BACKGROUND The hospital standardized mortality ratio (HSMR) is developed to evaluate and improve hospital quality. Different methods can be used to standardize the hospital mortality ratio. Our aim was to assess the validity and applicability of directly and indirectly standardized hospital mortality ratios. METHODS Retrospective scenario analysis using routinely collected hospital data to co...

This paper presents a multi-objective optimization model for the design of a waste management system consisting of customers, transfer stations, landfills and collection vehicles. The developed model aims to simultaneously minimize the total costs, greenhouse gas emissions and the rates of energy consumption. To tackle the multiple objectives in the problem, we utilize an interactive fuzzy prog...

Artificial Intelligence algorithms can be divided into two groups according to the type of problems they solve. Knowledge-intensive domains contain explicit knowledge, whereas knowledge-poor domains contain implicit knowledge. Logical methods are more suitable for the first type. Neural networks and case-based reasoning (CBR) are more suitable for the second type. This project combines the infe...

The connection between care-provider type and patient outcomes is well established. Less well understood, however, is how to evaluate staff mix decision-making aimed at maximizing quality outcomes for care recipients, nursing staff and healthcare systems. From May through November 2008, Eastern Health, the largest regional integrated health authority in Newfoundland and Labrador, conducted a St...

Transportation of cars by sea is mainly performed by specialized vessels. These vessels are purpose built for transporting cars and trucks, but some also transport other rolling equipment (high and heavy) and non-containerized cargo (break bulk). In this paper we introduce a routing and scheduling problem for deployment of the fleet of roll-on roll-off (RoRo) vessels. This problem is based on a...

Problem speciications for classical planners based on a STRIPS-like representation typically consist of an initial situation and a partially deened goal state. Hierarchical planning approaches, e.g., Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) Planning, have not only richer representations for actions but also for the representation of planning problems. The latter are deened by giving an initial state and...