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This study proposes a multi-objective and multi-period mathematical programming model to support planning decisions in the Long-Term Care (LTC) sector. The model provides information to help planning the delivery of institutional LTC services in the medium-term, both in terms of location selection and capacity planning, when it is intended a move towards an equitable provision of care. For this purpose,...
Recently, in a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) framework, Färe and Grosskopf [15] argued that the input directional distance function is invariant to affine data transformations under variable returns to scale (VRS), which includes, as a particular case, the property of translation invariance. In this paper we show that, depending on the directional vector used, the translation invariance may fail...
We consider the Train Timetabling Problem (TTP) in a railway node (i.e. a set of stations in an urban area interconnected by tracks), which calls for determining the best schedule for a given set of trains during a given time horizon, while satisfying several track operational constraints. In particular, we consider the context of a highly congested railway node in which different Train Operators...
Most manufacturers or retailers must procure items or services necessary for their businesses, in an environment that typically includes a number of competing suppliers with varying cost structures, price schemes, and capacities. In this paper, we consider the sourcing problem in which the buyer determines the sources that should be utilized and to what extent, in turn, dictating the total quantity...
The assignment of service requests to emergency departments is of paramount importance both from a life-threatening and an economical viewpoints. In the process of a more general project that aims at defining optimal allocation policies of patients to regional hospital network facilities (together with the potential reorganization of the facilities), the Department of Epidemiology of the Regional...
The English and Welsh water and sewerage industry is characterised by indivisible capital which has a long service life. Previous studies of efficiency for the English and Welsh water and sewerage industry take a static framework, assuming all inputs can be adjusted instantaneously. This paper measures dynamic efficiency by incorporating intertemporal links of capital within the production function...
Changes in demand when manufacturing different products require an optimization model that includes robustness in its definition and methods to deal with it. In this work we propose the r-TSALBP, a multiobjective model for assembly line balancing to search for the most robust line configurations when demand changes. The robust model definition considers a set of demand scenarios and presents temporal...
Research activities relating to data envelopment analysis (DEA) have grown at a fast rate recently. Exactly what activities have been carrying the research momentum forward is a question of particular interest to the research community. The purpose of this study is to find these research activities, or research fronts, in DEA. A research front refers to a coherent topic or issue addressed by a group...
The goal of Emergency Medical Service (EMS) systems is to provide rapid response to emergency calls in order to save lives. This paper proposes a relocation strategy to improve the performance of EMS systems. In practice, EMS systems often use a compliance table to relocate ambulances. A compliance table specifies ambulance base stations as a function of the state of the system. We consider a nested-compliance...
Many service systems display nonstationary demand: the number of customers fluctuates over time according to a stochastic—though to some extent predictable—pattern. To safeguard the performance of such systems, adequate personnel capacity planning (i.e., determining appropriate staffing levels and/or shift schedules) is often crucial. This paper provides a state-of-the-art literature review on staffing...
We develop a new model for the correct accounting of customs duties levied on a product. We examine inward and outward processing – that is, processed components can be either imported or produced in a foreign country – in the strategic planning of a global production network. This complex modeling problem is structured with path variables, and the duty drawbacks can be simultaneously and correctly...
The problem of effectively preprocessing a dataset containing a large number of performance metrics and an even larger number of records is crucial when utilizing an ANN. As such, this study proposes deploying DEA to preprocess the data to remove outliers and hence, preserve monotonicity as well as to reduce the size of the dataset used to train the ANN. The results of this novel data analytic approach,...
This paper examines limitations of the multi-stage DEA (data envelopment analysis) model in the literature. We focus on the DEA model with additive efficiency decomposition. We create taxonomy for the multi-stage DEA models and show when the decomposition weights can be non-increasing. When the decomposition weight for a stage is deemed reflective of the stage׳s relative importance, this property...
Japan, China, and South Korea depend heavily on imports for most of their energy. This study aims to investigate how energy security in these three East Asian countries will change in the future under climate mitigation policy scenarios. The study will help researchers and policy makers to better understand the relationship between climate and energy issues that will arise in relevant policy discussions...
It is well known that professional sports teams have made extensive use of analytics to improve their on-field performance. However, it is not as apparent that these same organizations use analytics to improve performance on the “business” side. The North American professional sports industry is unique in that the teams operate as legal monopolies/duopolies, with very few cities having more than one...
This paper aims to create an expert system that yields an optimal strategy for increasing network size on Facebook. Data were obtained from 5488 Facebook users by means of a custom-built Facebook application. We computed a total of 426 variables. Using these data we estimated a predictive model of network size which is subsequently used in a prescriptive model. The former is estimated with Random...
As a rapidly expanding market, carsharing presents a possible remedy for traffic congestion in urban centers. Especially free-floating carsharing, which allows customers to leave their car anywhere within the operator׳s business area, provides users with flexibility, and complements public transportation. We present a novel method that provides strategic and operational decision support to companies...
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