The paper discusses the question of the optimal control of an unsymmetric bottleneck system with Poisson arrival processes having the minimization of the mean individual waiting time as objective. The setup allows the straightforward generalization to more complicated forms of traffic organization. The notion of the mean individual waiting time is based on a theorem of the Little type, which is...

Background Different strategies for addressing the challenge of prioritizing elective patients efficiently and fairly have been introduced in Norway. In the time period studied, there were three possible outcomes for elective patients that had been through the process of priority setting: (i) high priority with assigned individual maximum waiting time; (ii) low priority without a maximum waitin...

OBJECTIVES In Spain, official information on waiting times for surgery is based on the interval between the indication for surgery and its performance. We aimed to estimate total waiting times for surgical procedures, including outpatient visits and diagnostic tests prior to surgery. In addition, we propose an alternative system to manage total waiting times that reduces variability and maximum...

Exploiting a precise reproduction of a stock exchange, the robustness of the Continuous Double Auction (CDA) mechanism, evaluated by means of the waiting time distributions, has been proved versus 36 different set ups made by varying both the operators’ behaviour and the market micro structure. The obtained results demonstrate that the CDA remains able to clear strongly different order flows, t...

We present WESt, a visualization for surgery waiting times applied to the province of British Columbia (BC) in Canada. This project is motivated by the long waiting time for surgeries in BC, which has the potential to put patients in danger and put extra pressure on clinicians [2]. WESt helps patients select a hospital and a physician, and to explore their options to get their surgery as soon a...

AIMS There has been increasing concern, by clinical oncologists in the UK, about the continuing long waiting times for radiotherapy treatment. An audit of patients starting treatment in 1 week in 2003 was carried out to determine waiting times and to compare current results with those obtained from a similar audit in 1998. MATERIALS AND METHODS All centres in the UK completed the audit, which...

Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 96 The waiting time phenomenon ................................................................................................ 96 Evidence on comparative waiting times across OECD countries ........................................ 101 Evidence on causes ...

Transcription factors are short stretches of DNA (or k-mers) mainly located in promoters sequences that enhance or repress gene expression. With respect to an initial distribution of letters on the DNA alphabet, Behrens and Vingron [3] consider a random sequence of length n that does not contain a given k-mer or word of size k. Under an evolution model of the DNA, they compute the probability p...

Waiting times for elective treatments are a key health-policy concern in several OECD countries. This study describes common measures of waiting times from administrative data across OECD countries. It focuses on common elective procedures, such as hip and knee replacement, and cataract surgery, where waiting times are notoriously long. It provides comparative data on waiting times across 12 OE...