During the course of care, patients frequently develop escalating health problems that lead to medical complications, costly treatments, severe pains, disabilities and even death. Predicting such escalations provides the opportunity to apply preventive measures that result in better patient safety, quality of care and lower ...

The long-term sustainability of food supply chains (FSCs) is critical to human and environmental health. While the modern industrial FSC is capable of the production and global distribution of enormous quantities of food, it also faces serious long-term environmental, social, and economic sustainability challenges. In ...

Process adjustment strategy is an important part of the process improvement methods, which is also called engineering process control (EPC), and it is often integrated with statistical process control (SPC) to improve the process control performance. While feedback control is used to compensate for the output deviation, ...

Musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) account for a large proportion of occupational injuries. As the computer has become ubiquitous in office work environments, so have computer-related MSDs. Since most work-related MSDs develop from the accumulation of micro trauma over moderate to long periods of time, early detection of ...

Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), an advanced version of conventional cruise control (CCC), can detect the distance to a vehicle ahead and assist drivers in maintaining a set speed and headway distance. The system has been available in the US since 2001, and there are approximately 70 vehicle models with ACC as standard or ...

Natural catastrophes can result in large scale displacement of populations, who are in urgent need of temporary quarters until permanent housing can be provided. During this period, the temporary housing plays an important role in the families' physical, psychological, social and economic recovery. A number of research studies ...

The large product assembly industry is a complex and heavily manually based assembly manufacturing process. Examples are commercial airplanes, ships, and wind turbines. These manufacturing enterprises are increasingly striving to satisfy the individual needs of customers by providing customized products. Under this circumstance, ...

The modern day vehicles encompass many in-vehicle Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), which can provide continuous feedback to drivers but do require an understanding of the driver, system, and vehicle interactions. A conceptual model of adaptive behavior was developed and used as a framework for the analysis of operators' ...

Appointment scheduling systems have been studied for nearly 60 years. From a decision making point of view, related problems can be classified into two categories: static and dynamic. In a static scheduling problem, all decisions are made before a clinic session starts; in a dynamic scheduling problem, the schedule of future ...