Research suggests that inexperienced individuals cannot accurately implement stimulus preference assessments given written instructions alone. Training that includes written instructions supplemented with feedback from a professional with expertise in conducting preference assessments has proven effective; unfortunately, expert-facilitated direct training may not be widely available. In the cur...

BACKGROUND Health care is changing with a new emphasis on patient-centeredness. Fundamental to this transformation is the increasing recognition of patients' role in health care delivery and design. Medical appointment scheduling, as the starting point of most non-urgent health care services, is undergoing major developments to support active involvement of patients. By using the Internet as a ...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: In multicase pediatric ear, nose, and throat operating rooms (ORs), brief delays in early case start times often produce a cascading effect of lengthy delays by the end of the day and can often lead to patient, family, and staff dissatisfaction and increased labor costs due to unplanned overtime. We sought to improve actual end of day relative to scheduled end of day f...

When technicians are deployed in field service, they must be allocated to the correct assignment and their routes should also be optimised as a part of that process. Data from a practical case of British Telecom has been used widely in the literature to test many different solution methods. This work discusses the modification of particle swarm optimization (PSO) for this problem and compares t...

Good resource scheduling plays a pivotal role in successful software development projects. However, effective resource scheduling is complicated by such disruptions as requirements changes, urgent bug fixing, incorrect or unexpected process execution, and staff turnover. Such disruptions demand immediate attention, but can also impact the stability of other ongoing projects. Dynamic resource re...

Call center scheduling aims to set-up the workforce so as to meet target service levels. The service level depends on the mean rate of arrival calls, which fluctuates during the day and from day to day. The staff scheduling must adjust the workforce period per period during the day, but the flexibility in so doing is limited by the workforce organization by shifts. The challenge is to balance s...

This paper addresses an important question of how to achieve an appropriate and nearly uniform work-load for an under-utilized staff in a waiting line situation by scheduling an appropriate amount of supplementary work during the idle time. We present an M/G/1 queue with a special server’s vacation policy to model this situation. In this system, after serving all arriving customers, the server...

In this paper, a crew-scheduling problem has been formulated considering the daily assignment of a set of crew staff to their round-trips for all the public transports (e.g. train, bus or air bus) that will minimize the waiting times and total service times (including waiting times) of all crews separately. In this approach, the waiting times as well as the service times of crews have been take...

Human resource is a key factor for IT new product development. Considering multi-skilled employees in IT Project Portfolio Scheduling, a mixed integer nonlinear programming model with three optimization objectives is proposed from the view of project or product managers. The three objectives are to maximize the increments of skill efficiency values for all multi-skilled employees, to minimize R...

Operating room scheduling is an important operational problem in most hospitals. In this paper, a novel mixed integer programming MIP model is presented for minimizing Cmax and operating room idle times in hospitals. Using this model, we can determine the allocation of resources including operating rooms, surgeons, and assistant surgeons to surgeries, moreover the sequence of surgeries within o...