This paper deals with the routing problem of health care sta in a home health care problem. Given a list of patients needing several cares, the problem is to assign cares to care workers. Some cares have to be performed by several persons and some cares cannot be performed with others. If a patient needs several cares, he may want to be treated by the same person. Moreover, some skills constrai...

We consider the problem of pattern matching with k mismatches, where there can be don't care or wild card characters in the pattern. Specifically, given a pattern P of length m and a text T of length n, we want to find all occurrences of P in T that have no more than k mismatches. The pattern can have don't care characters, which match any character. Without don't cares, the best known algorith...

In this paper we introduce and discuss the new concept of weighted don’t cares, i.e., we propose to enrich the notion of don’t cares, by assigning them a weight. These weights might be used to guide and refine the choices operated by the minimization algorithms in handling the don’t care conditions. We then propose, and experimentally validate, the first synthesis tool for functions with weight...

Searching for DNA or amino acid sequences similar to a given pattern string is very important in molecular biology. In fact, a lot of programs and algorithms have been developed. Most of them are based on alignment of strings or approximate string matching. However, they do not seem to be adequate in some cases. For example, the DNA pattern TATA (known as TATA box) is a common promoter that oft...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Technological medical diagnosis advances in cardiology have markedly increased indications for temporary or permanent artificial cardiac pacemakers (PM). This means that, in addition to cardiologists, other specialists have become involved in the handling of these devices. When PM patients undergo surgery, anesthesiologists participation may be decisive for the success...

In most Japanese hospitals, different nurses handle the pre-assigned nursing cares in different ways, which directly affect the quality of nursing cares. Thus, it is necessary to quantitatively elucidate the nurses' action rules for nursing instruction in high-quality care provision and evaluation of staffing levels. Keeping track of times of relative effectiveness in meeting and connecting wit...