Negative Attitudes of Law Students: A Replication of the Alienation and Dissatisfaction Factors

This book presents some recent systems engineering and mathematical tools for health care along with their real-world applications by health care practitioners and engineers. Advanced approaches, tools, and algorithms used in operating room scheduling and patient flow are covered. State-of-the-art results from applications of data mining, business process modeling, and simulation in healthcare, together with optimization methods, form the core of the volume. Systems Analysis Tools for Better Health Care Delivery illustrates the increased need of partnership between engineers and health care professionals. This book will benefit researchers and practitioners in health care delivery institutions, staff members and professionals of specialized hospital units, and lecturers and graduate students in engineering, applied mathematics, business administration and health care.

A time predefined variable depth search for nurse rostering

This paper presents a variable depth search for the nurse rostering problem. The algorithm works by chaining together single neighbourhood swaps into more effective compound moves. It achieves this by using heuristics to decide whether to continue extending a chain and which candidates to examine as the next potential link in the chain. Because end users vary in how long they are willing to wait for solutions, a particular goal of this research was to create an algorithm that accepts a user specified computational time limit and uses it effectively. When compared against previously published approaches the results show that the algorithm is very competitive

A new heuristic for the Pallet Loading Problem

this paper we will analyse the structure of optimal packing patterns and we will introduce the denotation of G4-structure. Then we propose a new heuristic for solving the PLP. Since the algorithm is based on dynamic programming it is of pseudo-polynomial type. The computational experiments show that instances having more than 200 items in an (optimal) packing pattern can be handled with small computational amount of time

An exact algorithm for general orthogonal n-dimensional knapsack problems

The n-dimensional orthogonal knapsack problem has a wide range of practical applications, including packing, cutting and scheduling. We present a new approach for its exact solution using a two-level tree search algorithm. A key role plays a graph-theoretical characterization of packing patterns that allows us to deal with classes of packing pattern that are symmetrical in a certain sense, instead of single ones. Computational results are reported for two-dimensional test problems from literature