BACKGROUND As no health system can afford to provide all possible services and treatments for the people it serves, each system must set priorities. Priority setting decision makers are increasingly involving the public in policy making. This study focuses on public engagement in a key priority setting context that plagues every health system around the world: wait list management. The purpose ...

Minimizing the total completion time (TCT) is essential in numerous manufacturing settings. Since such a problem considered NP-hard, it not likely that an optimal solution exists. Accordingly, many papers scheduling literature look for dominance relation as to minimizing TCT. Furthermore, due wide range of unpredictability settings, consider settings with uncertain and bounded setup times. None...

A discrete whale optimization algorithm (DWOA) is presented to solve the no-wait flow shop scheduling problem (NWFSSP) with objective makespan. An effective combination of nearest neighbor (NN) and standard deviation heuristics (SDH) used acquire initial solutions population. After that, three crossover operators, two-point (TPX), multiple-point (MPX) job-based (JBX) are designed mimics humpbac...