A frequently occurring operational problem is one of processing a given number of jobs (commodities) on a specified number of machines (facilities) referred to by various investigators as scheduling, dispatching, sequencing, or combinations thereof (Gupta and Stafford, 2006). In most manufacturing environments, a set of processes is needed to be serially performed in several stages before a job...

Current practice in economic evaluation is to assign equal social value to a unit of health improvement (“a QALY is a QALY is a QALY”). Alternative views of equity are typically considered separately to efficiency. One proposal seeks to integrate these two sets of societal concerns by attaching equity weights to QALYs. To date, research in pursuit of this goal has focussed on candidate equity c...

A no-wait job shop (NWJS) describes a situation where every job has its own processing sequence with the constraint that no waiting time is allowed between operations within any job. A NWJS problem with the objective of minimizing total completion time is a NP-hard problem and this paper proposes a hybrid genetic algorithm (HGA) to solve this complex problem. A genetic operation is defined by c...

Population based metaheuristics, such as hybrid genetic algorithms or memetic algorithms, play an important role in the solution of combinatorial optimization problems. The memetic algorithm presented here for the no-wait flowshop scheduling problem addresses a hierarchically organized complete ternary tree to represent the population that putted together with a recombination plan resembles a p...

We consider a problem of scheduling jobs in two-machine no-wait ow shops for which the objective is to minimize the makespan. Each job, upon completion of its processing on the rst machine, must be transferred immediately to the second machine due to a no-wait in process constraint. Every job requires a setup time on each machine before it is processed. The setup on the second machine is antici...

We address the scheduling problem for a no-wait flow shop to optimize total completion time with release dates. With the tool of asymptotic analysis, we prove that the objective values of two SPTA-based algorithms converge to the optimal value for sufficiently large-sized problems. To further enhance the performance of the SPTA-based algorithms, an improvement scheme based on local search is pr...

We consider in this paper the two-machine no-wait flowshop problem in which each machine may have an unavailable interval. We present 3 2 -approximation algorithms for the problem when the unavailable interval is imposed on only one machine, or the unavailable intervals on the two machines overlap. These algorithms improve on existing results.

Few studies report treatment outcome for early childhood internalizing disorders following psychotherapy, especially psychodynamic techniques. We aimed to investigate effectiveness of a novel, developmentally appropriate, short-term psychodynamic treatment program for 4to 10-year-olds with anxiety disorders in an outpatient setting. We conducted a quasi-experimental wait-list controlled study. ...

BACKGROUND Emergency departments (ED) recognize crowding and handover from prehospital to in-hospital settings to be major challenges. Prehospital Geographical Information Systems (GIS) may be a promising tool to address such issues. In this study, the use of prehospital GIS data was implemented in an ED in order to investigate its effect on 1) wait time and unprepared activations of Trauma Tea...

This research presents a novel approach to solve m-machine no-wait flowshop scheduling problem. A continuous flowshop problem with total flowtime as criterion is considered applying a hybrid evolutionary algorithm. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated and the results are compared with the best known in the literature. Experimental tests show the superiority of the evolutionary hy...