Increasing concerns over environmental degradation have amplified the role of environmental economics and the valuation of non-pecuniary environmental resources as tools of analysis to facilitate the design of policies. To date, however, environmental valuation methods have continued to be unreliable, misleading and contentious as a guide to resource allocations and damage compensations. Damage...

This paper is concerned with the compact representation of execution sequences in terms of efficient looping constructs. Here, by a looping construct we mean a compact way of specifying a finite repetition of a set of execution primitives (“instructions”). Such compaction, which can be viewed as a form of hierarchical run-length encoding, has application in many embedded software contexts, incl...

Jet lag arises from a misalignment of circadian biological timing with the timing of human activity, and is caused by rapid transmeridian travel. Jet lag's symptoms, such as depressed cognitive alertness, also arise from work and social schedules misaligned with the timing of the circadian clock. Using experimentally validated mathematical models, we develop a new methodology to find mathematic...

This paper proposes a decomposition-based heuristic approach to minimizing the makespan of job shops. In general, decomposition methods first divide the whole problem into several sub-problems, solve them and then combine sub-schedules to obtain a good feasible schedule. Although it may be reasonable to minimize the makespan of each sub-problem, its optimality will be lost when combining sub-sc...

We compared the effects of extinction (EXT) and fixed-time (FT) schedules as treatment for severe problem behavior displayed by 3 individuals with developmental disabilities. First, functional analyses identified the reinforcers maintaining aberrant behavior for all 3 individuals. Next, EXT and FT schedules were compared using a multielement design. During EXT, the reinforcer maintaining proble...

FlowOpt is demonstration software showing how advanced optimization technology can be put at the fingertips of practitioners, who are not experienced in optimization. FlowOpt is a unique combination of optimization technology based on constraint satisfaction techniques with knowledge engineering aspects of extracting formal problem models and with interactive visualization that gives users full...

This paper explores the inherent delays of airline schedules resulting from limited buffer times and stochastic disruptions in airline operations. The reliability of airline schedules is discussed and a set of measuring indices is developed to evaluate schedule reliability. It is found that significant gaps exist between the real operating delays, the inherent delays (from simulation) and the z...

The mathematical theory of linear systems has been used successfully to describe responding on variable-interval (VI) schedules. In the simplest extension of the theory to the variable-ratio (VR) case, VR schedules are treated as if they were VI schedules with linear feedback loops. The assumption entailed by this approach, namely, that VR and VI-plus-linear-feedback schedules are equivalent, w...

Test scheduling is a major problem in system-on-a-chip (SOC) test automation. We present an integrated framework that addresses several important test scheduling problems. We first present efficient techniques to determine optimal SOC test schedules with precedence constraints, i.e., schedules that preserve desirable orderings among tests. We then present a new algorithm that uses preemption to...

abstract background: while critical care nurses are vulnerable to burnout because of the complex nature of patients’ health problems, working in critical care areas has become even more complicated by shift working schedules. this study aimed to determine the relationship between fixed and rotating shifts and burnout in a sample of critical care nurses working in critical care areas. materials ...