CONTEXT Quality health care should be within everyone's reach, especially in a developing country. While India has the largest private health sector in the world, only one-fifth of healthcare expenditure is publically financed; it is mostly an out-of-pocket expense. About 70% of Indians live in rural areas making about $3 per day, and a major portion of that goes towards food and shelter and, t...

This paper deals with a long distance routing problem. The aim is to improve the use of the resources in order to reduce the distance. In this way of transport are known three kinds of pure distribution strategies: many to many, the trips are full truckload or the time restrictions are very tight, so they are direct shipments; the second one is known as peddling, in this case, closed collecting...

In this paper we propose a multi-objective, mixed integer linear programming model to design and manage the supply chain for biofuels. This model captures the tradeoffs that exist between costs, environmental and social impacts of delivering biofuels. The in-bound supply chain for biofuel plants relies on a hub-and-spoke structure which optimizes transportation costs of biomass. The model propo...

This study formulates a two-objective model to determine the optimal liner routing, ship size, and sailing frequency for container carriers by minimizing shipping costs and inventory costs. First, shipping and inventory cost functions are formulated using an analytical method. Then, based on a trade-off between shipping costs and inventory costs, Pareto optimal solutions of the twoobjective mod...

Innate social behaviours emerge from neuronal circuits that interpret sensory information on the basis of an individual’s own genotype, sex and experience. The regulated aggregation behaviour of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, a simple animal with only 302 neurons, is an attractive system to analyse these circuits. Wild social strains of C. elegans aggregate in the presence of specific sen...

In this retrospective study, the implant course and outcome of patients with ventricular assist devices (VADs) transferred from outlying "spoke" hospitals and converted nonsurgically to a device designed for ambulation at tertiary care "hub" hospitals are evaluated. Factors affecting the crucial decision to transfer and to convert devices have not previously been characterized. Data from 50 pat...

We explore the potential for real-time inter-modal substitution to reduce flight traffic and reduce delays in situations where there is a temporary severe shortfall in airport capacity or airport closure. Two schemes are discussed in this paper. One is that airlines cancel short-haul flights and rebook passengers on surface transport modes in cases when the delay savings from reduced flight tra...