Green performance measure is vital for enterprises in making continuous improvements to maintain sustainable competitive advantages. Evaluation of green performance, however, is a challenging task due to the dependence complexity of the aspects, criteria, and the linguistic vagueness of some qualitative information and quantitative data together. To deal with this issue, this study proposes a n...

The private theme parks are gradually surpassing public-owned scenic areas after many years of development and have become a mainstream choice for domestic tourists. Previous studies show that visitors from different backgrounds differ in consumer behavior and satisfaction factors. An understanding of visitor satisfaction is therefore of extreme importance to operators of privately-owned theme ...

We present a general framework for carrying out perturbation analysis in Stochastic Hybrid Systems (SHS) of arbitrary structure. In particular, Infinitesimal Perturbation Analysis (IPA) is used to provide unbiased gradient estimates of performance metrics with respect to various controllable parameters. These can be combined with standard gradient-based algorithms for optimization purposes and ...

INTRODUCTION: Supply chains face various disruptions from human-made to natural disasters preventing proper flow of materials and products. This problem is more important in the healthcare supply chains, especially the blood supply chains, in which human lives are at risk. Making the supply chains resilient, recently addressed by managers and researchers, can be a good way to tackle them. This ...

We address the traffic light control problem for multiple intersections in tandem by viewing it as a stochastic hybrid system and developing a Stochastic Flow Model (SFM) for it. Using Infinitesimal Perturbation Analysis (IPA), we derive on-line gradient estimates of a cost metric with respect to the controllable green and red cycle lengths. The IPA estimators obtained require counting traffic ...

Early diagnosis of invasive pulmonary aspergillosis (IPA) remains difficult due to the variable performance of the tests used. We compared the performance characteristics of Aspergillus lateral flow device (LFD) in bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) vs. BAL-galactomannan (GM), for the diagnosis of IPA. 311 BAL specimens were prospectively collected from patients who underwent bronchoscopy from Januar...

This study proposes a novel approach to fuzzy importance-performance analysis (FIPA) to modify conventional importance-performance analysis (IPA) for determining critical attributes in e-learning system measurements. There is an abundance of literature pertaining to the e-learning framework, but there is a shortage of literature on how to implement properly the framework in uncertainty with var...

Galactomannan detection in bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) fluid samples (GM test) is currently considered the gold standard test for diagnosing invasive pulmonary aspergillosis (IPA). The limitations, however, are the various turnaround times and availability of testing. We compared the performance of GM testing with that of conventional culture, an Aspergillus lateral-flow-device (LFD) test, a b...

www.thelancet.com Vol 384 October 11, 2014 1345 as 1–2% chlorhexidine in isopropyl alcohol, but we agree with Maiwald and colleagues that adequate studies to support or reject this hypothesis have not yet been done. Chlorhexidine in an alcoholic solution, however, is clearly superior to povidone-iodine for prevention of vascular catheter-related bloodstream infec tion. Maiwald and colleagues ha...

A detailed process characterization of SML electron beam resist for high-aspect-ratio nanopatterning at high sensitivity is presented. SML contrast curves were generated for methyl isobutyl ketone (MIBK), MIBK/isopropyl alcohol (IPA) (1:3), IPA/water (7:3), n-amyl acetate, xylene, and xylene/methanol (3:1) developers. Using IPA/water developer, the sensitivity of SML was improved considerably a...