Gestational hypertension, pre-eclampsia and eclampsia are conditions that affect the health of both mothers and infants during and after pregnancy. Recent research indicates the importance of considering environmental, social and individual contributors to poor pregnancy outcomes. Our research examined particulate matter (PM) concentrations as one measure of environmental exposure and neighbour...

In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of combining the key components of the basic metaheuristic methods on the quality of solutions produced for Uncapacitated Examination Timetabling Problem (UETP). These components are recombination, randomness, and neighbourhood structures. The Harmony search Algorithm (HSA) is used to simulate different combinations of these components. It has thr...

This research is done with an aim to compare the quality of housing in the two common appartment form on the rendering of main indexes of housing quality through two pre-designed neighbourhoods of Haft HozNeighborhood and the first phase of Ekbatan residential complex in the city of Tehran. Indexes of housing quality are extracted from the internal and external resources and are subjected to qu...

Many successful approaches to examination timetabling consist of multiple stages, in which a constructive approach is used for finding a good initial solution, and then one or more improvement approaches are employed successively to further enhance the quality of the solution obtained during the previous stage. Moreover, there is a growing number of studies describing the success of approaches ...

This work presents a heuristic for component pick-and-place sequencing to improve the throughput of a multi-head surface mount device placement machine for assembling printed circuit board. We present a Variable Neighbourhood Monte Carlo Search (VNMS), which employs variable neighbourhood search with an Exponential Monte Carlo acceptance criterion. VNMS is a descent-ascent heuristic that operat...

BACKGROUND Neighbourhood quality has been connected with an array of health issues, but neighbourhood research has been limited by the lack of methods to characterise large geographical areas. This study uses innovative computer vision methods and a new big data source of street view images to automatically characterise neighbourhood built environments. METHODS A total of 430 000 images were ...

Many successful approaches to examination timetabling consist of multiple stages, in which a constructive approach is used for finding a good initial solution, and then one or more improvement approaches are employed successively to further enhance the quality of the solution obtained during the previous stage. Moreover, there is a growing number of studies describing the success of approaches ...