T his article addresses the management challenges inherent in bringing a replacement hospital facility online through a process that maintains the continuity of the organization’s business while maximizing the benefits of the new facility. Planning for the activation of a new facility incorporates the processes of identifying, defining, organizing, and facilitating all of the tasks that are req...

This paper describes MEXAR2, a software tool that is currently used to synthesize the operational commands for data downlink from the on-board memory of the MARS EXPRESS spacecraft to the ground stations. The system generates from a two steps effort. A first study, performed before the launch of MARS EXPRESS, has produced a formalization of the memory dumping problem and developed the MEXAR pro...

The Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) is developing a centre of gravity (COG) analysis tool, intended to support operational planning in the Australian Defence Force (ADF). This tool provides a visual representation of the COG causal structure and an impact and later effects-based analysis capability, which facilitates the determination of the critical vulnerabilitie...

Various operational control systems (OCS) are naturally modeled as Markov Decision Processes. OCS often enjoy access to predictions of future events that have substantial impact on their operations. For example, reliable forecasts of extreme weather conditions are widely available, and such events can affect typical request patterns for customer response management systems, the flight and servi...

Field work is of fundamental importance for information regarding so-called tropical diseases. It enables more precise establishment of the prevalence of endemic diseases and of its social and economic consequences, allows study of the many clinical variants of diseases, of the epidemiological factors which trigger and maintain a certain morbid condition in the field environment where it occurs...

In power system reliability assessment, the system security limits and adequacy indices depend on the set of contingencies analyzed. Consequently the final solution strategies for short term operational and long term investment planning studies also depend on the set of contingencies considered for planning. Generally, planning is done for the most critical contingency, with the assumption that...

This paper addresses the issue of path planning in a virtual environment (VE) for the control of an Internet-based robot manipulator. A hybrid method is proposed in which the dimension of the path-planning problem is reduced by separating the problem of planning the position of the gripper from that of planning the pose of the gripper. A global configuration-space technique is used for the form...