• Korean Journal of Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Engineering
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• v.25 no.8
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• pp.464-470
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• 2013

Economic feasibility was conducted regarding the regulation that dictates obligatory installation of renewable energy facilities in small proportion. A concern is how to allocate the capacities of candidate facilities (solar collectors, PV cells and geothermal heat pumps) with minimum cost, and meet the obligatory energy supply proportion. A design rule has been developed, with which a designer can tune his or her design strategy between installation cost and LCC. This was derived mainly from documents regarding the KEMCO installation guide. It was concluded that PV was the cheapest, with respect to installation cost, but a geothermal heat pump was the most recommended, when LCC was also taken into account. The proposed design result was also confirmed, by simulation results obtained from Energy Plus.

• Korea Journal of Hospital Management
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.44-57
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• 2017

The objective of this study is to investigate financial integrity strategies for sustainable development of local public medical centers, and particularly focus on seeking ways to enhance its financial efficiency and publicness. The data which was collected from 33 local public medical centers was analyzed by Data Envelopment Analysis to measure its financial efficiency. Then, Matrix Analysis was used to examine the association of financial efficiency and publicness of local public medical centers with related factors. In the aspects of facilities and location, according to the results, the local public medical centers which have larger number of available hospital beds or located in bigger cities were examined to have higher degree of publicness. In the aspect of human resources, greater number of doctors made both financial efficiency and the degree of publicness decreased, whereas higher participation rate of educational program for doctors affects increasing its financial efficiency and publicness. Lastly, in the aspect of costs, higher labor, material, and administrative cost diminished financial efficiency, but enhanced the degree of publicness. Based on these results, this study concluded that enhancing the publicness of local public medical centers should be pursued by increasing the accessibility with better facilities and location, and also concurrently organizing rational expenditure structure with appropriate cost investment to the resources of local public medical centers. Also, it is necessary to enhance both financial efficiency and publicness simultaneously by improving the quality of health care services through the educational programs for medical staffs.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Geothermal and Hydrothermal Energy
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.45-57
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• 2022

The Ministry of National Defense of the Republic of Korea is showing a lot of interest in net zero-energy buildings (NZEBs) to reduce energy consumption of military facilities and to promote green growth policy in military sector. The application of building passive technologies and renewable energies is essential to achieving NZEBs. This paper analyzed energy performance and energy cost on the conventional heating and cooling system (baseline scenario) and three different alternative scenarios (ALT 1, ALT 2 and ALT 3) applied in a hypothetical military building. A building modeling and simulation software (DesignBuilder V6.1) with EnergyPlus calculation engine was used to calculate the energy consumption for each scenario. Overall, when the GSHPs are applied to both space airconditioning and domestic hot water (DHW) production, Alt-2 and Alt-3, the amount of energy consumption for target building can be greatly reduced. In addition, when the building envelope performance is increased like Alt-3, the energy consumption can be further reduced. The annual energy cost analysis showed that the baseline was approximately 161 million KRW, while Alt-3 was approximately 33 million KRW. Therefore, it was analyzed that the initial construction cost increase could be recovered within about 6.7 years for ALT 3. The results of this study can help decision-makers to determine the optimal strategy for implementing GSHP systems in military buildings through energy performance and initial construction cost assessment.

• Industrial Engineering and Management Systems
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.1-9
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• 2002

Among the state-space description of discrete vent systems, the max-plus algebra is known as one of the effective approach. This paper proposes a model predictive control (MPC) design method based on the max-plus algebra. Several studies related to these topics have been done so far under the constraints that system parameters are constant. However, in practical systems such as production systems, it is common and sometimes inevitable that system parameters vary by each event. Therefore, it is of worth to design a new MPC controller taking account of adjustable system parameters. In this paper, we formulate system parameters as adjustable ones, and they are solved by a linear programing method. Since MPC determines optimal control input considering future reference signals, the controller can be more robust and the operation cost can be reduced. Finally, the proposed method is applied to a production system with three machines, and the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified through a numerical simulation.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.224-241
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• 2015

Multiview plus depth (MVD) videos are widely used in free-viewpoint TV systems. The best-known technique to determine depth information is based on stereo vision. In this paper, we propose a novel local stereo matching algorithm which is radiometric invariant. The key idea is to use a combined matching cost of intensity and gradient based similarity measure. In addition, we realize an adaptive cost aggregation scheme by constructing an adaptive support window for each pixel, which can solve the boundary and low texture problems. In the disparity refinement process, we propose a four-step post-processing technique to handle outliers and occlusions. Moreover, we conduct stereo reconstruction tests to verify the performance of the algorithm more intuitively. Experimental results show that the proposed method is effective and robust against local radiometric distortion. It has an average error of 5.93% on the Middlebury benchmark and is compatible to the state-of-art local methods.

• Health Policy and Management
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.149-156
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• 2017

Background: This study was conducted to evaluate the performance of the Hierarchical Condition Category (HCC) model, identify potentially high-cost patients, and examine the effects of adding prior utilization to the risk model using Korean claims data. Methods: We incorporated 2 years of data from the National Health Insurance Services-National Sample Cohort. Five risk models were used to predict health expenditures: model 1 (age/sex groups), model 2 (the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services-HCC with age/sex groups), model 3 (selected 54 HCCs with age/sex groups), model 4 (bed-days of care plus model 3), and model 5 (medication-days plus model 3). We evaluated model performance using $R^2$ at individual level, predictive positive value (PPV) of the top 5% of high-cost patients, and predictive ratio (PR) within subgroups. Results: The suitability of the model, including prior use, bed-days, and medication-days, was better than other models. $R^2$ values were 8%, 39%, 37%, 43%, and 57% with model 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, respectively. After being removed the extreme values, the corresponding $R^2$ values were slightly improved in all models. PPVs were 16.4%, 25.2%, 25.1%, 33.8%, and 53.8%. Total expenditure was underpredicted for the highest expenditure group and overpredicted for the four other groups. PR had a tendency to decrease from younger group to older group in both female and male. Conclusion: The risk adjustment models are important in plan payment, reimbursement, profiling, and research. Combined prior use and diagnostic data are more powerful to predict health costs and to identify high-cost patients.

• Korean Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
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• v.7 no.6
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• pp.132-140
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• 2006

On December, 1996, Construction Management(CM) was introduced in Korean construction industry due to its managerial efficiency proven in the international construction industries. However, It have had serious problems with many regulations, standards, manuals and details of practices considering its constituents and industry conditions. Especially, there were controversial points in the CM fee estimate; difference between the fee on the owner's view point and that from contractor's that impedes appropriate CM services. Therefore, this paper is to analyze public construction projects into Cm fee calculation such as fee as a percent of construction cost, cost plus fixed fee and contract price, and analyzed what is irrationality and why irrationality is made. So it makes a contribution to a study on standards for paper CM fee calculation.

• Korean Journal of Clinical Pharmacy
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.30-38
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• 2010

This study was conducted to analyze cost-effectiveness of neoadjuvant chemotherapy for locally advanced head and neck cancer in Korean healthcare setting. We constructed a decision analytical model to estimate total costs and outcomes of paclitaxel+cisplatin (PC) or docetaxel+cisplatin+5-FU (DCF) for 2 years time horizon in 100 patient cohort with locally advanced head and neck cancer. Base analysis showed that cost savings of PC regimen were 379 million Korean Won and 231 million Korean Won in societal and payer's perspectives, respectively, compared to DCF regimen, and life saved was 0.18. PC regimen as a dominant strategy was found to be robust through sensitivity analyses.

• Journal of the Korean Solar Energy Society
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.50-57
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• 2012

Recently the renewable energy has been used widely and the importance of renewable sources is bigger than before. And the government enforced a law to the public buildings to install the renewable energy facilities. The capacity of facilities was 5% of total construction cost until April 13, 2011. Since then, the government changed the law from 5% of total construction cost to 10% of predicted energy usage for the resonable use of the renewable energy facilities. In this study, the comparative analysis is conducted according to the law to the building installed PV system through the Energy Plus simulation. And the method for improving renewable energy supply ratio was analyzed using existing PV array. Adjusting the PV array angle is the best way to generate more electric power without additional fee. When applying the month optimum angle, 3,600kWh of electric power are more generated compared to the existing angle.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.15 no.20
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• pp.8993-9004
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• 2014

Background: The incidence rate and the treatment costs of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) are high, especially in Thailand. Previous studies indicated that early detection by a surveillance program could help by down-staging. This study aimed to compare the costs and health outcomes associated with the introduction of a HCC surveillance program with no program and to estimate the budget impact if the HCC surveillance program were implemented. Materials and Methods: A cost utility analysis using a decision tree and Markov models was used to compare costs and outcomes during the lifetime period based on a societal perspective between alternative HCC surveillance strategies with no program. Costs included direct medical, direct non-medical, and indirect costs. Health outcomes were measured as life years (LYs), and quality adjusted life years (QALYs). The results were presented in terms of the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) in Thai THB per QALY gained. One-way and probabilistic sensitivity analyses were applied to investigate parameter uncertainties. Budget impact analysis (BIA) was performed based on the governmental perspective. Results: Semi-annual ultrasonography (US) and semi-annual ultrasonography plus alpha-fetoprotein (US plus AFP) as the first screening for HCC surveillance would be cost-effective options at the willingness to pay (WTP) threshold of 160,000 THB per QALY gained compared with no surveillance program (ICER=118,796 and ICER=123,451 THB/QALY), respectively. The semi-annual US plus AFP yielded more net monetary benefit, but caused a substantially higher budget (237 to 502 million THB) than semi-annual US (81 to 201 million THB) during the next ten fiscal years. Conclusions: Our results suggested that a semi-annual US program should be used as the first screening for HCC surveillance and included in the benefit package of Thai health insurance schemes for both chronic hepatitis B males and females aged between 40-50 years. In addition, policy makers considered the program could be feasible, but additional evidence is needed to support the whole prevention system before the implementation of a strategic plan.