Efficient and on-time maintenance plays a crucial role in reducing cost and increasing the market share of an industrial unit. Preventive maintenance is a broad term that encompasses a set of activities aimed at improving the overall reliability and availability of a system before machinery breakdown. The previous studies have addressed the scheduling of preventive maintenance. These studies ha...

Production scheduling deals with scheduling production jobs on a machine (single or multiple) in order to optimise a specific objective such as total weighted completion times or total weighted tardiness. The assumption that machines are always available for processing jobs is generally used in the production scheduling literature. In reality, machines often are unavailable due to preventive ma...

An oral infectious disease, dental caries, is caused by the cariogenic streptococci Streptococcus mutans. The expected preventive efficiency for prophylactics against dental caries is not yet completely observed. Nisin, a bacteriocin, has been demonstrated to be microbicidal against S. mutans, and liposome-encapsulated nisin improves preventive features that may be exploited for human oral heal...

Berries are gaining increasing importance lately for their chemopreventive and therapeutic potential against several cancers. In earlier studies, a blueberry-supplemented diet has shown protection against 17β-estradiol (E2)-mediated mammary tumorigenesis. This study tested both preventive and therapeutic activities of diet supplemented with whole blueberry powder (50:50 blend of Tifblue and Rub...

Ceramide as a second messenger is a key regulator in apoptosis and cytotoxicity. Ceramide-metabolizing enzymes are ideal target in cancer chemo-preventive studies. Neutral sphingomyelinase (NSMase), acid ceramidase (ACDase) and glucosyl ceramide synthase (GCS) are the main enzymes in ceramide metabolism. Silymarin flavonolignans are potent apoptosis inducers and silibinin is the most active com...

This paper presents a dynamic grouping maintenance strategy for multi-component systems with positive economic dependence, which implies that combining maintenance activities is cheaper than performing maintenance on components separately. Preventive maintenance durations and occurrences of maintenance activities within the scheduling horizon are considered. Moreover, in presence of opportuniti...

in order to perform preventive maintenance (pm), two approaches have evolved in the literature. the traditional approach is based on the use of statistical and reliability analysis of equipment failure. under statistical-reliability (s-r)-based pm, the objective of achieving the minimum total cost is pursued by establishing fixed pm intervals, which are statistically optimal, at which to replac...

this paper considers the problem of scheduling hybrid flowshops with machine availability constraints (mac) to minimize makespan. the paper deals with a specific case of mac caused by preventive maintenance (pm) operations. contrary to previous papers considering fixed or/and conservative policies, we explore a case in which pm activities might be postponed or expedited while necessary. regardi...

OBJECTIVES Despite the growing number of AIDS cases in women reported, community-based interventions, which are essential in this context, are scarce and rarely evaluated. The aim of this study was to carry out a community-based research intervention, to develop and evaluate a set of STD/ AIDS prevention actions targeting the vulnerability of low income women population. METHODS The study was...

BACKGROUND The objective of this study was to determine whether major depressive episodes (MDE) contribute to a lower rate of participation in three prevention activities: blood pressure checks, mammograms and Pap tests. METHODS The data source for this study was the Canadian National Population Health Survey (NPHS), a longitudinal study that started in 1994 and has subsequently re-interviewe...