The Multi-Compartment Vehicle Routing Problem (MC-VRP) consists of designing transportation routes to satisfy the demands of a set of costumers for several products that because of incompatibility constraints must be loaded on independent vehicle compartments. Despite its wide practical applicability the MC-VRP has not received much attention in the literature, and the few existing methods assu...

A novel genetic vaccine that is based on a Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus (VEE) replicon launched from plasmid DNA is described. The plasmid encodes a VEE replicon under the transcriptional control of the cytomegalovirus immediate-early promoter (VEE DNA). The VEE DNA consistently expressed 3- to 15-fold more green fluorescent protein in vitro than did a conventional DNA vaccine. Furtherm...

Novel compounds, composed of two acridone moieties connected by a propyl or butyl spacer, were synthesized and tested as potential modulators of P-glycoprotein (P-gp)-mediated multidrug resistance. The propyl derivative 1,3-bis(9-oxoacridin-10-yl)-propane (PBA) was extremely potent and, at a concentration of 1 microM, increased steady state accumulation of vinblastine (VLB) approximately 9-fold...

Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a popular combinatorial optimization problem which consists in finding an optimal set of routes for a fleet of vehicles in order to serve a specified collection of clients. Capacitated VRP (CVRP) is a version of VRP in which every vehicle has a capacity parameter assigned. The UCT (Upper Confidence bounds applied to Trees) is a heuristic simulation-based algorit...

Lack of the use environment and context in Virtual Reality Prototypes (VRP) makes it difficult for R&D and marketing people to exploit the computerised models of mobile devices. The concepts of a future product can be difficult to understand, evaluate and market in cases where a fully functioning physical prototype is not an option. One solution for the problem is Contextual Virtual Reality Pro...

Porin (PorB) is a major outer membrane protein produced by all Neisseria gonorrhoeae strains and has been a focus of intense interest as a vaccine candidate. In this study, the immunogenicity of PorB in mice was investigated after several immunization regimens. Outer membrane vesicles (OMV), recombinant renatured PorB (rrPorB), and PorB-expressing Venezuelan equine encephalitis (VEE) virus repl...

Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) has become an integral part in logistic operations which determines optimal routes for several vehicles to serve customers. The basic version of VRP is Capacitated VRP (CVRP) which considers equal capacities for all vehicles. The objective of CVRP is to minimize the total traveling distance of all vehicles to serve all the customers. Various methods are used to sol...

Dynamic vehicle routing problems with backhauling (VRPB), although important, have attracted little attention in the literature. Dynamic VRPB is more complex than dynamic vehicle routing problems (VRP) without backhauling, and since VRP without backhauling is a special case of VRPB, models and algorithms for dynamic VRPB can easily be adapted for dynamic VRP. In this paper, the author compared ...

We investigated the immunogenicity of gonococcal transferrin binding protein B (TbpB) expressed with and without a eukaryotic secretion signal from a nonpropagating Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus replicon particle (VRP) delivery system. TbpB was successfully expressed in baby hamster kidney (BHK) cells, and the presence of the eukaryotic secretion signal not only apparently increased the ...

The Vehicle Routing Problem with Pickups and Deliveries (VRPPD) is an extension to the classical Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), where customers may both receive and send goods. We do not make the assumption common in the VRPPD literature, that goods may only be picked up after all deliveries have been completed. We also eschew the concept of insertion and propose a method that treats pickups an...