BACKGROUND Investment by manufacturers in research and development of vaccines is relatively low compared with that of pharmaceuticals. If current evaluation technologies favour drugs over vaccines, then the vaccines market becomes relatively less attractive to manufacturers. METHODS We developed a mathematical model simulating the decision-making process of regulators and payers, in order to...

Managing the biodiversity extinction crisis requires wise decision-making processes able to account for the limited resources available. In most decision problems in conservation biology, several conflicting objectives have to be taken into account. Most methods used in conservation either provide suboptimal solutions or use strong assumptions about the decision-maker's preferences. Our paper r...

Walking is an essential task important to recovery after stroke. However, there is a limited understanding regarding the characteristics of walking in in-patients with stroke. The objectives of this thesis were to: 1) develop an instrument capable of acquiring temporal characteristics of everyday walking; 2) investigate the quantity and control of everyday walking; and 3) profile the task-speci...

The increased competition in the domestic and international market has posed excessive pressure to the manufacturing organizations to successfully implement the ISO 9001 quality standards. The implementation process becomes more challenging when it is surrounded by numerous barriers. Though the presence of barriers makes it more difficult but certain factors (hereby known as enablers) makes it ...

Outsourcing is a good strategy for firms that need to reduce operating costs and improve competitiveness, but it remains important for firms to scientifically select the appropriate outsourcing providers. Some efforts have been made regarding outsourcing problems, but these efforts incorrectly assumed that the criteria in the decision process are independent, which is not true in the real world...

In March 1998 the Office of Bioethics Education and Research at Dalhousie University hosted a multidisciplinary workshop, “Assent and Dissent in Research Involving Children.” The overall objectives for the meeting were: first, to promote and protect the health and well-being of children by ensuring that potentially beneficial biomedical and health research involving children was not inappropria...

Decision-making typically needs the mechanisms to compromise among opposing norms. Once multiple objectives square measure is concerned of machine learning, a vital step is to check the weights of individual objectives to the system-level performance. Determinant, the weights of multi-objectives is associate in analysis method, associated it's been typically treated as a drawback. However, our ...

Risk assessment describes the impact of a particular hazard as a function of dose and exposure. It forms the foundation of risk management and contributes to the overall decision-making process, but is not its endpoint. This paper outlines a risk analysis framework to underpin decision-making in the area of allergen cross-contact. Specifically, it identifies challenges relevant to each componen...

aggregation operators (aos) have been studied by many schol- ars. as many aos are proposed, there is still lacking approach to classify the categories of ao, and to select the appropriate ao within the ao candidates. in this research, each ao can be regarded as a cognitive style or individual dierence. a cognitive style and aggregation operator (csao) model is pro- posed to analyze the mapping ...

BACKGROUND Role of information source, perceived benefits and risks, and destination image has significantly been examined in travel and tourism literature; however, in medical tourism it is yet to be examined thoroughly. The concept discussed in this article is drawn form well established models in tourism literature. METHODS The purpose of this research was to identify the source of informa...