The non-differentiability and implicit definition of boundary of production possibility set (PPS) in data envelopment analysis (DEA) are two important difficulties for obtaining directional characteristics, including different elasticity measures and marginal rates of substitution. Also, imposing weight restrictions in DEA models have some shortcomings and misunderstandings. In this paper we ut...

In medical education, we have tended to present problems as being singular, stable, and solvable. Problem solving has, therefore, drawn much of medical education researchers' attention. This focus has been important but it is limited in terms of preparing clinicians to deal with the complexity of the 21st century healthcare system in which they will provide team-based care for patients with com...

This paper presents the problem definition of the benchmark structural control problem for the seismically excited highway bridge. The benchmark problem is based on the newly constructed 91/5 highway over-crossing in Southern California. The goal of this effort is to develop a standardized model of a highway bridge using which competing control strategies, including devices, algorithms and sens...

Department of Civil Engineering, The City College of the City University of New York, T-121 Steinman Hall, Convent Avenue at 140th Street, New York, NY 10031, U.S.A. Earthquake Engineering Research and Test Center, Guangzhou University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005, U.S.A. Department of Mechanical Engineering a...

A p-hub center network design problem is definition of some nodes as hubs and allocation of non-hub nodes to them wherein the maximum travel times between any pair of nodes is minimized. The distinctive feature of this study is proposing a new mathematical formulation for modeling costs in a p-hub center problem. Here, instead of considering costs as a linear function of distance, for the first...

This study is devoted to the formulation of the network design problem of one-way streets and the application of simulated annealing (SA) algorithm to solve this problem for a large real network. It discusses some points of views on one-way street networks, the objective function used for design, the way in which design constraints may be considered, and the traffic problems concerning one-way ...

This paper describes an approach for automatically decomposing a problem into subproblems, automatically creating reusable subroutines to solve the subproblems, and automatically assembling the results produced by the subroutines in order to solve the problem. The approach uses genetic programming with the recently developed additional facility of automatic function definition. Genetic programm...