scholarly journals Multi-Objective Optimization of Home Healthcare with Working-Time Balancing and Care Continuity

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (22) ◽  
pp. 12431
Author(s):  
Amir M. Fathollahi-Fard ◽  
Abbas Ahmadi ◽  
Behrooz Karimi

The ageing population in most parts of the world becomes a grand challenge for healthcare decision-makers. The care of elderly persons and general hygienic care at patients’ homes are two main reasons to motivate an optimization problem, namely, home healthcare (HHC). A robust plan for caregivers to have sustainable HHC operations management is to consider working-time balancing of caregivers, care continuity and uncertainties, e.g., the uncertainty of patients’ availability in addition to service and travel times as well as the regulations of companies to meet the standards of high-quality home care services. Based on these motivations and challenges to this field, this study firstly established a multi-objective robust optimization of the HHC which is multi-depot, multi-period and multi-service. The demand of each patient in each period may be different due to promptness of services. Each caregiver plays one of the roles of nurses, doctors, physiotherapists and nutritionists. The types of services are directly related to these roles. The objectives were optimizing the total cost of logistic activities as well as the total unemployment time of caregivers and care continuity. As a complicated optimization problem, this study innovated efficient heuristics and an enhanced nature-inspired metaheuristic. Finally, an extensive comparison with regards to the criteria of the multi-objective algorithms’ assessment was conducted. Some sensitivity analyses were conducted to conclude some practical insights.

Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 174
Author(s):  
Wenqiang Zhu ◽  
Jiang Guo ◽  
Guo Zhao

Islands are the main platforms for exploration and utilization of marine resources. In this paper, an island hybrid renewable energy microgrid devoted to a stand-alone marine application is established. The specific microgrid is composed of wind turbines, tidal current turbines, and battery storage systems considering the climate resources and precious land resources. A multi-objective sizing optimization method is proposed comprehensively considering the economy, reliability and energy utilization indexes. Three optimization objectives are presented: minimizing the Loss of Power Supply Probability, the Cost of Energy and the Dump Energy Probability. An improved multi-objective grey wolf optimizer based on Halton sequence and social motivation strategy (HSMGWO) is proposed to solve the proposed sizing optimization problem. MATLAB software is utilized to program and simulate the optimization problem of the hybrid energy system. Optimization results confirm that the proposed method and improved algorithm are feasible to optimally size the system, and the energy management strategy effectively matches the requirements of system operation. The proposed HSMGWO shows better convergence and coverage than standard multi-objective grey wolf optimizer (MOGWO) and multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) in solving multi-objective sizing problems. Furthermore, the annual operation of the system is simulated, the power generation and economic benefits of each component are analyzed, as well as the sensitivity.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (8) ◽  
pp. 2775
Author(s):  
Tsubasa Takano ◽  
Takumi Nakane ◽  
Takuya Akashi ◽  
Chao Zhang

In this paper, we propose a method to detect Braille blocks from an egocentric viewpoint, which is a key part of many walking support devices for visually impaired people. Our main contribution is to cast this task as a multi-objective optimization problem and exploits both the geometric and the appearance features for detection. Specifically, two objective functions were designed under an evolutionary optimization framework with a line pair modeled as an individual (i.e., solution). Both of the objectives follow the basic characteristics of the Braille blocks, which aim to clarify the boundaries and estimate the likelihood of the Braille block surface. Our proposed method was assessed by an originally collected and annotated dataset under real scenarios. Both quantitative and qualitative experimental results show that the proposed method can detect Braille blocks under various environments. We also provide a comprehensive comparison of the detection performance with respect to different multi-objective optimization algorithms.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Hailin Liu ◽  
Fangqing Gu ◽  
Zixian Lin

Transfer learning methods exploit similarities between different datasets to improve the performance of the target task by transferring knowledge from source tasks to the target task. “What to transfer” is a main research issue in transfer learning. The existing transfer learning method generally needs to acquire the shared parameters by integrating human knowledge. However, in many real applications, an understanding of which parameters can be shared is unknown beforehand. Transfer learning model is essentially a special multi-objective optimization problem. Consequently, this paper proposes a novel auto-sharing parameter technique for transfer learning based on multi-objective optimization and solves the optimization problem by using a multi-swarm particle swarm optimizer. Each task objective is simultaneously optimized by a sub-swarm. The current best particle from the sub-swarm of the target task is used to guide the search of particles of the source tasks and vice versa. The target task and source task are jointly solved by sharing the information of the best particle, which works as an inductive bias. Experiments are carried out to evaluate the proposed algorithm on several synthetic data sets and two real-world data sets of a school data set and a landmine data set, which show that the proposed algorithm is effective.


2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 36
Author(s):  
Alejandro Estrada-Padilla ◽  
Daniela Lopez-Garcia ◽  
Claudia Gómez-Santillán ◽  
Héctor Joaquín Fraire-Huacuja ◽  
Laura Cruz-Reyes ◽  
...  

A common issue in the Multi-Objective Portfolio Optimization Problem (MOPOP) is the presence of uncertainty that affects individual decisions, e.g., variations on resources or benefits of projects. Fuzzy numbers are successful in dealing with imprecise numerical quantities, and they found numerous applications in optimization. However, so far, they have not been used to tackle uncertainty in MOPOP. Hence, this work proposes to tackle MOPOP’s uncertainty with a new optimization model based on fuzzy trapezoidal parameters. Additionally, it proposes three novel steady-state algorithms as the model’s solution process. One approach integrates the Fuzzy Adaptive Multi-objective Evolutionary (FAME) methodology; the other two apply the Non-Dominated Genetic Algorithm (NSGA-II) methodology. One steady-state algorithm uses the Spatial Spread Deviation as a density estimator to improve the Pareto fronts’ distribution. This research work’s final contribution is developing a new defuzzification mapping that allows measuring algorithms’ performance using widely known metrics. The results show a significant difference in performance favoring the proposed steady-state algorithm based on the FAME methodology.


Author(s):  
Amin Hosseini ◽  
Touraj Taghikhany ◽  
Milad Jahangiri

In the past few years, many studies have proved the efficiency of Simple Adaptive Control (SAC) in mitigating earthquakes’ damages to building structures. Nevertheless, the weighting matrices of this controller should be selected after a large number of sensitivity analyses. This step is time-consuming and it will not necessarily yield a controller with optimum performance. In the current study, an innovative method is introduced to tuning the SAC’s weighting matrices, which dispenses with excessive sensitivity analysis. In this regard, we try to define an optimization problem using intelligent evolutionary algorithm and utilized control indices in an objective function. The efficiency of the introduced method is investigated in 6-story building structure equipped with magnetorheological dampers under different seismic actions with and without uncertainty in the model of the proposed structure. The results indicate that the controller designed by the introduced method has a desirable performance under different conditions of uncertainty in the model. Furthermore, it improves the seismic performance of structure as compared to controllers designed through sensitivity analysis.


2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (8) ◽  
pp. 2323-2337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ricardo Giesen ◽  
Héctor Martínez ◽  
Antonio Mauttone ◽  
María E. Urquhart

Author(s):  
Ali Thamallah ◽  
Anis Sakly ◽  
Faouzi M’Sahli

This article focuses on the tracking and stabilizing issues of a class of discrete switched systems. These systems are characterized by unknown switching sequences, a non-minimum phase, and time-varying or dead modes. In particular, for those governed by an indeterminate switching signal, it is very complicated to synthesize a control law able to systematically approach general reference-tracking difficulties. Taking into account the difficulty to express the dynamic of this class of systems, the present paper presents a new Dynamic matrix control method based on the multi-objective optimization and the truncated impulse response model. The formulation of the optimization problem aims to approach the general step-tracking issues under persistent and indeterminate mode changes and to overcome the stability problem along with retaining as many desirable features of the standard dynamic matrix control (DMC) method as possible. In addition, the formulated optimization problem integrates estimator variables able to manipulate the optimization procedure in favor of the active mode with an appropriate adjustment. It also provides a progressive and smooth multi-objective control law even in the presence of problems whether in subsystems or switching sequences. Finally, simulation examples and comparison tests are conducted to illustrate the potentiality and effectiveness of the developed method.


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