WHAT IS KNOWN ON THE SUBJECT?: There is consistent evidence that service users and carers feel marginalized in the process of mental health care planning. Mental health professionals have identified ongoing training needs in relation to involving service users and carers in care planning. There is limited research on the acceptability of training packages for mental health professionals which i...

In the DESIRE project an autonomous robot capable of performing service tasks in a typical kitchen environment has been developed. The overall system consists of various loosely coupled subcomponents providing particular features like manipulating objects or recognizing and interacting with humans. To bring all these subcomponents together to act as monolithic system, a high-performance plannin...

In office and domestic environments there are several different tasks that are considered as boring or time-consuming, which would preferably be carried out by an autonomous mobile service robot. One of the primary tasks for a mobile service robot is to perform fetch-and-carry missions. For a robot to be able to perform a mission, the mission first must be planned, which is done by a mission pl...

Travelers tend to place a high value on qualitative factors such as convenience, comfort, security and prestige. However, conventional transport planning practices tend to focus on quantitative impacts and undervalue qualitative impacts. This paper describes ways to evaluate qualitative impacts. Improved travel convenience and comfort tend to reduce unit travel time costs and so are equivalent ...

The ambulance-planning problem includes operational decisions such as choice of dispatching policy, strategic decisions such as where ambulances should be stationed and at what times they should operate, and tactical decisions such as station location selection. Any solution to this problem requires careful balancing of political, economic and medical objectives. Quantitative decision processes...

The ability to automatically compose web services, and to monitor their execution, is an essential step to substantially decrease time and costs in the development, integration, and maintenance of complex services. In this paper, we exploit techniques based on the “Planning as Model Checking” approach to automatically compose web services and synthesize monitoring components. By relying on such...

In this paper, we study a logistics problem arising in military transport planning. A military organization operates a large fleet of vehicles in a depot to serve the requests of various operational units. Each request has a fixed start and end time, and is served by a prescribed number of vehicles. We address the following two problems: (1) how many vehicles are at least needed to meet a given...

CONTEXT Family planning is highly beneficial to women's overall health, particularly in developing countries. Yet, in much of Sub-Saharan Africa, contraceptive prevalence remains low and unmet need for family planning remains high. It is hypothesized that the poor quality of family planning service provision in many low-income settings is a barrier to contraceptive use, but this hypothesis has ...

Background Systematic screening helps increase family planning uptake through integration with other services, including immunization. Though successfully demonstrated at health facilities, this strategy has not been demonstrated in communities. This study assessed the effectiveness of systematic screening to increase postpartum family planning use during community health days in India without ...