In 2008, the Ontario Long Term Care Association was awarded funding from HealthForceOntario to assist with its nursing recruitment strategy based on research it had initiated in 2007. The research goal was to understand the career motivations and perceptions of students enrolled in registered nursing (RN) and registered practical nursing (RPN) programs in Ontario to develop and test a message t...

the traveling salesman problem (tsp) is the problem of finding the shortest tour through all the nodes that a salesman has to visit. the tsp is probably the most famous and extensively studied problem in the field of combinatorial optimization. because this problem is an np-hard problem, practical large-scale instances cannot be solved by exact algorithms within acceptable computational times. ...

this paper proposes the exchange market algorithm (ema) to solve the combined economic and emission dispatch (ceed) problems in thermal power plants. the ema is a new, robust and efficient algorithm to exploit the global optimum point in optimization problems. existence of two seeking operators in ema provides a high ability in exploiting global optimum point. in order to show the capabilities ...

AbstrAct: Muti-objective optimization deals with the simultaneous optimization of two or more conflicting objective functions in real-life systems. This paper deals with the multi-objective optimization in service systems. The goal of service systems is to provide cost-efficient service to customers, while at the same time, reducing the customer waiting time for service. In general, a low cost ...

Power electronic circuit (PEC) design is a complicated optimization problem that calls for evolutionary computation (EC) algorithms. The existing EC algorithms for optimizing PEC have difficulty in practical applications because they demand users to carefully define very narrow search ranges for different circuit components. Aiming at this problem, this paper models PEC with uniform search rang...

In this paper, Enhanced Practical Swarm Optimization (EPSO) algorithm is proposed to be applied to pattern synthesis of linear arrays. Updating formulas of global best particle position and velocity are modified to improve the convergence accuracy of classical Practical Swarm Optimization. The developed EPSO is tested and compared with a standard benchmark to be validated as an efficient optimi...

Climate change as the greatest environmental challenge facing the world today. Power stations play a major role in greenhouse gas emissions. Nearly 21.3% of green house gases are emitted by power plants alone. The main sources of greenhouse gases are due to burning of fossil fuels and deforestation leading to higher carbon dioxide concentrations. Normally CO2 in the atmosphere is removed by mix...

Characteristically, social insects are extremely reliant on their use of pheromones to maintain their social activities as a colony unit. This paper describes an on-going project to investigate the possibility of using pheromone communication in a robot swarm. The particular example of pheromone communication considered here was inspired by the queen bee pheromone. This pheromone is only emitte...