While biomass has been recognized as an important renewable energy source which has a range of positive impacts on the economy, environment, and society, the existence of feedstock seasonality and risk of service disruptions at collection facilities potentially compromises the efficiency and reliability of the energy supply system. In this paper, we consider reliable supply chain design for bio...

This paper analyzes the state of health and access to health services among the urban poor in India. Analysis is based on data from a primary survey conducted among 2000 households, covering 10,929 individuals from four cities of India. Summary statistics and regressions (using STATA) are used for data analysis. Results show lack of government facilities and services, a very high preference for...

This paper presents a portable and adaptive mobile agent system. The system consists of a core system and subcomponents like micro-kernel operating systems. The core system offers only the minimal and common facilities and the latter is implemented as a collection of mobile agents which offer various facilities independent on its execution environment. The system can dynamically evolve and exte...

This paper considers a truck scheduling problem in the context of solid waste collection in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The problem consists of designing ``good" daily truck schedules over a set of previously defined collection trips, on which the trucks collect the solid waste in fixed routes and empty the loads in one of the several operational recycling facilities in the system. The main objective...

the investigation of dimensional efficiency for branches of maskan bank in resources collection and facilities allocation: approach of super efficiency model with weight restrictions. the scarcity of financial resources of banks, especially in developing countries like as iran, leads to planning for improving efficiency and productivity. improving efficiency needs to performance measurement and...

Structural Biologists are tackling ever more ambitious projects, for example more complex membrane proteins and larger macromolecular assemblies (Figure 1). Such systems often show considerable inter and intra crystal variation in diffraction quality. Sample evaluation prior to data collection, already widespread in Macromolecular Crystallography (Figure 2), will thus become more crucial as wil...

OBJECT In the present study, we compared the positive cytodiagnostic test rates with discrepancies using self-collection devices for cervical cancer screening. We made this survey to examine whether or not our self- smear preparation method using the Kato self-collection device contributed to an improved rate of detecting atypical cells compared with existing recommended preparation methods. ...

A customizable system for image browsing, named PIBE, is proposed. In details, PIBE provides the user with a set of browsing and personalization facilities that enable an effective and efficient exploration of the image collection. The approach is novel and appealing because: 1) the personalization actions over the hierarchical organization of images are local, 2) the storage of the browsing st...