A challenging problem in real world logistics applications consists in planning service territories for customer deliveries, in contexts where customers must be clustered into groups that satisfy various conditions such as balance and connectivity. In this paper we propose new algorithms for producing such clusters based upon special procedures for exploiting Thiessen polygons. Our methods are ...

It is amazing how time flies; 2007 which ends in 2 weeks has been a very eventful and busy year for the cluster. The year witnessed many major epidemic outbreaks and natural disasters which include the meningitis outbreak in west Nile region, cholera in Kitgum district (spill over from 2006), Marburg in Kamwenge, floods in Teso, Karamoja and northern Uganda, Hepatitis E in Kitgum and recently E...

Computer-based clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) are often implemented at a cluster level, but standard statistical methods for sample estimation and analysis may not be appropriate for such studies. This review aims to determine whether the design and analysis methods of cluster-based studies were adequately addressed in reports of CDSS studies. We retrieved 61 reports of the CDSS cont...

AIMS Studies have shown that alcoholics with a cluster-B personality disorder (cluster-B PD) are characterized by high levels of impulsivity. However, impulsivity has mainly been studied as a broad concept without its different aspects being considered. The present study compared abstinent alcoholic inpatients without any personality disorder (PD) and abstinent alcoholics with cluster-B PD on d...

Integrated solutions for product delivery planning and scheduling in distribution centres are proposed and built on a cluster analysis and simulation optimisation methodology. A cluster analysis of product demand data of stores is used to identify typical dynamic demand patterns and product delivery tactical plans. Further, simulation optimisation techniques are applied to find optimal paramete...

In today's 300mm wafer fabrication facilities, large parts of the lot processing are performed in cluster tools. Cluster tools are machines where a number of process chambers are attached to a main frame containing a transport robot. In contrast to traditional single process tools it is possible to load cluster tools with more than one lot, even with lots from different products. As a consequen...

The problem of obtaining a detailed understanding of the behavior of a cluster (or a collection) of rainwater tanks is complex and can only be solved by simulation. If the collection of houses is very large, a tractable solution can only be obtained by stochastic simulation in which the parameters defining the houses and tanks are sampled from probability distributions. An important output from...

Despite the reported effectiveness of analytical algorithms in facility layout planning, a detailed literature survey suggests a lack of new analytical methods in recent years. This paper focuses on open space facilities layout planning that involves modules with constant aspect ratios. We propose a construction-cum-improvement algorithm involving a novel combination of a boundary search-based ...