the bed usage as much as possible. One possible way to achieve this is to create an operating room (OR) schedule that spreads the usage of beds nicely over time, and thereby minimizes the number of required beds. An OR-schedule is given by an assignment of OR-blocks to specific days in the planning horizon and has to fulfill several resource constraints. Due to the stochastic nature of the length of stay of patients, the analytic calculation of the number of required beds for a given OR-schedule is a complex task involving the convolution of discrete distributions. In this paper, two approaches to deal with this complexity are presented. First, a heuristic approach based on local search is given, which takes into account the detailed formulation of the objective. A second approach reduces the complexity by simplifying the objective function. This allows modeling and solving the resulting problem as an ILP. Both approaches are tested on data provided by Hagaziekenhuis in the Netherlands. Furthermore, several what-if scenarios are evaluated. The computational results show that the approach that uses the simplified objective function provides better solutions to the original problem. By using this approach, the number of required beds for the considered instance of HagaZiekenhuis can be reduced by almost 20%

Quantitative assessment of prefrontal cortex in humans relative to nonhuman primates

Significance A longstanding controversy in neuroscience pertains to differences in human prefrontal cortex (PFC) compared with other primate species; specifically, is human PFC disproportionately large? Distinctively human behavioral capacities related to higher cognition and affect presumably arose from evolutionary modifications since humans and great apes diverged from a common ancestor about 6–8 Mya. Accurate determination of regional differences in the amount of cortical gray and subcortical white matter content in humans, great apes, and Old World monkeys can further our understanding of the link between structure and function of the human brain. Using tissue volume analyses, we show a disproportionately large amount of gray and white matter corresponding to PFC in humans compared with nonhuman primates.</jats:p

The effect of blockholders in corporate governance

Unlike the Anglo-Saxon model, whereby ownership of publicly traded companies is typically in the hands of dispersed shareholders, in continental Europe ownership often lies in the hands of what are known as ‘blockholders’. But how does this affect corporate governance, especially when employees, protected by strong labour institutions, are also powerful

Scheduling non-urgent patient transportation while maximizing emergency coverage

Many ambulance providers operate both advanced life support (ALS) and basic life support (BLS) ambulances. Typically, only an ALS ambulance can respond to an emergency call, whereas non-urgent patient transportation requests can be served by either an ALS or a BLS ambulance. The total capacity of BLS ambulances is usually not enough to fulfill all non-urgent transportation requests. The remaining transportation requests then have to be performed by ALS ambulances, which reduces the coverage for emergency calls. We present a model that determines the routes for BLS ambulances while maximizing the remaining coverage by ALS ambulances. Different from the classical dial-a-ride problem, only one patient can be transported at a time, and not all requests are known in advance. Throughout the day, new requests arrive, and we present an online model to deal with these requests

Hamiltonian Formalism in Quantum Mechanics

Heisenberg motion equations in Quantum mechanics can be put into the Hamilton form. The difference between the commutator and its principal part, the Poisson bracket, can be accounted for exactly. Canonical transformations in Quantum mechanics are not, or at least not what they appear to be; their properties are formulated in a series of Conjectures

A Simple Supermodular Mechanism that Implements Lindahl Allocations

This paper introduces a new incentive compatible mechanism which for general preference environments implements Lindahl allocations as Nash equilibria. The mechanism does not increase in structural complexity as consumers are added to the economy, the minimum dimension of data needed to compute payoffs is smaller than other mechanisms with comparable properties; and for quasi-linear environments, the mechanism induces a supermodular game for appropriate choices of the mechanism parameters. Thus, this new Lindahl mechanism provides a connection between the desirable welfare properties of Lindahl allocations and the desirable theoretical/ convergence properties of supermodular games