Performance measurement in the health-care sector is a challenging task due to the wide variety in performance metrics and their interpretation. It is essential to develop a robust methodology to evaluate health-care performance since substantial and increasing amount of public resources are dedicated to health-care. With this goal in mind, this paper proposes a fuzzy decision making framework ...

This dissertation consists of three essays that propose designs and theoretically-based evaluations of two novel decision support systems (DSS): a web-based spatial DSS (SDSS), a dialectic DSS (DDSS), and a comparative analysis of subjective and objective measures of system success in terms of decision process and outcome. In the first essay, a web-based SDSS that utilizes the latest advances i...

We propose a comparative performance evaluation method for security protocols. We start by constructing a security protocol model where we assign a cost functions for each cryptographic operation. For each class of cryptographic operations (e.g. symmetric encryption, asymmetric decryption), we construct a polynomial function based on an exhaustive performance evaluation of cryptographic combina...

Multimedia and real-time applications require bandwidth guarantees, which may be achieved by resource reservation. However, resource reservation in ad-hoc networks is a very challenging task due to the instability of radio channels, node mobility and lack of coordination between mobile nodes. Proposed reservation MAC protocols like CATA, FPRP, R-CSMA and SRMA/PA have limitations and are suitabl...

The results of a comparative study of five aluminum and one wood baseball bats are presented. The study includes an analysis of field data, high-speed laboratory testing, and modal analysis. It is found that field performance is strongly correlated with the ballbat coefficient of restitution (BBCOR) and only weakly correlated with other parameters of the bat, suggesting that the BBCOR is the pr...

The first phase of this s tudy was the production of contemporary straightbred (SB) and reciprocal crossbred (F 1 ) bulls by mating Angus (A) bulls to A and Santa Gertrudis (SG) cows and SG bulls to SG and A cows. Of the bulls produced during the 4-yr period, those used for breeding included 15 A, 15 SG, 8 A x SG and 8 SG x A. For 205-d weight and weight /day of age (W/DA) postweaning, A X SG h...

Table 2: Example of Contingency Table where = the number of examples covered by Rule R that are in Class C. = the number of examples covered by Rule R that are not in Class C. = the number of examples not covered by Rule R that are in Class C. = the number of examples covered by neither Rule R or Class C. = total number of examples covered by rule R. = total number of examples not covered rule ...

This thesis shows that object-level, trace-driven simulation can facilitate evaluation of language runtime systems and reaches new conclusions about the relative performance of important garbage collection algorithms. In particular, I reach the unexpected conclusion that mark-and-sweep garbage collection, when augmented with generations, shows comparable CPU performance and much better referenc...