Neonatal mortality rates by gestational age and birth weight category are important indicators of maternal and child health and care quality. However, due to new laws on administrative simplification and privacy, these specific rates have not been calculated in Italy since 1999. The main aim of...

The last decade has seen paper-and-pencil (P&P) tests being replaced by computerized adaptive tests (CATs) within many testing programs. A CAT may yield several advantages relative to a conventional P&P test. A CAT can determine the questions or test items to administer, allowing each test form...

In this article, we consider the problem of finding the optimal inventory level for components in an assembly system where multiple products share common components in the presence of random demand. Previously, solution procedures that identify the optimal inventory levels for components in a...

An embedded network within a linear program is, roughly speaking, a subset of constraints that represent conservation of flow. We examine three broad classes of heuristic techniques---row-scanning deletion, column-scanning deletion, and row-scanning addition---for the extraction of large...

This paper examines issues in building decision support models for budgeting nursing workforce requirements in a hospital. We determine regular-time, overtime, and agency workforce levels for various skill classes in a budget cycle. We introduce a family of eight models ranging from a...

We pose the following problem: given m jobs, each of which requires a certain total amount of labour that must be performed within specified time periods, how should one schedule the jobs' execution to obtain a total workload that is as even as possible? A related question is: what is the...

Modelling planning problems that extend over many time periods as linear programs leads to a special structure called a "staircase" or "dynamic" linear program. In this special structure, the nonzero coefficients of the linear program appear in blocks along the "main diagonal" of the coefficient...

In constrast to "ordinary" sensitivity analysis in linear programming, the tolerance approach considers simultaneous and independent changes in the objective function coefficients and in the right-hand side terms. This approach yields a maximum tolerance percentage such that, as long as selected...

In the scheduling situation considered here, we are given a set of routes, each associated with a particular school. A single bus is assigned to each route, picking up the students and arriving at their school within a specified time window. The scheduling problem is to find the fewest buses...