Planning the operational procedures in a railway marshalling yard is a complex problem. When a train arrives at a marshalling yard, it is uncoupled on an arrival yard and then its cars are rolled to a classification yard. All cars should eventually be rolled to the classification track that has been assigned to the train they're supposed to depart with. However, there is normally not enough cap...

The average American generates approximately 4.5 pounds of garbage per day, for a total of 196 million tons of trash per year, most of which ends up in landfills (Shortridge, 1993). Various government and private programs have been organized to divert part of this garbage (metals, plastics, paper and cardboard, and yard and food wastes) from landfills by recycling. Yard and food wastes often ar...

Seaport terminals recognise the need to change current practices in order to improve regional air quality while enhancing their terminals’ competitiveness. One area that terminals can do better at is to improve their yard crane operations and in turn reduce the trucks in-terminal delay. This study examines various container rehandling strategies by the yard cranes with the goal of improving the...

To the Editor: A recent important study1 addressing the prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors in a rural African population, reports that ‘... most participants followed a physically inactive lifestyle’. The validity of their findings is difficult to evaluate as the study provides little information regarding the physical activity questionnaire that was used. Questionnaire validity is relev...

This paper discusses a case study of the board game of Scotland Yard from a computational perspective. Interestingly, Scotland Yard is a genuine “playgame” with imperfect information. For reasons not completely clear to me, games with imperfect information have escaped the interest of researchers in Algorithmic combinatorial gametheory. I show by means of a powerset argument, that Scotland Yard...

In this paper, a method integrating Q-learning algorithm and simulation technique is proposed to optimize the operation scheduling in container terminals. Firstly Q-learning algorithms for yard cranes and yard trailers are designed to obtain the optimal scheduling strategy of yard cranes and yard trailers. Then Q-learning is combined with simulation to develop an integrating scheduling model in...

MANY patients in mental hospitals, while no longer needing the active treatment services of a hospital, are still unable to live in the community without help. In addition, there are many patients in the community for whom hospitalisation is not yet necessary but for whom some form of help is needed to prevent it in the near future. Voluntary and governmental groups have long been aware of the ...

The interaction of the dye YD2 with a cluster of (anatase-phase) TiO2 (which is utilized in dye-sensitized solar cells, DSSCs) and electron injection by the dye into the cluster were studied by performing density functional theory (DFT) calculations at the B3LYP, PBE, and TPSS levels of theory, including dispersion effects. We studied and quantified the interaction of the metallomacrocycle with...