BACKGROUND The voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC) program in Zimbabwe aims to circumcise 80% of males aged 13-29 by 2017. We assessed the impact of actual VMMC scale-up to date and evaluated the impact of potential alterations to the program to enhance program efficiency, through prioritization of subpopulations. METHODS AND FINDINGS We implemented a recently developed analytical appr...

This paper studies charging scheduling problem of electric vehicles (EVs) in the scale of a microgrid (e.g., a university or town) where a set of charging stations are controlled by a central aggregator. A bi-objective optimization problem is formulated to jointly optimize total charging cost and user convenience. Then, a close-to-optimal online scheduling algorithm is proposed as solution. The...

Objectives. To evaluate whether collaboration between existing and new transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) programs could help reduce the number of cases needed to achieve optimal efficiency. Background. There is a well-documented learning curve for achieving procedural efficiency and safety in TAVR procedures. Methods. A multidisciplinary collaboration was established between the Min...

the prevent alcohol and risk related trauma in youth (p.a.r.t.y.) program is an injury prevention program set up in 2011 at a level-1 trauma center in germany. its objective is the prevention of road traffic accidents among young road users. our goal is to enable adolescents to recognize risks and to improve life-changing behavior to reduce the severity of injury and the number of killed young ...

In this paper, four simulated annealing based multiobjective algorithms—SMOSA, UMOSA, PSA and WMOSA have been used to solve multiobjective optimization of constrained problems with varying degree of complexity along with a new PDMOSA algorithm. PDMOSA algorithm uses a strategy of Pareto dominant based fitness in the acceptance criteria of simulated annealing and is improved. In all algorithms, ...

Nearly all discussions about the appropriate consumption discount rate for climate-change policy evaluation assume that a single discount rate concept applies. We argue that two distinct concepts and associated rates apply. We distinguish a social-welfare-equivalent discount rate (rSW) appropriate for determining whether a given policy would augment social welfare (according to a postulated soc...

In multiobjective optimization methods, the multiple conflicting objectives are typically converted into a single objective optimization problem with the help of scalarizing functions and such functions may be constructed in many ways. We compare both theoretically and numerically the performance of three classification-based scalarizing functions and pay attention to how well they obey the cla...

In this paper, we propose a new constraint-handling technique for evolutionary algorithms which is based on multiobjective optimization concepts. The approach uses Pareto dominance as its selection criterion, and it incorporates a secondary population. The new technique is compared with respect to an approach representative of the state-of-the-art in the area using a well-known benchmark for ev...

This paper reports on preliminary numerical experiments in optimizing coolant flows in continuous casting of steel with respect to multiple objectives. For this purpose, Differential Evolution for Multiobjective Optimization (DEMO) coupled with a reliable numerical simulator of the casting process was applied. The algorithm parameters were initially tuned to balance between the quality of the e...

to increase agricultural crops’ quality and to minimize losses in the final product and used energy during the drying process, major drying system parameters should be continuously controlled. precise control of such parameters is attained by using automatic control systems. to optimize the overall dryer efficiency in a forced convective solar dryer, a controller was designed, constructed a...