A two-phase mathematical-programming heuristic for flexible assignment of activities and tasks to work shifts

In the service industry, workers perform work shifts and are assigned to interruptible activities and uninterruptible tasks during their shifts. The work shifts of regular employees are often established several weeks in advance of the operations when the activity and task demands are still uncertain. Just a few days before the operations when these demands are unveiled with more certainty, the planned schedules can be slightly modified and on-call temporary employees can be scheduled to satisfy the demands as best as possible. As acceptable modifications, extending the planned shifts and moving workers’ meal breaks are considered. In this paper, we are interested in the scheduling problem encountered in this second step, which also involves assigning activities and tasks to the scheduled work shifts. To produce good-quality solutions in fast computational times for large-sized instances, we develop a two-phase heuristic. In the first phase, an approximate mixed-integer programming model is used to suggest temporary shifts and extensions to regular shifts and to schedule and assign tasks. In the second phase, a column-generation heuristic embedded in a rolling horizon procedure determines the final shifts and assigns activities to them. Computational results obtained on randomly generated instances are reported to evaluate the validity of the proposed solution method.     

Gain improvement and microwave operation of 4H–SiC MESFET with a new recessed metal ring structure

A new multi-recessed 4H-SiC MESFET with recessed metal ring for RF embedded circuits is proposed (MR2-MESFET). The key idea in the proposed structure is based on the elimination of the spaces adjacent to gate and stopped the depletion region extending towards drain and source and the reduction of the channel thickness between gate and drain to increase breakdown voltage (V_BR); meanwhile the elimination of the gate depletion layer extension to source/drain to decrease gate-source capacitance (C_gs). The influence of multi-recessed drift region and recessed metal ring structures on the characteristics of the MR2-MESFET is studied by numerical simulation. The optimized results show that the V_BR of the MR2-MESFET is 119% larger than that of the conventional 4H–SiC MESFET (C-MESFET); meanwhile maintain 85% higher saturation drain current. Therefore, the maximum output power density of the MR2-MESFET is 23.1 W/mm compared to 5.5 W/mm of the C-MESFET. Also, the cut-off frequency (f_T) and the maximum oscillation frequency (f_max) of 24.9 and 91.7 GHz are obtained for the MR2-MESFET compared to 11 and 40 GHz of the C-MESFET structure, respectively. The proposed MR2-MESFET shows a maximum stable gain (MSG) exceeding 23.6 dB at 3.1 GHz which is the highest gain yet reported for SiC MESFETs, showing the potential of this device for high power RF applications.     

Visual search performance among persons with schizophrenia as a function of target eccentricity.

The current study investigated one possible mechanism of impaired visual attention among patients with schizophrenia: a reduced visual span. Visual span is the region of the visual field from which one can extract information during a single eye fixation. This study hypothesized that schizophrenia-related visual search impairment is mediated, in part, by a smaller visual span. To test this hypothesis, 23 patients with schizophrenia and 22 healthy controls completed a visual search task where the target was pseudorandomly presented at different distances from the center of the display. Response times were analyzed as a function of search condition (feature vs. conjunctive), display size, and target eccentricity. Consistent with previous reports, patient search times were more adversely affected as the number of search items increased in the conjunctive search condition. It was important however, that patients’ conjunctive search times were also impacted to a greater degree by target eccentricity. Moreover, a significant impairment in patients’ visual search performance was only evident when targets were more eccentric and their performance was more similar to healthy controls when the target was located closer to the center of the search display. These results support the hypothesis that a narrower visual span may underlie impaired visual search performance among patients with schizophrenia. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)