Resource Unit Research Articles

Cost analysis of a Patient-Centred Medical Home for community-dwelling older adults with complex needs in Singapore

The Patient-Centred Medical Home (PCMH) demonstration in Singapore, launched in November 2016, aimed to deliver integrated and patient-centred care for patients with biopsychosocial needs. Implementation was based on principles of comprehensiveness, coordinated care and shared decision-making. We conducted a prospective single-arm pre-post study design, which aimed to perform cost analysis of PCMH from the perspectives of patients, healthcare providers and society. We assessed short-to-intermediate-term health-related costs by analysing data on resource use and unit costs of resources. We analysed 165 participants enrolled in PCMH from November 2017 to April 2020, with mean age of 77 years. Compared to the 3-month period before enrolment, mean total direct and indirect participant costs and total health system costs increased, but these were not statistically significant. There was a significant decrease in mean cost for primary care (government primary care and private general practice) in the first 3-month and second 3-month periods after enrolment, accompanied by a significant decrease in service utilisation and mean costs for PCMH services in the second 3-month period post-enrolment. This suggested a shift in resource costs from primary care to community-based care provided by PCMH, which had added benefits of both clinic-based primary care and home-based care management. Findings were consistent with a lower longer-term cost trajectory for PCMH after the initial onboarding period. Indirect caregiving costs remained stable. The PCMH care model was associated with reduced costs to the health system and patients for usual primary care, and did not significantly change societal costs.

Investigation of the competitive nature of eMBB and mMTC 5G services in conditions of limited communication resource.

The main contribution of the investigation is the Markov model of the process of resource allocation management between subscribers of eMBB and mMTC services within the 5G cluster. The proposed model, considers the organization of the channel resource in the format of resource blocks. The presented model allows to estimate the average duration of IoT sessions, the average number of active multimedia/IoT sessions, the average number of channel resource units occupied by multimedia/IoT traffic, the average number of resource blocks occupied by multimedia/IoT traffic. The metrics are generalized by three management schemes of the investigated process: balanced, competitive and perspective. The first and third schemes enable static/dynamic distribution of channel resources into reserved and common segments for subscribers of eMBB and mMTC services. The proposed model is illustrated with an example showing how to assess the availability and efficiency of channel resource use of the 5G cluster of the cyber-physical system of the Situation Center of the Department of Information Technology of Vinnytsia City Council (Vinnytsia, Ukraine). The article also shows how to use the proposed model to select the 5G network parameters to keep the probabilities of rejection of multimedia and IoT requests below a set threshold.

An Improved Approach to Wave Energy Resource Characterization for Sea States with Multiple Wave Systems

Generally, wave energy resource assessment and characterization are performed based on an entire wave spectrum, ignoring the detailed energy features that belong to wave systems, i.e., wind waves and swells. In reality, the energy is separately possessed by multiple wave systems, propagating at different directions and velocities. Therefore, it is the wave system that is the most fundamental unit of the wave energy resource. Although detailed analyses of wind waves and swells can be conducted via wave system partitioning, operational assessment methods that can reveal the detailed wave energy characteristics of wave systems still deserve further development. Following a two-step partitioning procedure, this paper presents an improved approach to the characterization of wave energy resources based on grouped wave systems. Wave systems classified as the same group are consistent in terms of propagation direction, velocity, and other characteristics of wave energy, but these characteristics between the groups are obviously different. Therefore, in comparison with the traditional method, the new approach can reveal more comprehensive and more detailed characteristics of the wave energy resource in terms of (i) wind-sea and swell components, (ii) directionality, and (iii) wave conditions; details that represent valuable information for the improvement of the performance of wave energy converter devices and the optimization of the layout of device arrays in wave farms.

Robust damping and decoupling controller for interconnected power network based on distributed energy resources

Converter based distributed energy resource (DER) units are intended to be integrated into the power system using grid-forming converters (GFCs). It proposes to emulate the synchronous machines dynamics and forms the grid voltage/frequency by instantaneously balance the load changes without peer-to-peer coordination. However, the damping and coupling characteristics of GFCs in multi-vendor interoperability-based network have not yet been fully explored. The paper proposes a step-by-step analytic method based on participation factor analysis to efficiently analyze the oscillatory modes and the coupling characteristics in the GFCs-based network, especially where the GFCs are controlled by different control techniques. Moreover, to efficiently damp these oscillatory modes and such control coupling, a hybrid damping method based on an oscillation damper and a decoupling controller is proposed. A mathematical modelling is derived to confirm the role of the proposed decoupling controller especially during transient periods. Design guidelines using pattern search algorithm are presented to identify the optimum parameters of the proposed hybrid damping method. Finally, the experimental results using Controller-hardware-in-the-loop (CHiL) verify the theoretical analysis and the efficient damping against large disturbances. © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Distributed economic nonlinear MPC for DC Micro-Grids with inherent bounded dynamics and coupled constraints

This paper proposes a hierarchical control scheme for DC Micro-Grids (MGs) composed of distributed energy resource (DER) units, active loads, and coupled constraints, that incorporates different control levels to achieve economic operation and coupled constraint satisfaction at all times. All loads are considered as constant power loads (CPLs), which are known to lead to instability due to the negative impedance characteristics. To this end, firstly an improved version of the recently developed sl-PI controller is introduced in the primary level to provide boundedness and local stability of the dynamics. The supervisory controller solves an economic optimisation problem to compute voltage setpoints and at a lower control layer the system is driven to those setpoints, by utilising a distributed nonlinear MPC setup with non-iterative, neighbour-to-neighbour communication framework. A rigorous analysis on the system robustness to uncertainties in the exchanged information and bounded load variations is provided, and recursive feasibility and stability of each subsystem is analytically proven for the first time, according to the authors’ knowledge. Finally, we demonstrate the proposed controller with the aid of simulated scenarios for a DC MG with multiple DER units and CPLs.

Analysis of the synergistic mechanism of forest eco-economic system

Based on the collective forest with common use rights, the social-ecological system analysis framework and autonomous governance theory proposed by Elinor Ostrom are introduced in the forest eco-economic system to analyze the interaction logic among the first-level subsystems and the secondary variables of the forest eco-economic system and the variables related to the autonomous governance of the system to explore the synergistic mechanisms affecting the forest eco-economic system. The results show that: in the case of information asymmetry, collective actions of governmental and non-governmental organizations will aggravate the dilemma of forest eco-economic synergistic development; actors extract forest resource units from the forest resource system to achieve economic benefits; and renewable resources of forest ecosystems can be sustained in the long term when the average extraction rate of humans from forest ecosystems does not exceed the average replenishment rate.

Environmental law and natural resource law: if “divorce” is relevante?

The article examines the problems of the environmental law structural system. The urgency of this issue has increased signifi cantly due to the repeated attempts of some researchers to justify the need to separate from the environmental law of its natural resource unit and create a new branch of law, along with environmental law, the subject and scope of which will be signifi cantly narrowed. A brief historical digression into the study of the relevant issue in Ukrainian science over the past 60 years was made. The connection between the evolution of legal thought and the development of environmental legislation at diff erent stages is substantiated. The views of modern supporters of such a question are analyzed. Attention is focused on the signifi cant disagreements of researchers in understanding the subject and system of the proposed new branch of law: some of them suggest a separation of utilization, on the one hand, and protection, on the other; others are talking about the allocation in some areas of diff erentiated regulation of relations for the utilization and protection of certain natural resources while leaving in the fi eld of environmental law regulation of integrated environmental relations; from time to time there are other approaches that never completely coincide with each other, even among supporters of the independence of natural resource law. It is emphasized that such inconsistency of researchers’ opinion only delays the process of systematization of environmental legislation, which is long overdue, especially from the standpoint of law enforcement. The relationship between the system of law and the system of legislation is studied in the context of preparation for the systematization of environmental legislation. The conclusion is made about the need to preserve the unity of the branch of law that regulates relations in the system «man - nature». Key words: environmental law; natural resource law; branch of law; system of law; system of legislation; systematization of environmental legislation

Renewable power distribution networks considering dynamic-differential pricing, carbon trading, and solid waste recycling: A fuzzy programming approach

In the energy market, community of prosumers play a great role to enhance the sustainability of power distribution networks. They generate energy for their own consumption and sell the surplus energy to an electricity company. In this study, a power plant considered communities of prosumers and consumers with the objective to determine the capacity of distributed renewable energy generation units established by the power company itself, the power generation capacity of the prosumers, the dynamic-differential prices offered to the prosumers and consumers, and the optimal buy-back price offered to buy the surplus energy generated by the prosumers. According to the numerical analysis, the prosumers generated 89.82% of the energy demand of the community where the rest of the energy demand is covered by the power from the distributed renewable energy resource units. Both the buy-back energy price that the energy company offered to the prosumers and the net profit that the power company earned increased as the fixed price increased and price elasticity decreased. As a result of its participation in carbon trading by establishing distributed renewable generation units and collecting renewable energy from the prosumers, the power company increased its net profit by 1.13%.

Managing irrigation water resources with economic benefit and energy consumption: an interval linear multi-objective fractional optimization model under multiple uncertainties

At present, water shortage has increasingly become one of the key factors restricting the sustainable development of agriculture. And during the process of agricultural production, the energy consumption has also been paid more and more attention. Therefore, in order to deal with the above problems, an improved interval linear multi-objective fractional programming model (ILMOFPM) was developed, which has the characteristic is that it not only focuses on the optimal allocation of the amount of irrigation water resources, but also on improving irrigation water resources use efficiency. To demonstrate its effectiveness and applicability, ILMOFPM was applied to a case study in Jinghuiqu irrigation district, Shaanxi Province, China. Maximum economic benefit per unit of water resource and minimum energy consumption per unit of water resource were selected as the planning objectives. A series of irrigation water resources optimal allocation schemes were obtained, which could give the decision makers the desired optimal scheme according to the actual situation. Based on the results of the established model, economic benefit and energy consumption generally decreased as the representative hydrological years changed from wet to dry, and the total crop planting area also showed a decreased trend. Moreover, a lot of water resources was saved by introducing crop evapotranspiration and effective precipitation in the developed model, 57.45%, 44.17%, 39.33% of total water resources consumption were saved under different representative hydrological years, respectively.

Geo-Spatial Modeling in the Assessment of Environmental Resources for Sustainable Water Resource Management in a Semi- Arid Region : A Case Study of Bhandara District, India

The present study is geospatial modeling in the assessment of environmental resources for sustainable water resource management in a Bhandara district, India, using by geographical information system (GIS) and remote sensing (RS) techniques. The study will be based on secondary data. Secondary data was collected during the time period between are 1971 to 2013. After data collection the data were edited and coded. Then all the collected data were scrutinized carefully and recorded in master sheets. The monsoon rains in district are concentrated in the four months from June to September and receive 90.81% rainfall, post-monsoon 1.86% pre-monsoon 4.83% and winter 2.48%. Sandy red soil has covered 31% area; median black soil has covered 47% and Lomi red soil 22% covered the area of district. There are 580 large and 13,758 small and medium sized lakes in the district. The percentage of total area under forest 12.25%, especially during 2001 to 2011 periods it was in Bhandara (12.33%), Mohadi (19.89%), Tumsar (13.27%), Lakhani (11.13%) and Lakhandur (16.24%) decreased on large scale. There is a tremendous increase in the forest area in Sakoli (9.31%). Well irrigation is very important, in 1981; the total irrigated area was 66009 hect. of these 7.67% area is under well irrigation in 2011, the total irrigated area was 128165 hect; of these, 19605 hect. (15.30%) area was under well irrigation in the district. The aim of this present study was to evaluate environmental resource units that have been delineated based on the geospatial modeling of environment parameters with appropriate weights in GIS and RS techniques. The data can be used for area management, utilized in restoration and conservation of natural resources studies in the future.

Business-transactions and Accumulation of Economic Resources

Operational management implies not only production management but logistics, innovative management, transaction and quality management and other components of organization of business as well. Operational managers bear the responsibility that company should possess advanced production and organization methods, implement continued modernization and remain the leading positions. In order to beat the competitors, together with care on price and quality - the firm should try to implement an innovative technology and in such manner satisfy the customers` requirements in a better way. The Indicator of enterprise`s backwardness is relatively high cost price, low-grade production or both at a time, which presents the ineffective combination of resources. Division of costs into fixed and variable types are being performed according to the short-term periods. As for long-term periods, according them all the costs are variable. Short-time period is the time interval, during of which it is possible to increase the production capacity only by improvement of variable costs. If the part of resources applied in the manufacture are left unchanged and they are added with some other resource, then production volume might be increased in the beginning, but since then, whilst the optimal correlation of resources will be violated, the moment will rise, when an additional resources involved in production will gain ever less and less return. In such case, the law of decreased return (or the decreased marginal production capacity law) is active. The least is nothing more than a grow of variable expenses per production unit under the conditions of unchanged costs. Marginal return - means the surplus of production capacity, which is conditioned by application of additional unit of resource. Key words: business, marketing, agreement, transactions, enterprise, resources, production, operation, goods, automatization, firm, cost, raw materials, materials, calculation.

Factors influencing Use of Human Resource Information System in Nepali Organizations

Adoption of Human Resource Information System (HRIS) could be instrumental in gaining competitive advantage to organizations across all sectors. However, the adoption of HRIS is scanty in many organizations, especially in the developing countries. This study attempted to investigate application of Unified Technology Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model in the context of adoption of Human Resource Information System (HRIS) in Nepali organizations. It also examined the mediating role of Behavioral Intention for actual use of HRIS. The study further investigated the moderating role of prior exposure for generating actual use of HRIS when behavioral intention already existed. One hundred thirty employees from the Human Resource Unit of different organizations participated in the study. The results showed that three factors - facilitating condition, performance expectancy, and hedonic motivation, generate behavioral intention for adoption of HRIS. The influence of these factors on actual use of HRIS was partially mediated by behavioral intention for adoption. Prior exposure of employees moderated the positive influence of three factors on actual use of HRIS. The implications of the study are discussed and limitations of the study are highlighted.

Increasing the efficiency of using resources as a factor of environmental business activity

In modern conditions of gradual depletion of natural resources, natural capital is becoming the main limiting factor of production systems. The dominant trend of exceeding the rate of use of natural resources over the growth rate of production leads to exclusive attention to the need to increase the productivity of natural resources in solving environmental problems and problems of rational use of mineral resources. The resource potential created in Ukraine, its uniqueness, scale of development, relevant infrastructure objectively determine in the long run the preservation of a significant share of the mineral complex in social production. The inefficiency of the technical and economic mechanism of subsoil use leads to large losses of minerals, which makes it objectively necessary to form conceptually new approaches to the rational use of natural resources. Strategic resources are a prerequisite for increasing not only economic but also environmental efficiency: the production of industrial waste is several times lower than from extracted natural raw materials, which creates the preconditions for increasing the profitability of the enterprise. Rational use of natural resources allows to increase volumes production per unit of resource, reduce costs marketable products, expand the market niche of the enterprise and optimize the size of penalties for environmental pollution. It is also crucial solving environmental problems: reducing the area of land that are taken away under dumps; reduction of the volume of stored waste and dustiness of the territory, etc. In view of this, it can be argued that strategic resources produce opportunities for synergy of environmental and economic results through rational use of natural resources. Development and implementation of management decisions aimed at ensuring a balance of resources enterprises is a combined process, which is based on use of various management methods and tools appropriate to the current conditions and development objectives of the entity.

Managing Queues with Different Resource Requirements

In many service systems, customers from different classes may have very different resource requirements. These differences include not only the duration of the service but also the units of resource required. This is especially prominent in healthcare settings, where patients with different severity levels can require a different level of medical attention/supervision translating into varying demands of nurse staffing capacity. Motivated by these applications, in “Managing Queues with Different Resource Requirements,” Zychlinski, Chan, and Dong study the optimal scheduling policy of a multiserver queue in which customers from different classes may require different units of servers. When customers have heterogeneous resource requirements, in addition to the cost of waiting and resource requirement, we also need to take policy-induced idleness into account. A good policy needs to carefully balance the myopic cost reduction rate and the more forward-looking system throughput. An index-based policy, referred to as the idle-avoid [Formula: see text] rule, is developed to balance these factors. Theoretical analysis along with numerical experiments provide support for good and robust performance of the proposed policy.

Credibility-based chance-constrained multimode resource-constrained project scheduling problem under fuzzy uncertainty

This paper investigates a multimode resource-constrained project scheduling problem under hybrid uncertain environment. With the activity durations are fuzzy variables, the resource requests change with the durations. The goal is to minimize the project duration and the cost associated with the required resources. Considering the stochastic duration and resource demand, a chance constrained programming model based on credibility is established. In order to solve the model, the chance constraints and fuzziness are treated by introducing the credibility distribution function and its inverse function. And, a hybrid algorithm combining particle swarm optimization (PSO) and genetic algorithm (GA) is proposed. It has shown fine performance in solving problems with 30, 60, and 120 activities. We also analyze the sensitivity of confidence, fuzziness, number of activities, number of modes, and resource unit cost. Meanwhile, fuzzy value-at-risk is used as a risk measure, and a model based on it is constructed. These numerical results show that the developed algorithm can obtain the near optimal solution of large-scale projects in a reasonable calculation time.

Weighted Alamouti Media-Based Modulation

A weighted Alamouti (WA) media-based modulation (WA-MBM) scheme is presented. In this scheme, the real and imaginary parts of the diagonal and anti-diagonal WA codes are interleaved and transmitted according to a well-designed MBM channel states activation approach, so that the spatial resource units in both diagonal and anti-diagonal directions of WA-MBM signal are fully exploited to achieve higher spectral efficiency. The maximum-likelihood (ML) detection and theoretical average bit error probability (ABEP) for WA-MBM are derived. Simulation results demonstrate obvious performance improvement of WA-MBM over some existing MBM schemes.

An Online Learning Approach to Sequential User-Centric Selection Problems

This paper proposes a new variant of multi-play MAB model, to capture important factors of the sequential user-centric selection problem arising from mobile edge computing, ridesharing applications, etc. In the proposed model, each arm is associated with discrete units of resources, each play is associate with movement costs and multiple plays can pull the same arm simultaneously. To learn the optimal action profile (an action profile prescribes the arm that each play pulls), there are two challenges: (1) the number of action profiles is large, i.e., M^K, where K and M denote the number of plays and arms respectively; (2) feedbacks on action profiles are not available, but instead feedbacks on some model parameters can be observed. To address the first challenge, we formulate a completed weighted bipartite graph to capture key factors of the offline decision problem with given model parameters. We identify the correspondence between action profiles and a special class of matchings of the graph. We also identify a dominance structure of this class of matchings. This correspondence and dominance structure enable us to design an algorithm named OffOptActPrf to locate the optimal action efficiently. To address the second challenge, we design an OnLinActPrf algorithm. We design estimators for model parameters and use these estimators to design a Quasi-UCB index for each action profile. The OnLinActPrf uses OffOptActPrf as a subroutine to select the action profile with the largest Quasi-UCB index. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the efficiency of OnLinActPrf.

An Extension of Two Species Lotka-Volterra Competition Model

Limiting resource is a angular stone of the interactions between species in ecosystems such as competition, prey-predators and food chain systems. In this paper, we propose a planar system as an extension of Lotka-Volterra competition model. This describes two competitive species for a single resource which are affected by intra and inter-specific interference. We give its complete analysis for the existence and local stability of all equlibria and some conditions of global stability. The model exhibits a rich set of behaviors with a multiplicity of coexistence equilibria, bi-stability, tri-stability and occurrence of global stability of the exclusion of one species and the coexistence equilibrium. The asymptotic behavior and the number of coexistence equilibria are shown by a saddle-node bifurcation of the level of resource under conditions on competitive effects relatively to associated growth rate per unit of resource. Moreover, we determine the competition outcome in the situations of Balanced and Unbalanced intra-inter species competition effects. Finally, we illustrate results by numerical simulations.

Multiplexing Capacity of Hybrid PD-SCMA Heterogeneous Networks

Hybrid multiple access schemes are considered potential technologies towards achieving optimal spectrum sharing for future heterogeneous networks. Multiple users are multiplexed on a single resource unit in the code domain for sparse code multiple access (SCMA) or power domain for power domain non-orthogonal multiple access (PD-NOMA) and in both domains for the hybrid power domain sparse code non-orthogonal multiple access (PD-SCMA). This allows for effective spectrum usage but comes at a cost of increased detection complexity resulting in loss of performance in terms of outages. It is therefore imperative to determine the user multiplexing capacity for effective performance. This work investigates codebook capacity bounds in small cells, pairing and power capacity bounds for the number of small cell user equipment’s (SUEs) and macro cell user equipment’s (MUEs) that can be multiplexed on a codebook for the developed PD-SCMA technology. Closed-form solutions for codebook, pairing and power multiplexing capacity bounds are derived. The performance of the system results into low outage when the system’s point of operation is within the multiplexing bounds. To alleviate the resource allocation (RA) challenges of such a system at the transmitter, dual parameter ranking (DPR) and alternate search method (ASM) based RA schemes are proposed. The results show significant capacity gain with DPR-RA in comparison with conventional schemes.

Field screening and identification of stable resistance sources in wheat germplasm against loose smut disease caused by Ustilago segetum var. tritici

Loose smut (LS) caused by Ustilago segetum var. tritici is an important disease of wheat (Triticum spp.) and accounts for 1-2% annual yield losses in India. The disease can be managed easily with the use of seed treatment with systematic fungicides, however, the application of these fungicides remained limited amongst farmers mainly due to their high price, limited knowledge about seed protectants as well as lack of any visible external symptoms on infected seeds. Additionally, seed dressing with protectants is hazardous to the environment and human health and thus not acceptable in organic wheat cultivation. The most affordable and environment friendly technique to protect wheat crop is to develop varieties that are resistant to loose smut disease. Therefore, research efforts have been made to screen one hundred and ninety-seven wheat genotypes obtained from gene bank (Germplasm resource unit, ICAR-Indian Institute of Wheat and Barley Research) under field conditions for LS disease using artificial inoculation technique. The experiment was laid out in randomized block design with three replications for two consecutive years during 2014-15 and 2015-21016. The results of the field trials indicated that only seventy seven genotypes (39.09 %) showed resistance to loose smut and infection ranged from 0-5% under artificially inoculated conditions. More than 15 % genotypes (31) were found to be immune and 18.78 % (thirty seven) genotypes were highly resistant (HR) and twenty three (11.68%) were identified as susceptible (S) genotypes. There was forty-nine moderately susceptible genotype obtained from the experiment. The results reveled that there are some promising LS resistance lines and could therefore be introduced to wheat breeders for further breeding as well as multi-locational trials for developing disease-resistant cultivars.