Field Workforce Scheduling (FWS) is a very important and practical problem in the service industries. It concerns the scheduling of multi-skilled employees to geographically dispersed tasks. In FWS, employee efficiency is highly important, and thus they have to be managed in an effective way. Employee empowerment is a relatively new and flexible management concept. It promises to benefit both o...

Alkaline, sulfidic, 54 to 60 degrees C, 4 to 53 million-year-old meteoric water emanating from a borehole intersecting quartzite-hosted fractures >3.3 km beneath the surface supported a microbial community dominated by a bacterial species affiliated with Desulfotomaculum spp. and an archaeal species related to Methanobacterium spp. The geochemical homogeneity over the 650-m length of the boreho...

Soil temperature (tB) was determined down to 2 m below ground level at 8 locations in the city of Oberhausen, Ruhr area, Germany, between August 2010 and July 2011 to investigate the subsurface urban heat island (SUHI) and its impact on drinking water quality. The soil temperatures obtained in Oberhausen demonstrate typical location-dependent behaviour. At the depth of drinking water pipes (1 t...

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has a high number of foreign workers, especially those coming from endemic areas with intestinal parasites. The participating foreign workers (FWs) were from a variety of countries. Eleven species of intestinal parasites (nine helminthes and two protozoa) were identified, with an overall prevalence of 50 (31%), out of 160 FWs. The predominant parasite was Entamoeba h...

Impact of aging on nanoparticle toxicity in real matrices is scarcely investigated due to a lack of suitable methodologies. Herein, the toxicity of pristine and aged silver nanoparticles (Ag NPs) to a bioluminescent Pseudomonas putida bioreporter was measured in spiked crude and final wastewater samples (CWs and FWs, respectively) collected from four wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). Results...

Environmental pressure to reduce nutrient losses from agricultural fields has increased in recent years. To abate this nutrient loss to the environment, better management practices and new technologies need to be developed. Thus, research was conducted to evaluate if subsurface banding poultry litter (PL) would reduce nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) loss in surface water runoff using a four-row...

The control of inverters has degrees freedom that open the way to improve output harmonic spectrum. Numerous works dealing with this objective have been proposed in literature, particularly within definition switching angles. Among them, well-known PWM techniques such as Quarter Wave Symmetry (QWS), Half (HWS), and Full (FWS) are based on Optimal Pulse Patterns (OPP) computation using symmetrie...

it more susceptible to leaching (Albus and Knighton, 1998). Higher moisture contents will also raise microbial Groundwater and surface water are significant resources for rural activity including mineralization (Skopp et al., 1990). water supplies, and certain agricultural practices may have substantial effects on these resources. An 11-yr study was started in 1989 near The increase in minerali...

electrode arrays allows for the interpretation of the twodimensional distribution of electrical conductivity in the The analytic element method is used to investigate the spatial subsurface. The electrical conductivity distribution can sensitivity of different electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) arrays. By defining the sensitivity of an array to a subsurface location we then be related to t...