Search results for "Operations Research"
showing 10 items of 1297 documents
Do elite endurance athletes report their training accurately?
2013
Purpose:The purpose of this study was to validate the accuracy of self-reported (SR) training duration and intensity distribution in elite endurance athletes.Methods:Twenty-four elite cross-country skiers (25 ± 4 y, 67.9 ± 9.88 kg, 75.9 ± 6.50 mL · min−1 · kg−1) SR all training sessions during an ~14-d altitude-training camp. Heart rate (HR) and some blood lactate measurements were collected during 466 training sessions. SR training was compared with recorded training duration from HR monitors, and SR intensity distribution was compared with expert analysis (EA) of all session data.Results:SR training was nearly perfectly correlated with recorded training duration (r = .99), but SR training…
Do editors have a silver bullet? an agent-based model of peer review
2014
This paper presents an agent-based model of peer review that looks at the effect of different editorial policies of referee selection. We tested four author/referee matching scenarios as follows: random selection of referees, selection of referees with a similar status to submission authors, selection of higher-skilled and lower skilled referees. We tested these scenarios against three types of referee behaviour, i.e., fair, unreliable and strategic and measured their implications for the quality and efficiency of the process. Results show that in case of randomness of referee judgment, any editorial policy is detrimental for peer review. If referees behave strategically, certain matching p…
A Full-Scale Agent-Based Model to Hypothetically Explore the Impact of Lockdown, Social Distancing, and Vaccination During the COVID-19 Pandemic in L…
2021
Background The COVID-19 outbreak, an event of global concern, has provided scientists the opportunity to use mathematical modeling to run simulations and test theories about the pandemic. Objective The aim of this study was to propose a full-scale individual-based model of the COVID-19 outbreak in Lombardy, Italy, to test various scenarios pertaining to the pandemic and achieve novel performance metrics. Methods The model was designed to simulate all 10 million inhabitants of Lombardy person by person via a simple agent-based approach using a commercial computer. In order to obtain performance data, a collision detection model was developed to enable cluster nodes in small cells that can b…
Pandemic Prevention and Personality Psychology: Gender Differences in Preventive Health Behaviors during COVID-19 and the Roles of Agreeableness and …
2022
One of the greatest public health crises in recent times, the COVID-19 pandemic, has come with a myriad of challenges in terms of health communication and public cooperation to prevent the spread of the disease. Understanding which are the key determinants that make certain individuals more cooperative is key in effectively tackling pandemics and similar future challenges. In the present study (N = 800), we investigated whether gender differences in compliance with preventive health behaviors (PHB) at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic could be established, and, if so, whether the personality traits of agreeableness and conscientiousness could help explain this presumed relationship. Consis…
Sustainable Farming Practices, Awareness, and Behavior in Small Farms in Brazil
2021
This paper investigates the relationship between the use of digital and non-digital sources of information on sustainable farming practices, institutional pressure and adoption of such practices by farmers in Brazilian semi-arid lands. The research uses a model based on the theory of reasoned action (TRA) and the institutional theory. Our results for a sample of 100 Brazilian farmers show that non-digital sources of information and ‘Coercive’ and ‘Normative’ pressures have a positive impact on farmers’ attitude towards and actual adoption of sustainable farming practices. However, digital sources of information such as TV and Radio do not play a significant role. In addition, pro-environmen…
Estimating economic severity of Air Traffic Flow Management regulations
2021
The development of trajectory-based operations and the rolling network operations plan in European air traffic management network implies a move towards more collaborative, strategic flight planning. This opens up the possibility for inclusion of additional information in the collaborative decision-making process. With that in mind, we define the indicator for the economic risk of network elements (e.g., sectors or airports) as the expected costs that the elements impose on airspace users due to Air Traffic Flow Management (ATFM) regulations. The definition of the indicator is based on the analysis of historical ATFM regulations data, that provides an indication of the risk of accruing dela…
Geometric interpretation of the optimality conditions in multifacility location and applications
1991
Geometrical optimality conditions are developed for the minisum multifacility location problem involving any norm. These conditions are then used to derive sufficient conditions for coincidence of facilities at optimality; an example is given to show that these coincidence conditions seem difficult to generalize.
GRASP with exterior path-relinking and restricted local search for the multidimensional two-way number partitioning problem
2017
In this work, we tackle multidimensional two-way number partitioning (MDTWNP) problem by combining GRASP with Exterior Path Relinking. In the last few years, the combination of GRASP with path relinking (PR) has emerged as a highly effective tool for finding high-quality solutions for several difficult problems in reasonable computational time. However, in most of the cases, this hybridisation is limited to the variant known as interior PR. Here, we couple GRASP with the "exterior form" of path relinking and perform extensive experimentation to evaluate this variant. In addition, we enhance our GRASP with PR method with a novel local search method specially designed for the MDTWNP problem. …
An Application of Analytic Network Process in the Planning Process: The Case of an Urban Transformation in Palermo (Italy)
2014
The primary objective of this study is to test the multicriteria analysis application in favor of a selection process among alternative transformations of an urban area in the city of Palermo. The choice is referred to as a strategyoriented one aiming to create “new urban centralities” able to redraw all urban structures that start to activate renewal processes within the existing city. The application of multicriteria analysis technique, such as the Analytic Network Process (ANP) - BOCR model, is due to the need to represent the complexity of the decision problem characterized by interrelations among several elements described by many indicators from different levels. The case study is als…
An environment based approach for the ant colony convergence
2020
Abstract Ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithms are a bio inspired solutions which have been very successful in combinatorial problem solving, also known as NP-hard problems, including transportation system optimization. As opposed to exact methods, which could give the best results of a tested problem, this meta-heuristics is based on the stochastic logic but not on theoretical mathematics demonstration (or only on certain well defined applications). According to this, the weak point of this meta-heuristics is his convergence, its termination condition. We can finds many different termination criteria in the scientific literature, yet most of them are costly in resources and unsuitable f…