车辆数不确定的软时间窗车辆路径问题的改进遗传算法

综合考虑车辆数和行驶距离两种优化目标,提出了VRPSTW的多目标优化模型,同时提出了解决VRPSTW问题的一种改进遗传算法。在算法中,通过适应度函浸透的变化,较好地解决了多目标优化的问题;通过对交叉算子改进,增加了算法的寻优能力,同时又克服了算法对群体多样性的要求;针对遗传算法局部搜索能力弱的问题。加入了2-opt局部搜索方法,很好地弥补了遗传算法的不足。经过实验,本方法能较好地解决VRPSTW问题,从而对运榆决策提供有力支持。     

Leveraging multi-tier healthcare facility network simulations for capacity planning in a pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has placed severe demands on healthcare facilities across the world, and in several countries, makeshift COVID-19 centres have been operationalised to handle patient overflow. In developing countries such as India, the public healthcare system (PHS) is organised as a hierarchical network with patient flows from lower-tier primary health centres (PHC) to mid-tier community health centres (CHC) and downstream to district hospitals (DH). In this study, we demonstrate how a network-based modelling and simulation approach utilising generic modelling principles can (a) quantify the extent to which the existing facilities in the PHS can effectively cope with the forecasted COVID-19 caseload; and (b) inform decisions on capacity at makeshift COVID-19 Care Centres (CCC) to handle patient overflows. We apply the approach to an empirical study of a local PHS comprising ten PHCs, three CHCs, one DH and one makeshift CCC. Our work demonstrates how the generic modelling approach finds extensive use in the development of simulations of multi-tier facility networks that may contain multiple instances of generic simulation models of facilities at each network tier. Further, our work demonstrates how multi-tier healthcare facility network simulations can be leveraged for capacity planning in health crises.     

passive drinking

The threat to health from passive smoking is now well understood. Andrew Wilson, a freelance healthcare journalist, reveals the alarming results of recent research into ‘passive drinking’. Without wishing to cause alarm Economic Affairs wonders how seriously we should treat these new findings?     

Policy-driven ecosystems for new vaccine development

This paper examines the relationship between biomedical policies and entrepreneurial R&D strategies. Public health programs have been unable to provide effective and affordable treatment of infectious diseases for the poor. While governments have become more open to private sector contributions to policy objectives, it is rare to find new ventures commercializing healthcare innovations for neglected diseases. Two case studies of entrepreneurial ventures, in the UK and China, provide evidence on how resource-constrained firms mobilize participants in policy-specific ecosystems to achieve their goals of new vaccine development for tuberculosis. Ecosystem analysis reveals how the innovators’ business models can align their strategies with national policy objectives.     

Tensions in local government employment relationships

Abstract

A wide variety of initiatives characterized under the umbrella term of new public management have been introduced over the past two decades to improve efficiency and cost-effectiveness in the public sector. The implications of these initiatives for public sector employment relationships have been the subject of on-going debate. This article contributes to this debate through examining how employees within local authorities are managed in a time of personal crisis with a particular focus on long-term sickness absence in the context of increased management drives for efficiency under the NPM agenda. The findings reveal that for managers in two local authorities that form the focus of this study there is a tension in struggling to achieve a workable balance between the needs of employees and wider operational requirements, resulting in role ambiguity for line managers and detrimental effects for vulnerable public service workers.     

Managing compliance with privacy regulations through translation guardrails: A health information exchange case study

Information privacy is increasingly important in our digitally connected world, particularly in healthcare, and privacy regulations are ramping up to promote appropriate privacy practices. As a digital platform that enables healthcare providers to exchange protected health information (PHI), a health information exchange (HIE) is governed by health information privacy regulations. The challenge for HIEs is to operate in a way that will maximize information exchange while maintaining compliance with regulations that may constrain the sharing of PHI. Regulations impose a measure of universality through compliance requirements, while being flexible to allow adaptation to the local context. However, our longitudinal case study into the privacy policies of an HIE, demonstrates that the journey of privacy ideas from their original formulation in regulations, to their ultimate enactment in an organizational setting, is accompanied by translations, such that the final implementation may vary extensively from its original form. Such variability often results in interpretations that differ from what the regulators intended. Consequently, translation guardrails are necessary to protect against problematic translations of regulatory ideas which could lead to compliance issues and loss of platform participation. Our findings offer two contributions. First, we contribute to the compliance literature by explaining how guardrails can balance the use of permission and obligation schemas which are necessary to translate regulations into effective organizational policies for the success of HIEs and other information exchange platforms. Second, we contribute to extending translation theory by explaining how pragmatic reasoning schemas function as the mechanism through which translation of regulations occurs.     

A priority-based multi-objective framework for water resources diversion and allocation in the middle route of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project

Because of the degradation of the social-ecological-economic-environmental (SEEE) system, water scarcity has been a growing source of conflicts over the globe. Further, the uncertainty arising from complex water resource scenarios increases the conflicts between the different water users and destabilizes water allocation systems. In this study, a priority-based multi-objective programming (MOP) model (quantitative path) with fuzzy random variables (FRVs) is established for a water resource diversion and allocation (WRDA) problem. To determine the priorities of the multiple objectives, a priority-determination approach (qualitative path) is designed, comprising of a pressure-state-response (PSR) multiple attribute assessment system and a technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS)-based evaluation method. Then the MOP model is transformed into a solvable goal programming (GP)-based model. Because of the inclusion of FRVs, the obtained results can be adjusted to local conditions in view of social, economic, environmental and ecological objective priorities. Therefore, they are more applicable than traditional weight sum or Pareto multi-objective WRDA methodologies. A case study from the middle route of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project (SNWDP-MRP) in China is given to demonstrate the practicability and rationality of the proposed methodology in obtaining scientific WRDA plans.     

Why Do Some Multinational Firms Respond Better Than Others to the Hostility of Host Governments? Proximal Embedding and the Side Effects of Local Partnerships

Using a multiple-case study of alleged expropriations reported before the World Bank, we examine how multinational companies (MNC) react to the escalating hostility of host governments. Our study reveals how different choices regarding the interaction with local nonmarket stakeholders – which we refer to as proximal vs. mediated embedding – shape how managers respond to these disputes by affecting their ability to collect, process and interpret information, and to act upon it in a way that effectively mobilizes local and international support. In contrast to the prevailing view that local partners in international joint ventures shelter MNCs from abuse from political authorities, our findings show that primary reliance on local partners to manage the local nonmarket environment can actually reinforce a liability of outsidership and even create a ‘liability of insidership’, to the extent that relying on local partners prevents the MNC from establishing quality connections with a broad range of nonmarket stakeholders, reducing its alertness and responsiveness to hostile acts from host governments.     

Governed Through Ghost Jurisdictions: Municipal Law,Inner Suburbs and Rooming Houses

This article examines the legal geography of municipal bylaws regulating rooming houses in the City of Toronto. Using a legal geography analysis of Toronto's rooming house licensing bylaw, I argue that this bylaw is a ghost jurisdiction that designates part of the city as illegal and has implications for governance of the inner suburbs. In so doing, I push the debate on legal geography forward by suggesting that we, as urban scholars, take the temporal seriously in our analysis of space. Drawing from semi‐structured interviews, archival data and participant observation, I analyse seemingly mundane legal mechanisms through the case study of suburban rooming houses. Overall, in this article I make three contributions. First, I demonstrate how a temporal analysis is important to legal geography inquiries of uneven regulation and spaces of poverty. Second, I suggest that studies of legal governance are integral for redefining suburban governance amidst socio‐economic decline in the inner suburbs. Third, I argue that studying urban legal mechanisms in the suburbs is essential for moving beyond downtown analytical frameworks and is needed to address how low‐income suburban tenants, a large majority of whom are racialized newcomers, are unevenly regulated and unfairly governed by local government.     

A logistics model for emergency supply of critical items in the aftermath of a disaster

This paper proposes a logistics model for delivery of prioritized items in disaster relief operations. It considers multi-items, multi-vehicles, multi-periods, soft time windows, and a split delivery strategy scenario, and is formulated as a multi-objective integer programming model. To effectively solve this model we limit the number of available tours. Two heuristic approaches are introduced for this purpose. The first approach is based on a genetic algorithm, while the second approach is developed by decomposing the original problem. We compare these two approaches via a computational study. The multi-objective problem is converted to a single-objective problem by the weighted sum method. A case study is presented to illustrate the potential applicability of our model. Also, presented is a comparison of our model with that proposed in a recent paper by Balcik et al. [6]. The results show that our proposed model outperforms theirs in terms of delivering prioritized items over several time periods.     

EFFECT OF CROSS‐BORDER HEALTH CARE ON QUALITY AND PROGRESSIVITY OF FINANCING

In this study, we examine the effect of cross‐border health care in terms of public health insurance. We consider its effect on healthcare quality and progressivity of financing. We use a two‐country Hotelling model in which consumers are divided into two groups: high and low innate‐talent consumers. Aiming to maximize social welfare, governments impose a progressive income tax on consumers to provide healthcare services. Assuming that a payment scheme for healthcare services is based on diagnosis‐related group pricing, which has been adapted in many countries, we obtain the following results. The promotion of cross‐border health care does not influence healthcare quality or the progressivity of financing in patient‐importing countries, but does reduce healthcare quality and influence the progressivity of financing in patient‐exporting countries.     

Using difference equations to find optimal tax structures on the SugarScape

The use of equations to describe agent-based model dynamics allows access to mathematical theory that is not otherwise available. In particular, equation models can be effective at solving optimization problems—that is, problems concerning how an agent-based model can be most effectively steered into a particular state. In order to illustrate this strategy, we describe a modified version of the well-known SugarScape model and implement taxation. The optimization problem is to determine tax structures that minimize deaths but maximize tax income. Tax rates are dependent upon the amount of sugar available in a particular region; the rates change over time. A system of discrete difference equations is built to capture agent-based model dynamics. The equations are shown to capture the dynamics very well both with and without taxation. A multi-objective optimization technique known as Pareto optimization is then used to solve the problem. Rather than focusing on a cost function in which the two objectives are assigned weights, Pareto optimization is a heuristic method that determines a suite of solutions, each of which is optimal depending on the priorities of the researcher. In this case, Pareto optimization allows analysis of the tradeoff between taxes collected and deaths caused by taxation. The strategies contained here serve as a framework for a broad class of models.     

A Transposition of Territory: Decolonized Perspectives in Current Urban Research

In this article, we discuss the concept of territory from a decolonized perspective. We engage with the ongoing debate on decentralizing urban studies to outline the potential drawbacks of essentializing, generalizing or objectifying the urban. Through the socio‐territorial approach utilized here we seek to address these issues by shifting attention, first, to the social production of territory, and secondly, from an analysis of state strategies to the urban scale. We understand territory as being produced when subjects struggle over the practices, meanings and tenures of urban space. An example from Mexico City is employed to illustrate how territory becomes both the site and stake of social struggle. By focusing on the subjects involved in the production of territory, and on the way different subjects produce and reproduce hegemonic spaces and counter‐spaces, we emphasize three aspects in particular: first, a territory's specific material conditions; secondly, the imaginarios (social imaginaries) various actors inscribe into it; and thirdly, the communal land use form of the ejido as a unique territorial regulation. Finally, we argue for the empirical groundedness of the concept of territory with the aim of further pluralizing the field of urban studies. The socio‐territorial approach we propose explicitly focuses on power relations in the production of both urban space and knowledge.     

Why Local Social Forums Emerge Where They do: Beyond Diffusion,Geographical Appropriation

Social forums are, quintessentially, a transnationally mobile institutional enterprise. Since the first World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001, thousands of local initiatives have emerged all over the world. Yet we know very little about the diffusion processes involved. This article examines nine local social forums (LSFs) in two societies (France and Québec) in order to understand how social forums (SFs) spread throughout or within each territory. Aside from the usual factors, such as the presence or absence of an initiator, favorable political opportunity structure and access to resources, I consider the geography of appropriation, with an emphasis on the dimensions of place (where the forums are organized), and scales of action built by activists. First, I show that, as proposed in the social movement literature, SFs spread from the global South to the global North as a direct result of activists willing to reproduce within their localities that which they have seen and experienced on a larger scale. Political opportunity structures and access to resources appear relevant to understanding the longevity of LSFs and their capacity to be more or less encompassing experiences. But beyond these ‘usual suspects’, the geographical appropriation of social forums is an important consideration that helps us understand the specific diffusion of LSFs in each national territory. In Québec, the region is perceived as a ‘given’ by activists and becomes the relevant scale of collective action, while in France, scale building is at stake and LSFs are used as a tool to escape the centralization of the main national organization in the field of global protest.     

Relational Co-ordination and Stigma at Work: How Frontline Employees Compensate for Failures in Public Health Systems

Co-ordinating collective work and communicating a shared understanding of tasks is necessary to accomplishing organizational goals. Stigma could exacerbate co-ordination challenges between public and private organizations by further widening differences in goals and incentives among employees. Using relational co-ordination theory, we explore how stigma can influence employee behaviour in the context of healthcare delivery. We study healthcare professionals and frontline workers involved in the fight against AIDS in India to examine how public health systems fail due to a lack of communication and co-ordination, and that these failures are worsened by stigma. When stigma is present, relationships between employees become strained due to misaligned work routines, lack of information sharing and cooperation failure. Our findings reveal emergent responses from frontline employees that mitigate co-ordination failures through: (1) role adaptation to improve predictability of tasks; (2) social purpose identification to promote a common understanding and engage stigmatized clients; and (3) affective attachment that encourages extra-role behaviours and task ownership. We draw implications for relational co-ordination and stigma, as well as public-private co-ordination in public health systems.     

Are standardized EMSs useful in local authorities? A study of how a tool from the private sector is used in the public sector

Following the trend in the private sector, standardized environmental management systems (EMSs) have been introduced in several local authorities around the world. When the tool is transferred from the private sector to the public, one can ask how useful the tool is in the new environment, since the private and the public sectors are two different types of social sphere, with different institutional logics. Taking a closer look at the situation in Sweden, this paper aims to investigate the applicability of standardized EMSs in local authorities and the public sector in general. Based on qualitative interviews with public officers in two municipalities in Sweden, it is argued that EMSs are useful in municipalities. However, the study also reveals that an EMS seems to be more suitable for technical service administrations and municipally owned companies than social service administrations. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Changing the conversation on evaluating digital transformation in healthcare: Insights from an institutional analysis

The global health sector is engaged in significant digital transformation. Evaluating these transformations is important given the major investments involved and their major potential consequences. However, studies have critiqued both the quality of evaluations and the quality of evaluation research. The persistent lack of progress has led researchers to ask deeper questions about what is actually occurring when teams evaluate the benefits of digital transformation. This translational research essay explores how institutional theory offers a lens for understanding the complexities of evaluating digital transformations in healthcare and provides insights for improving it. In particular, we show how institutional theory can explain behaviors observed in the literature and in our own case study. We also show how institutional theory can benefit from the insights observed in evaluation work. Motivated by these opportunities, we suggest an agenda through which practitioners and researchers can jointly improve work in this area.     

Facilitating sustainable development decisions: measuring stakeholder reactions

Sustainable development is an issue of increasing importance, in which organizations must engage multiple stakeholders and consider their objectives when deciding on organizational actions, but research provides little guidance regarding how managers can measure stakeholder reactions and use information to facilitate decision‐making. The broad objective of this study is to provide insights useful for decision‐making. In this study, we investigate in its natural and complex environment a real‐world sustainable development conflict – whether to expand energy development in Wyoming. The primary issue is the impact that expanding energy development will have on wildlife and the environment. We collect data from both the local community and a broader national population for use in a quantitative analysis. We use contingent valuation methods to capture the social impact ascribed by the stakeholders. We conclude with a discussion of how this information can be used ex ante to inform decision‐making for sustainable development. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Including the Feedback of Local Health Improvement in Assessing Costs and Benefits of GHG Reduction

Ancillary benefits of greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation refer to benefits from GHG mitigation in addition to lowered adverse impacts of global climate change. A major ancillary benefit of GHG mitigation is reduced local air toxins, which improves health. The purpose of the study is not to determine whether ancillary benefits of GHG mitigation can or cannot justify GHG mitigation. Rather, we discuss how an important benefit of addressing GHG emission — the local health effects — should and can be incorporated using the approaches put forth. A CGE model is used for simulating a carbon tax policy. A health effects submodel takes the local air emissions output from the CGE model and assesses the implications for ambient air concentration, health, and labor supply. Labor and medical expenditure changes are fed back into the economy. Applying this approach to Thailand, when health feedback is included we find that: (1) negative impact on GDP under a carbon tax drops by 45%, and (2) welfare improves for households and cleaner producers.