Cesarean delivery (CD) rates were until recently low in rural China where the population lacked health insurance. In July 2003 the New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS) was introduced. We report findings from a health systems study carried out in the EC-funded project "Structural hinders to and...

In a recent paper, Chen [J.S. Chen, Scheduling of nonresumable jobs and flexible maintenance activities on a single machine to minimize makespan, European Journal of Operational Research 190 (2008) 90-102] proposes a heuristic algorithm to deal with the problem Scheduling of Nonresumable Jobs...

This paper considers a variation of the classical single machine scheduling problem with tool changes. In the variation, two sets of jobs, namely special jobs and normal jobs, are considered. By special jobs, we mean that each special job must be processed within the first prefixed time units of...

A single-machine scheduling problem with workload-dependent maintenance duration is considered. The objective is to minimize total completion time. For the case where the derivation of the maintenance duration function is greater than or equal to 1, a polynomial time optimal algorithm is...

Innovation is crucial to improving productivity and fostering sustainable growth, especially among countries that are moving toward or are at the cutting edge of technological advances (technology frontier). Innovation is usually underfinanced due to its high uncertainty nature and market...