Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product.

Polyphasic taxonomy, a consensus approach to bacterial systematics.

Brucellosis remains a major zoonosis worldwide Although many countries have eradicated Brucella abortus from cattle, in some areas Brucella melitensis has emerged as a cause of infection in this species as well as in sheep and goats Despite vaccination campaigns with the Rev 1 strain, B melitensis remains the principal cause of human brucellosis Brucella suis is also emerging as an agent of infection in cattle, thus extending its opportunities to infect humans The recent isolation of distinctive strains of Brucella from marine mammals has extended its ecologic range Molecular genetic studies have demonstrated phylogenetic affiliation to Agrobacterium, Phyllobacterium, Ochrobactrum, and Rhizobium Polymerase chain reaction and gene probe development may provide more effective typing methods Pathogenicity is related to production of lipopolysaccharides containing a poly N-formyl perosamine O chain, CuZn superoxide dismutase, erythrlose phosphate dehydrogenase, stress-induced proteins related to intracellular survival, and adenine and guanine monophosphate inhibitors of phagocyte functions Protective immunity is conferred by antibody to lipopolysaccharide and T-cell-mediated macrophage activation triggered by protein antigens Diagnosis still centers on isolation of the organism and serologic test results, especially enzyme immunoassay, which is replacing other methods Polymerase chain reaction is also under evaluation Therapy is based on tetracyclines with or without rifampicin, aminoglycosides, or quinolones No satisfactory vaccines against human brucellosis are available, although attenuated purE mutants appear promising

/pdf/brucellosis-an-overview-14k0fkto7f.pdf

Brucellosis: an overview.

Project scheduling under uncertainty: survey and research potentials

http://web.nchu.edu.tw/pweb/users/arborfish/lesson/8682.pdf

A survey of variants and extensions of the resource-constrained project scheduling problem

Personnel costs typically are the second largest costs for airline operations after fuel costs. Since efficient crew employment can drastically reduce operational costs of airline companies, the crew scheduling problem in the airline industry has been extensively investigated in the operations research literature. This problem typically consists of assigning duties to crew members securing the safety of all flights minimizing the corresponding overall cost for personnel. Due to the typical size and complexity of the crew rostering problem, airline companies want to adopt scheduling policies that roster crew members according to fixed days on and days off patterns. However, as the distribution of work duties over the planning horizon is typically highly variable in airline operations, the scheduling according to these fixed work patterns is seriously hindered. In this chapter, we give an overview of different measures that help to schedule airline crew under a variable workload using fixed days on and days off patterns.

Days on and days off scheduling of pilots under a variable workload

The time/cost trade-off problem is a well-known project scheduling problem that has been extensively studied. In recent years, many researchers have begun to focus on project scheduling problems under uncertainty to cope with uncertain factors, such as resource idleness, high inventory, and missing deadlines. To reduce the disturbance from uncertain factors, the aim of robust scheduling is to generate schedules with time buffers or resource buffers, which are capped by project makespan and project cost. This paper addresses a time-cost-robustness trade-off project scheduling problem with multiple activity execution modes under uncertainty. A multiobjective optimization model with three objectives (makespan minimization, cost minimization, and robustness maximization) is constructed and three propositions are proposed. An epsilon-constraint method-based genetic algorithm along with three improvement measures is designed to solve this NP-hard problem and to develop Pareto schedule sets, and a large-scale computational experiment on a randomly generated dataset is performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and the improvement measures. The final sensitivity analysis of three key parameters shows their distinctive influences on the three objectives, according to which several suggestions are given to project managers on the effective measures to improve the three objectives.

Multimode time-cost-robustness trade-off project scheduling problem under uncertainty

The Data-Driven Project Manager: A Statistical Battle Against Project Obstacles

Recently, an electromagnetism (EM) heuristic has been introduced by Birbil and Fang (2003) to solve unconstrained optimization problems. In this paper, we extend the EM methodology to combinatorial optimization problems and illustrate its effectiveness on the well-known resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP). We present computational experiments on a standard benchmark dataset, compare the results of the different modifications on the original EM framework with current state-of-the-art heuristics, and show that the procedure is capable of producing consistently good results for challenging instances of the problem under study. We also give directions for future research in order to further explore the potential of this new technique.

The electromagnetism meta-heuristic applied to the resource-constrained project scheduling problem

https://lirias.kuleuven.be/bitstream/123456789/461835/1/OR_0028.pdf

Mario Vanhoucke

Papers

Days on and days off scheduling of pilots under a variable workload

Multimode time-cost-robustness trade-off project scheduling problem under uncertainty

The Data-Driven Project Manager: A Statistical Battle Against Project Obstacles

The electromagnetism meta-heuristic applied to the resource-constrained project scheduling problem

Maximizing the net present value of a project with progress payments