BACKGROUND Little is known about the impact of joining an Accountable Care Organization (ACO) on primary care provider organization's costs. The purpose of this study was to determine whether joining an ACO is associated with an increase in a Rural Health Clinic's (RHC's) cost per visit. METHODS The analyses focused on cost per visit in 2012 and 2013 for RHCs that joined an ACO in 2012 and co...

The Internet has experienced a tremendous expansion in its size and complexity since its commercialization. Internet hosts are threatened by large-scale Distributed Denial-ofService (DDoS) attacks in the network. DDoS attacks typically rely on compromising a large number of hosts to generate traffic to a single destination node. Thus the severity of DDoS attacks will likely increase to the poss...

Both the clonal selection algorithm (CSA) and the ant colony optimization (ACO) are inspired by natural phenomena and are effective tools for solving complex problems. CSA can exploit and explore the solution space parallely and effectively. However, it can not use enough environment feedback information and thus has to do a large redundancy repeat during search. On the other hand, ACO is based...

This paper discusses the problem of placing weighted items in a circular container in two-dimensional space. This problem is of great practical significance in various mechanical engineering domains, such as the design of communication satellites. Two constructive heuristics are proposed, one for packing circular items and the other for packing rectangular items. These work by first optimizing ...

This article proposes a novel MPPT algorithm based on the firefly and elite ant system-trained Elman neural network (FA-EAS-ElmanNN). First, position of fireflies is randomly initialized by (FA), meanwhile individuals with higher attractiveness degree value are selected as optimal solution. Second, extra pheromones artificially released to boost positive feedback effect convergence rate system ...

Sensors play an important role in the modern manufacturing and industrial processes. Their reliability is vital to ensure reliable and accurate information for condition based maintenance. For the gearbox, the critical machine component in the rotating machinery, the vibration signals collected by sensors are usually noisy. At the same time, the fault detection results based on the vibration si...

Ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithms have proved that they can adapt to dynamic optimization problems (DOPs) when they are enhanced to maintain diversity. DOPs are important due to their similarities to many real-world applications. Several approaches have been integrated with ACO to improve their performance in DOPs, where memory-based approaches and immigrants schemes have shown good resu...