Investments in the extension of health insurance coverage, the strengthening of public health services, as well as primary care and better hospitals, highlights the emerging role of healthcare as part of China’s new growth regime, based on an expansion of services, and redistributive policies. Such investments, apart from their central role in terms of relief for low-income people, serve to reb...

Bike sharing systems have been installed in many cities around the world and are increasing in popularity. A major operational cost driver in these systems is rebalancing the bikes over time such that the appropriate number of bikes and open docks are available to users. We combine two aspects that have previously been handled separately in the literature: determining service level requirements...

We consider on-demand car rental systems for public transportation. In these systems, demands are often unbalanced across different parking stations, necessitating costly manual relocations of vehicles. To address this so-called “deadheading” effect and maximise the operator’s revenue, we propose two novel pricing mechanisms. These adaptively adjust the prices between origin and destination sta...

It is well-known that news is essential in financial markets. The amount of news releases is continually growing due to the expansion of communication media in today’s computerised world, and the ability to correctly and efficiently interpret financial information has become much more important in trading. Financial news analytics allow the trader to significantly reduce the latency time to rea...

We address the concurrent rebalancing of almost balanced binary search trees (AVL trees). Such a rebalancing may for instance be necessary after successive insertions and deletions of keys. We show that this problem can be studied through the self-reorganization of distributed systems of nodes controlled by local evolution rules in the line of the approach of Dijkstra and Scholten. This yields ...

The convergence rates for the non-linear coarse mesh finite difference (CMFD) method and the coarse mesh rebalance (CMR) method are derived analytically for one-group, one-dimensional solutions of the fixed source diffusion problem in a non-multiplying infinite homogeneous medium. The derivation was performed by linearizing the non-linear algorithm and by applying Fourier error analysis to the ...

Public bike sharing systems are important alternatives to motorized individual traffic and are gaining popularity in larger cities worldwide. In order to maintain user satisfaction, operators need to actively rebalance the systems so that there are enough bikes available for rental as well as sufficient free slots for returning them at each station. This is done by a vehicle fleet that moves bi...

The dynamics and throughput of a bucket brigade production system is studied when workers speeds increase due to learning. It is shown that, if the rules of the bucket brigade system allow a re-ordering of its workers then the bucket brigade production system is very robust and will typically rebalance to a self-organizing optimal production arrangement. As workers learn only those parts of the...

The role of functional foods in pet diet with a perspective link with human nutrition is the object of our study. Veterinary pet trials clearly indicated that functional foods provide health benefits when administered on a regular basis with adequate active principles in the context of a well balanced diet. Our work hypothesis is that domestic animals might be a suitable model to validate, in s...