In chemical manufacturing and petroleum refining, large-scale maintenance activities must be conducted on a regular basis. Entire production units are shut down for disassembly and comprehensive inspection and renewal. Such a process is called Shutdown and Turnaround (or turnaround for short). It is an essential process but causes high out-of-service cost. Therefore a good schedule for the turn...

This article introduces the use of failure time analysis methods for studying turnaround times in pathology. The key to understanding the approach is to view a laboratory specimen like a living patient. When the specimen enters the laboratory, the time is analogous to the time of diagnosis for a patient. When the specimen's analysis is completed, the event is analogous to a patient who has died...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study was to compare the turnaround time for liquid culturing and primary anti-tuberculous drug susceptibility testing (DST) performed using the mycobacteria growth indicator tube (MGIT) 960 system (Becton Dickinson, USA) with that for conventional culturing and DST (by the absolute concentration method) performed using solid culture medium and to determine the co...

This paper concerns the highly complex task of scheduling large-scale maintenance activities during a plants shutdown or turnaround. We model it as a discrete time-cost tradeoff problem with capacity constraints and individual working shifts for different resource types with a cost function regarding a balanced resource consumption. We introduce and model the problem, give an overview on the la...