1,721,026 research outputs found
Computer simulation and swarm intelligence organization into an emergency department: a balancing approach across Ant Colony Optimization
No full textHealthcare system must be sensitive to the needs of patient, financially viable and cost-effective. Emergency Department (ED) crowding and rising healthcare costs are perceived as significant issues that are getting worse. In order to respond to the growing number of incoming patients, hospital departments, including emergency rooms, have to re-evaluate their current facilities, procedures and practises from an operations management perspective. In a typical ED, it is important to minimise not only the patient's waiting time but also the staff idle time while maintaining the high utilisation rate of medical facilities. Computer simulation is recognised as a powerful tool, for medical management, to enquire productivity trying to increase service level to patients. Based on the analogy of a Job Shop Scheduling Problem (JSSP) and known patient scheduling methodologies, a metaheuristic Swarm Intelligence (SI) approach, focused on Ant System (AS) behaviour, was used in the balancing of an ED. The Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) algorithm was implemented with the proposal to optimise patient scheduling under defined precedence, zoning and capacity constraints while balancing the workload between and within resource types. The ED of Cork University Hospital (CUH), Ireland, is the case in issue
The Balancing Problem in an Emergency Room based on Ant Colony Optimization algorithm
No full textMarket place requirements are putting increasing pressures on organisations to be more competitive. The requirement for performance improvement has pushed engineers and managers towards the careful study of critical parameters and towards the “re-engineering” approach. A key problem for engineers engaged in the development of powerful analytical tools is to explain their use in concrete terms to management. This problem is worsened where the value added is difficult to measure due to the nature of the process. The Health Care system is a case in point. Emergency Department crowding and rising health-care costs are perceived as significant issues that are getting worse. In order to respond to the growing number of incoming patients, hospital departments, including emergency rooms, have to re-evaluate their current facilities, procedures and practises from an operations management perspective. In a typical Emergency Department it is important to minimise (under fixed constraints) patient waiting time; but also staff idle time while maintaining the high utilization rate of medical facilities. Traditionally, these capacity problems have been solved, mainly, by increasing the number of available resources.
This paper presents some observations arising from the development of a case study in the public health care system. In particular, we developed and tested a simulation model, but also a process scheduling model of the Emergency Department (ED) of Cork University Hospital (CUH) - Ireland. Based on the analogy of a job shop scheduling problem and known patient scheduling methodologies, we used an Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm for the balancing of the process. The algorithm is based on Swarm Intelligent (SI) meta-heuristic techniques. The problem is multi-objective in its general formulation. The proposal of the present work is to optimise patient scheduling under defined precedence, zoning and capacity constraints. In addition to this goal, the approach will be to attempt to balance the workload between and within resource types (i.e., work-centres or medical staff: doctors, nurses, administrators etc...). The proposed model will be integrated into the simulation model, resulting in minimising the number of resources and balancing the workload within each resource
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Computer Simulation in Health Care Service: The Emergency Department of CUH
No full textIn the health care service is important to minimize staff idle time and patient waiting time maintaining a high utilization rate of medical facilities. Some hospitals have insufficient resources. Many hospitals have inefficient ways to use them. In order to respond to the growing number of incoming patients, hospital departments, including emergency rooms, have to re-evaluate their current facilities, procedures and practises from an operations management perspective. Computer simulation is recognized as a powerful tool, for medical management, to improve productivity while increasing service level to patients.
This paper presents some observations arising from the development of a case study in the public health care system. An optimal layout design and process configuration in the Emergency Department (ED) of the Cork University Hospital (CUH) – Ireland was developed and tested. Through a discrete event simulation model of the ED, bottlenecks were analysed and a new system configuration was proposed. An optimising procedure based on Simulated Annealing (SA) methodology, group technology approach and axiomatic design procedures was employed into layout analysis. The performance of the implemented model was evaluated in terms of mean patient’s waiting time, resource (static and staff) utilization, service level to patients and managerial costs
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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