Workload on nursing wards depends highly on patient arrivals and patient lengths of stay, which are both inherently variable. Predicting this workload and staffing nurses accordingly is essential for guaranteeing quality of care in a cost effective manner. This paper introduces a stochastic method that uses hourly census predictions to derive efficient nurse staffing policies. The generic analy...

The Geostationary Ocean Color imager (GOCI) is the first geostationary ocean color satellite sensor that collects hourly images eight times per day during daylight. This high frequency image acquisition makes it possible to study more detailed dynamics of red tide blooms, sediment plumes, and colored dissolved organic matter plumes, and can aid in the prediction of biophysical phenomena. We app...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Few studies have examined the effect of hourly changes in air pollution on cardiovascular disease morbidity. We evaluated the associations between hourly changes in air pollution and the risks of several types of cardiovascular disease. METHODS We used a time-stratified case-crossover design. Study participants were 10,949 residents of the city of Okayama, Japan, aged≥6...

In this paper, an agent-based structure of the electricity retail market is presented based on which day-ahead (DA) energy procurement for customers is modeled. Here, we focus on operation of only one Retail Energy Provider (REP) agent who purchases energy from DA pool-based wholesale market and offers DA real time tariffs to a group of its customers. As a model of customer response to the offe...

We obtain hourly values of tail densities and of power law indices,  , of suprathermal (speeds above 2.48 times the solar wind speed) protons from power law fits to hourly velocity distribution functions in the solar-wind-frame. ACE/SWICS and ULEIS data, which often include very low counting statistics, are used to derive hourly proton phase space densities. We find that during part of the rec...

BACKGROUND Preterm birth is a major perinatal health problem, but factors leading to it are still not completely understood. OBJECTIVES Our goal was to identify the relation between acute increase in ambient air pollution in a few hours before onset of labor and the risk of preterm birth. METHODS We collected registered birth outcome data and hourly ambient air pollution measurements during...

This paper aims to propose a two-step approach for day-ahead hourly scheduling in a distribution system operation, which contains two operation costs, the operation cost at substation level and feeder level. In the first step, the objective is to minimize the electric power purchase from the day-ahead market with the stochastic optimization. The historical data of dayahead hourly electric power...

In this paper we present, demonstrate and validate a method for predicting city-wide electricity gains from photovoltaic panels based on detailed 3D urban massing models combined with Daysim-based hourly irradiation simulations, typical meteorological year climactic data and hourly calculated rooftop temperatures. The resulting data can be combined with online mapping technologies and search en...

Boundary layer turbulence has a profound influence on the distribution of tracers with sources or sinks at the surface. The 40-year ERA-40 meteorological data set of the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts contains archived vertical diffusion coefficients. We evaluated the use of these archived diffusion coefficients versus off-line diagnosed coefficients based on other meteorolo...