many countries are turning their attention to the use of explicit financial incentives to drive desired improvements in healthcare performance. however, we have only a weak evidence-base to inform policy in this area. the research challenge is to generate robust evidence on what financial incentives work, under what circumstances, for whom and with what intended and unintended consequences.

In this paper, we present a replanning algorithm for a decision-theoretic hierarchical planner, and illustrate the experimental methodology we designed to investigate its performance. The methodology relies on an agentbased framework, in which plan failures emerge from the interplay of the agent and the environment. Given this framework, the replanning algorithm is compared with planning from s...

Monitoring network performance and status is a fundamental task for network operators as it directly impacts the quality of the offered services and hence user satisfaction. For this purpose a consolidated approach, which is largely adopted by network operators, is based on the so-called KPIs (key performance indicators). In this paper, we propose and discuss a set of KPIs to monitor network pe...

Urban system is a dynamic complicated system involved with many uncertainties, thus always leading to an undesired situation that the city doesn't develop as the previously made urban plans. Urban planning implementation evaluation, which is devoted to urban planning implementation supervision and management, is an important and indispensible part of efficient, healthy and sustainable urban dev...

in the last decades an increasing number of clubs, associations, and partnerships behind professional team sports have become business enterprises as well; as regards their income and number of employees, there are numerous companies managing sports clubs in the medium sized enterprise sector. by nature of being businesses that manage sports, successful performance is usually the number one str...

The case company of this research is a well-known enterprise in manufacturing precision locknuts in Taiwan. Due to the demand of enterprise application integration, the case company plan to implement enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. In order to realize the effectiveness of ERP introduction, this study applied balanced scorecard (BSC) approach to evaluate the critical performance of ER...

A new network has been recently proposed for the provision of fixed broadband services via high altitude platform stations (HAPS) in the 48/47 GHz band. One of the critical issues of this technology is spectrum sharing with the fixed satellite service. This paper examines the effect of Earth-to-stratosphere co-channel interference produced by ground stations of HAPS network to geostationary orb...

Advanced personalization of database applications is a big challenge, in particular for distributed mobile environments. We present several new results from a prototype of a route planning system. We demonstrate how to combine qualitative and quantitative preferences gained from situational aspects and from personal user preferences. For performance studies we analyze the runtime efficiency of ...