Assigning patients to nurses in neonatal intensive care

An intensive care nursery provides health care for critically ill newborn infants. During a typical shift, infants range from those needing only occasional care to those requiring constant attention. At the beginning of each shift, the head nurse groups the patients for assignment to staff nurses. Typically each nurse cares for one group of infants throughout the shift. The large variation in infant conditions along with several complicating side constraints makes it difficult to develop balanced nurse work loads. We develop a mathematical programming approach for achieving better workload balance. We first develop a detailed neonatal acuity system that quantifies the nursing workload of each patient. We then develop an integer linear program that assigns patients to nurses while balancing nurse workloads. Because this model is computationally intractable, we develop a heuristic that exploits the fact that most nurseries are divided into a number of physical zones. We use ten case studies taken from a major university hospital to benchmark the performance of this heuristic. We also perform a designed experiment using randomly generated problems that examines the effect of nursery parameters on heuristic performance.     

Fleet configuration subject to stochastic demand: an application in the distribution of liquefied petroleum gas

We study the problem of configuring a fleet, in which vehicles receive information on-line about the demand that they should fulfil while they are on the road. In each district it must be decided the number of vehicles and their capacity. The objective function is to minimise the operational cost subject to constraints for the minimum delivery capacity, the maximum vehicle size and the average waiting time for customers. The last constraint is modelled as a queuing system that is adjusted according to the simulation of the delivery process of a Chilean company that distributes liquefied petroleum gas in portable cylinders. We provide the analytical form of all the components of the model, so it can be solved using a standard non-linear programming package. We show that the fleet may increase its sales by 3% and reduce the waiting time of customers 10% by allowing a set of vehicles to share the buffer of orders rather than having vehicles to exclusively serve smaller sectors.     

Pt(110)表面自吸附原子能量和力的改进分析型嵌入原子法分析

采用改进分析型嵌入原子法计算了Pt(110)表面自吸附原子的能量和法向力.当Pt吸附原子位于Pt(110)表面第一层原子的二重对称洞位上0.11nm时最稳定.Pt吸附原子的最佳迁移路径是由一个二重对称洞位沿密排方向迁移到最近邻的另一个二重对称洞位.在吸附原子远离表面的过程中，将依次经过排斥、过渡和吸引等三个区域.在排斥区和过渡区，由于吸附原子与表面原子间强的相互作用势，吸附原子的能量和法向力的形貌图均为(110)面原子排列的复形，与对势理论和嵌入原子法得到的结果一致.在吸引区，由于多体相互作用及晶体中原子 关键词： 金属表面 自吸附 能量 力     

DESIGN OF A NOVEL 2-D UNIPLANAR CRLH-TL STRUCTURE

A novel uniplanar 2-D composite right/left-handed transmission line (CRLH-TL) structure is proposed based on a general transmission line theory and the way to increase the relative operating bandwidth in the left-handed (LH) region and lower the LH operating frequency is illustrated. In addition, a new method to extract parameters and calculate the Bloch impedance of the structure is presented. Numerical results of the dispersion as well as the extracted parameters are given, which are calculated based on full-wave simulation. The present 2-D uniplanar CRLH-TL structure is applicable to 2-D left-handed materials in lower and wider LH frequency range. Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 60371010) (No. 60471037) (No. 63531020)     

Mn位W掺杂对La0.3Ca0.7MnO3体系磁结构的影响

通过对La0.3Ca0.7Mn1-xWxO3(x=0.00,0.04,0.08,0.12,0.15)多晶样品M-T曲线、M-H曲线及ESR谱的测量,研究了Mn位W掺杂对电荷有序体系La0.3Ca0.7MnO3磁结构的影响.结果表明,当掺杂量为0.00≤x≤0.08时,体系存在电荷有序(CO)相,AFM/CO态共存于相变温度以下,电荷有序温度TCO随着W掺杂量的增加而增加;x=0.04时,样品在低温下为FM相与AFM/CO相共存,在CO相建立前、后均有FM从PM中分离出来;当x≥0.12时,CO态融化,在极低温度下存在顺磁-铁磁(PM-FM)相变.     

具有高机械强度的掺Er~(3 )∶TeO_2-Nb_2O_5玻璃的光谱性质研究

熔制了掺铒碲铌玻璃样品(100-X)TeO2-XNb2O5(X=5,10,15,20mol%),测试了其密度、折射率、转变温度、析晶温度、维氏机械强度、吸收光谱、荧光光谱、荧光寿命等参量。利用Judd-Ofelt和McCumber理论分别计算了铒离子强度参量Ωt(t=2,4,6)和受激发射截面σemi的大小,研究了掺铒碲铌玻璃样品光谱参量对Nb2O5成分的依赖性,并与典型的碲锌钠玻璃(75TeO2-20ZnO-5Na2O)在热学、机械强度、光谱性质和放大品行四个方面进行了比较.     

Nonlinear dynamics of a spinor Bose-Einstein condensate in a double-well potential

We examine the nonlinear dynamical behavior of a spinor Bose-Einstein condensate in a double-well potential. Considering a condensate with large number of atoms, such that it can be described using the mean field theory, we separate the spinor dynamics from the spatial dynamics under the single-mode approximation. We limit ourselves to certain initial conditions under which the spatial mode is frozen so that we can focus on the spinor dynamics only. Identifying collective spin variables of our system, we derive the corresponding nonlinear equations of motion for them. Employing standard stability analysis, we find and characterize fixed points of the system. For a wide range of physical parameters such as tunneling strength and non-linear interactions, as well as for various initial preparations of the system, we identify qualitatively different dynamical regimes possible in the system. In particular, complete and incomplete oscillations of spin variables between quantum wells are found. We also show that by bringing some fixed points close to each other in the phase space of the system, it is possible to induce amplitude modulation to those otherwise regular tunneling oscillations.     

Multiporous hollow polymer particles

Hollow particles with interconnected cavities have been prepared by a simple modified suspension polymerization of acrylate monomers in the incorporation of a phase inversion process and polymerizable emulsifier. The morphology of particles has been characterized by scanning electron micrographs (SEMs). Based on observations made using an optical microscope equipped with a digital camera and SEM images of particles obtained under different conditions, the formation mechanisms for multiporous hollow particles are discussed.     

Scheduling multi-stage parallel-processor services to minimize average response time

The problem of scheduling on a multi-stage parallel-processor architecture in computer centres is addressed with the objective of minimizing average completion time of a set of requests. The problem is modelled as a flexible flowshop problem for which few heuristics exist in the flowshop scheduling literature. A new three-phase heuristic is proposed in this paper. An extensive computational experiment has been conducted to compare the performance of the existing heuristics and the proposed heuristic. The results indicate that the proposed heuristic significantly outperforms the existing ones. More specifically, the overall average error of the best existing heuristic is about five times that of the proposed heuristic while the overall average CPU time of the proposed heuristic is about half of the best existing one. More importantly, as the number of requests increases, the CPU time of the proposed heuristic decreases considerably (compared to the best existing heuristic) while the ratio of the error (of the best existing to the proposed heuristic) of about five times remains almost the same.     

A Lagrangean heuristic algorithm for disassembly scheduling with capacity constraints

This paper considers the problem of determining the disassembly schedule (quantity and timing) of products in order to satisfy the demand of their parts or components over a finite planning horizon. The objective is to minimize the sum of set-up, disassembly operation, and inventory holding costs. As an extension of the uncapacitated versions of the problem, we consider the resource capacity restrictions over the planning horizon. An integer program is suggested to describe the problem mathematically, and to solve the problem, a heuristic is developed using a Lagrangean relaxation technique together with a method to find a good feasible solution while considering the trade-offs among different costs. The effectiveness of the algorithm is tested on a number of randomly generated problems and the test results show that the heuristic suggested in this paper can give near optimal solutions within a short amount of computation time.