Break scheduling problems arise in working areas where breaks are indispensable, e.g., in air traffic control, supervision, or assembly lines. We regard such a problem from the area of supervision personnel. The objective is to find a break assignment for an existing shiftplan such that various constraints reflecting legal demands or ergonomic criteria are satisfied and such that staffing requi...

This paper deals with the break minimization problem of sports scheduling. The problem is to find a stadium assignment that minimizes the total number of breaks under a given round-robin tournament schedule. We show that the problem can be formulated as MAX RES CUT and MAX 2SAT. We also apply Goemans and Williamson’s approximation algorithm based on positive semidefinite programming relaxation....

We consider the break minimization problem for fixing home-away assignments in round-robin sports tournaments. First, we show that for an opponent schedule with n teams and n− 1 rounds, there always exists a home-away assignment with at most 1 4n(n−2) breaks. Secondly, for infinitely many n, we construct opponent schedules for which at least 6n(n−1) breaks are necessary. Finally, we prove that ...

Factors that influence choice between qualitatively different reinforcers (e.g., a food item or a break from work) are important to consider when arranging treatments for problem behavior. Previous findings indicate that children who engage in problem behavior maintained by escape from demands may choose a food item over the functional reinforcer during treatment (DeLeon, Neidert, Anders, & Rod...

Intonation phrase length distribution is important information for prosodic break prediction. However, existing CRF frameworks cannot make full use of it. An expanded CRF is proposed in this paper to tackle this problem. Its lattice carries the location of previous intonation phrase (L3) break, and consequently makes it possible to support various dynamic features, such as the number of syllabl...

Rarely, do we think of cancer as “bacterial”, such that we are often told that “cancer is NOT contagious” Persistent bacterial infections cause persistent irritation of the host’s defense systems, which when ineffective in eradication of the infection, result in a multitude of self-destructive damages. This in some cases occurs to such severity that the resu...