The problem of how to plan coal fuel blending and distribution from overseas coal sources to domestic power plants through some possible seaports by certain types of fleet in order to meet operational and environmental requirements is a complex task. The aspects under consideration includes each coal source contract’s supply, quality and price, each power plant’s demand, environmental requirem...

This paper introduces singular mix-valued logical networks and singular mix-valued logical control networks. Via semi-tensor product, a singular mix-valued logical network can be converted to an algebraic form. On this basis, the normalization problem and solvability are discussed. Then, fixed points and cycles of singular mix-valued logical networks are also studied. Furthermore, the optimal c...

This article summarizes the main findings of a study comparing three generic Medicaid nursing home payment systems: case-mix, facility-specific, and class-rate. The major comparative analyses examined patient-level case mix and quality, facility-level costs, Medicaid payment rates, and profitability. The study also analyzed case-mix payment systems in greater detail, emphasizing the earlier sys...

The Japanese medical care system, highly rated internationally, has recently experienced a crisis that has placed a burden on all of its citizens, providers, and payers, due to the expansion of medical expenditures in rapidly aging society with the stagnant economy. To address this, in April 2003, Japan implemented a case-mix payment system, instead of conventional fee-for-service payment, base...

South Carolina Medicaid implemented prospective payment by diagnosis-related group (DRG) for inpatient care. The rate of complications among newborns and deliveries doubled immediately. The case-mix index for newborns increased 66.6 percent, which increased the total Medicaid hospital expenditure 5.5 percent. Outlier payments increased total expenditure further. DRG distribution change among ne...

Significant delays and resulting environmental impacts are commonly observed during departure operations at major US and European airports. One approach for mitigating airport congestion and delays is to exercise tactical operations planning and control with an objective to improve the efficiency of surface and terminal area operations. As a subtask of planning airport surface operations, this ...

this study investigates the coordination of production scheduling and maintenance planning in theflow shop scheduling environment. the problem is considered in a bi-objective form, minimizing themakespan as the production scheduling criterion and minimizing the system unavailability as themaintenance planning criterion. the time interval between consecutive maintenance activities as well as the...