INTRODUCTION There is a high prevalence of polypharmacy and inappropriate medication use in Singapore nursing homes. This study primarily explored the benefits of pharmacist reviews in local nursing homes. The secondary aims were to review the potential cost savings gained from following the pharmacists' recommendations and to identify the possible risks associated with polypharmacy and inappro...

We study the dynamic assignment of flexible servers to stations in the presence of setup costs that are incurred when servers move between stations. We focus on tandem lines with two stations and two servers with the goal of maximizing the long-run average profit. We investigate how the optimal server assignment policy for such systems depends on the magnitude of the setup costs, as well as on ...

One of the earliest results in flow shop scheduling theory is an algorithm given by Johnson’s [1] for scheduling jobs on two or three machines to minimize the total elapsed time whenever the processing times of jobs are random. The present paper is an attempt to develop a heuristic algorithm for two stages specially structured flow shop scheduling in which the processing times of the jobs a...

We consider a periodic-review, serial inventory system, in which each stage replenishes inventory according to an echelon-stock (r, nQ, T ) policy – a standard echelon-stock (r, nQ) policy executed every T periods. Demands are independent, identically distributed in different periods and occur at the most downstream stage. Two types of fixed costs are considered: setup cost and replenishment co...

One of the most important tasks operations manager are confronted with is to determine production quantities over a medium-size planning horizon such that demand is met, scarce production facilities are not overloaded and that the sum of holding and setup costs is minimized. For the single machine case the well-known Capacitated Lot-Sizing Problem (CLSP) has been proposed to determine minimum c...

We generalize the concept of K-convexity to an n-dimensional Euclidean space. The resulting concept of K-convexity is useful in addressing production and inventory problems where there are individual product setup costs and/or joint setup costs. We derive some basic properties of K-convex functions. We use the concept to derive the optimal policy in a deterministic case of two products with a j...

This paper studies convergence properties of optimal values and actions for discounted and averagecost Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with weakly continuous transition probabilities and applies these properties to the stochastic periodic-review inventory control problem with backorders, positive setup costs, and convex holding/backordering costs. The following results are established for MDPs...

The cell formation (CF) is one of the most important steps in the design of a cellular manufacturing system (CMS), which it includes machines’ grouping in cells and part grouping as separate families, so that the costs are minimized. The various aspects of the problem should be considered in a CF. The machine reliability and the tool assigned to them are the most important problems which have t...

Many real-world applications require varying costs for different types of mis-classification errors. Such a cost-sensitive classification setup can be very different from the regular classification one, especially in the multiclass case. Thus, traditional meta-algorithms for regular multiclass classification, such as the popular one-versus-one approach, may not always work well under the cost-s...

extensive research has been devoted to resource constrained project scheduling problem. however, little attention has been paid to problems where a certain time penalty must be incurred if activity preemption is allowed. in this paper, we consider the project scheduling problem of minimizing the total cost subject to resource constraints, earliness-tardiness penalties and preemption penalties, ...