This paper proposes an opportunistic maintenance policy for the multi-unit series production system. This proposed maintenance policy is on the basis of the failure rate analysis, which is more realistic than age-based or time-based opportunistic replacement models. When a system halts for performing preventive maintenance or opportunistic maintenance, the alternative decision of replacement an...

Using the Diagnostic Cost Group (DCG) model developed from a national sample, we examine biased selection among one fee-for-service (FFS) plan, one preferred provider organization, and several health maintenance organizations (HMOs) in Massachusetts. The proportions of enrollees in low-risk groups are higher in the HMO plans and lower in the FFS plan. The average age in the FFS plan is 9 years ...

Research in the planning community has focused on improving plan generators to produce better, more efficient plans faster. However, the environments in which these plans are usually executed are highly dynamic and even the best plans cannot account for unforeseen circumstances. Additionally, the decision-making processes are still handled by human operators, rendering fully automated approache...

The costs of providing benefits to enrollees in private Medicare Advantage (MA) plans are slightly less, on average, than what traditional Medicare spends per beneficiary in the same county. However, MA plans that are able to keep their costs comparatively low are concen­trated in a fairly small number of U.S. counties. In the 25 counties where the cost differences between MA plans and traditio...

This work presents Drake, a dynamic executive for temporal plans with choice. Dynamic plan execution strategies allow an autonomous agent to react quickly to unfolding events, improving the robustness of the agent. Prior work developed methods for dynamically dispatching Simple Temporal Networks, and further research enriched the expressiveness of the plans executives could handle, including di...

While risk-sensitive (RS) approaches for designing plans of total productive maintenance are critical in manufacturing systems, there is little in the literature by way of theoretical modeling. Developing such plans often requires the solution of a discrete-time stochastic controloptimization problem. Renewal theory and Markov decision processes (MDPs) are commonly employed tools for solving th...

This paper presents an approach to representing and manipulating plans and other synthesised artifacts in the form of a set of constraints. The (Issues - Nodes - Orderings/Variables/Auxiliary) constraints model is used to characterise plans and processes. The more general (Issues - Nodes - Critical/Auxiliary) constraints model can be used for wider applications in design, con...

In this paper, we consider a production system that must achieve a set of different requests during a finite horizon period. Among the various requests proposed, the objective is to select those to be satisfied so as to maximize the net profit. A sporadic maintenance policy is studied to minimize the maintenance costs by the achievement of perfect preventive maintenance actions after the comple...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the relative impact of physician groups and health plans on quality of care measures. DESIGN Secondary data analysis of receipt of preventive care services included in the Health Plan Employer Data and Information Set (HEDIS) among 10 758 patients representing 21 health maintenance organizations and 22 large provider groups in the San Francisco and Los Angeles, Califo...