scholarly journals Parallel Machine Production and Transportation Operations’ Scheduling with Tight Time Windows

Complexity ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Yang Jiang ◽  
Tong He ◽  
Jie Xiong ◽  
Xin Wu ◽  
Yao Chen

This study addresses a parallel machine production and transportation operations’ scheduling problem with a tight time window associated with the transfer and delivery process. The orders located at the parallel machines need to be delivered to customers by train. Each order must be processed within a limited completion time in order for the product to be matched with the optimal trip to its destination within the delivery period. A mathematical analysis method is used to reveal the impact of tight time windows on the scheduling of production and transportation operations. The order transfer redundancy time and order transfer waiting time are employed to reflect the impact scheduling of production on the transfer process. The order delivery redundancy time and order delivery waiting time are used to describe delivery operations. The goal is to maximize the coordination level of order transfer and delivery, which are reflected in the order transfer time and the order delivery time, respectively. Additionally, a simulated annealing algorithm using the column generation technique was developed to solve this problem. The results show that the use of the system coordination model in this method obviously improves the number of successful transfers and deliveries.

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilaria Izzo ◽  
Canio Carriero ◽  
Giulia Gardini ◽  
Benedetta Fumarola ◽  
Erika Chiari ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Brescia Province, northern Italy, was one of the worst epicenters of the COVID-19 pandemic. The division of infectious diseases of ASST (Azienda Socio Sanitaria Territoriale) Spedali Civili Hospital of Brescia had to face a great number of inpatients with severe COVID-19 infection and to ensure the continuum of care for almost 4000 outpatients with HIV infection actively followed by us. In a recent manuscript we described the impact of the pandemic on continuum of care in our HIV cohort expressed as number of missed visits, number of new HIV diagnosis, drop in ART (antiretroviral therapy) dispensation and number of hospitalized HIV patients due to SARS-CoV-2 infection. In this short communication, we completed the previous article with data of HIV plasmatic viremia of the same cohort before and during pandemic. Methods We considered all HIV-patients in stable ART for at least 6 months and with at least 1 available HIV viremia in the time window March 01–November 30, 2019, and another group of HIV patients with the same two requisites but in different time windows of the COVID-19 period (March 01–May 31, 2020, and June 01–November 30, 2020). For patients with positive viremia (PV) during COVID-19 period, we reported also the values of viral load (VL) just before and after PV. Results: the percentage of patients with PV during COVID-19 period was lower than the previous year (2.8% vs 7%). Only 1% of our outpatients surely suffered from pandemic in term of loss of previous viral suppression. Conclusions Our efforts to limit the impact of pandemic on our HIV outpatients were effective to ensure HIV continuum of care.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (8) ◽  
pp. e006359
Author(s):  
Zheng Bian ◽  
Xiaoxian Qu ◽  
Hao Ying ◽  
Xiaohua Liu

ObjectivePreterm birth is the leading cause of child morbidity and mortality globally. We aimed to determine the impact of the COVID-19 mitigation measures implemented in China on 23 January 2020 on the incidence of preterm birth in our institution.DesignLogistic regression analysis was used to investigate the association between the national COVID-19 mitigation measures implemented in China and the incidence of preterm birth.SettingShanghai First Maternity and Infant Hospital, Shanghai China.ParticipantsAll singleton deliveries abstracted from electronic medical record between 1 January 2014 to 31 December 2020.Main outcome measuresPreterm birth rate.ResultsData on 164 107 singleton deliveries were available. COVID-19 mitigation measures were consistently associated with significant reductions in preterm birth in the 2-month, 3-month, 4-month, 5-month time windows after implementation (+2 months, OR 0.80, 95% CI 0.69 to 0.94; +3 months, OR 0.83, 95% CI 0.73 to 0.94; +4 months, OR 0.82, 95% CI 0.73 to 0.92; +5 months, OR 0.84, 95% CI 0.76 to 0.93). These reductions in preterm birth were obvious across various degrees of prematurity, but were statistically significant only in moderate-to-late preterm birth (32 complete weeks to 36 weeks and 6 days) subgroup. The preterm birth difference disappeared gradually after various restrictions were removed (7th–12th month of 2020, OR 1.02, 95% CI 0.94 to 1.11). There was no difference in stillbirth rate across the study time window.ConclusionSubstantial decreases in preterm birth rates were observed following implementation of the national COVID-19 mitigation measures in China. Further study is warranted to explore the underlying mechanisms associated with this observation.


Author(s):  
Ha Thi Mai Phan

As the construction activity has been growing, the companies that supply fresh concrete expand their production scale to meet their customers’ needs. The more customers, the longer queue tank trucks have to wait to pick up the fresh concrete. The customers are construction companies that have different construction works at the same time while the transportation time is only at night. They have to schedule efficiently the fleet of fresh concrete tank trucks during the night (turning the tank trucks a few turns) with constraints on the time window for the transfer of fresh concrete from the concrete company to the construction site as well as constraints on the waiting time for loading fresh concrete in the company. The scheduling for the fleet of construction company’s tank trucks will be modeled to minimize total transportation costs (fixed, variable) with estimated waiting times and tank truck’s turns several times during the night. The model of logistics problem is NP hard; Therefore, two algorithms are proposed to find the nearly optimal solution: heuristics and simulated annealing algorithm. The results will be compared and analyzed.


2020 ◽  
pp. 089686082097693
Author(s):  
Alix Clarke ◽  
Pietro Ravani ◽  
Matthew J Oliver ◽  
Mohamed Mahsin ◽  
Ngan N Lam ◽  
...  

Background: Technique failure is an important outcome measure in research and quality improvement in peritoneal dialysis (PD) programs, but there is a lack of consistency in how it is reported. Methods: We used data collected about incident dialysis patients from 10 Canadian dialysis programs between 1 January 2004 and 31 December 2018. We identified four main steps that are required when calculating the risk of technique failure. We changed one variable at a time, and then all steps, simultaneously, to determine the impact on the observed risk of technique failure at 24 months. Results: A total of 1448 patients received PD. Selecting different cohorts of PD patients changed the observed risk of technique failure at 24 months by 2%. More than one-third of patients who switched to hemodialysis returned to PD—90% returned within 180 days. The use of different time windows of observation for a return to PD resulted in risks of technique failure that differed by 16%. The way in which exit events were handled during the time window impacted the risk of technique failure by 4% and choice of statistical method changed results by 4%. Overall, the observed risk of technique failure at 24 months differed by 20%, simply by applying different approaches to the same data set. Conclusions: The approach to reporting technique failure has an important impact on the observed results. We present a robust and transparent methodology to track technique failure over time and to compare performance between programs.


Author(s):  
Sameh M. Saad ◽  
Ramin Bahadori

In most classic vehicle routing problems, the main goal is to minimise the total travel time or distance while, the green vehicle routing problem, in addition to the stated objectives, also focuses on minimising fuel costs and greenhouse gas emissions, including carbon dioxide emissions. In this research, a new approach in Pollution Routing Problem (PRP) is proposed to minimise the CO2 emission by investigating vehicle weight fill level in length of each route. The PRP with a homogeneous fleet of vehicles, time windows, considering the possibility of split delivery and constraint of minimum shipment weight that must be on the vehicle in each route is investigated simultaneously. The mathematical model is developed and implemented using a simulated annealing algorithm which is programmed in MATLAB software. The generated results from all experiments demonstrated that the application of the proposed mathematical model led to the reduction in CO2 emission.


2009 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcin Woch ◽  
Piotr Łebkowski

This article presents a new simulated annealing algorithm that provides very high quality solutions to the vehicle routing problem. The aim of described algorithm is to solve the vehicle routing problem with time windows. The tests were carried out with use of some well known instances of the problem defined by M. Solomon. The empirical evidence indicates that simulated annealing can be successfully applied to bi-criterion optimization problems.


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