This study proposes a hybrid minimal repair policy which combines periodic maintenance policy with age-based maintenance policy for a serial production system. Parameters of such policy are defined as and which indicate as hybrid minimal repair time and planned preventive maintenance time respectively . Under this hybrid policy, the system is repaired minimally if it fails during , . A perfect ...

Mobile devices have experienced explosive growth and rapid adoption. These devices have also become troves of security and privacy data of the consumers that utilize them. What makes mobile devices unique from traditional computing platforms is the additional sensing components they contain and their ease of access which allow consumers to make these devices a part of their lives. Additionally ...

We discuss a class of computer/network architectures that supports multilevel security and commercial applications, while utilizing primarily commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) workstations, operating systems and hardware components. We show that a property of these architectures is that, while they are capable of supporting multilevel confidentiality policies, they do not generally support partia...

BACKGROUND To increase operating room (OR) efficiency, a new resource allocation strategy, a new policy for patient urgency classification, and a new system for OR booking was implemented at a tertiary referral hospital. We investigated the impact of these interventions. METHODS We carried out a before-and-after study using OR data. A total of 23,515 elective (planned) and non-elective (unpla...

Researchers and policy makers are increasingly turning to multi-agent and dynamic-network multi-agent models to study real-world systems. The models hold particular appeal because of their intuitive representation of complex real-world systems that can be thought of as “complex systems.” Both policy makers and those affected by the policies influenced by these models often question whether a mo...

While many applications incur few page faults, some scientiic and database applications perform poorly when running on top of a traditional virtual memory implementation. To help address this problem, several systems have been built to allow each program the ex-ibility to use its own application-speciic page replacement policy, in place of the generic policy provided by the operating system. Th...

OBJECTIVE To describe the state of research ethics policies and practices in health research institutions in sub-Saharan African countries. DESIGN A structured questionnaire was used to solicit information on research ethics from health research institutions. SETTING Forty-two sub-Saharan African countries. PARTICIPANTS Key informants from the health research institutions. MAIN OUTCOME ...

Based on a discrete-event simulation model, Simulationbased Real-time Decision-Making (SRDM) is an innovative approach to real-time, goal-directed decision-making. When applied to a flexible manufacturing system, SRDM makes better decisions than most fixed policies, such as deterministic, stochastic and manual. SRDM even improved over fixed policies optimized within a class of policies by OptQu...

There have been heated debates on the controversial role of healthcare Group Purchasing Organizations (GPOs) which negotiate contracts with vendor on the behalf of healthcare providers. These GPOs cover their costs by charging manufacturers ‘‘Contract Admi nistrative Fees,’’ instead of being reimbursed by the providers. This causes conflicts of interests. Therefore, purchasing through GPOs migh...

Abstract We are sometimes faced with the problem of searching for the actual failure time of a unit when it has failed until time t0. This is called a backward time problem of how much time we go back to search for the failure time from time t0, and is solved by using the reversed failure rate. This paper proposes an extended model of multiple backward trials in which we find the actual failure...