• Industrial Engineering and Management Systems
• /
• v.7 no.2
• /
• pp.171-181
• /
• 2008

Home care, known also as domiciliary care, is part of the community care service that is a responsibility of the local government authorities in the UK as well as many other countries around the world. The aim is to provide the care and support needed to assist people, particularly older people, people with physical or learning disabilities and people who need assistance due to illness to live as independently as possible in their own homes. It is performed primarily by care workers visiting clients' homes where they provide help with daily activities. This paper is concerned with the dispatching of care workers to clients in an efficient manner. The optimized routine for each care worker determines a schedule to achieve the minimum total cost (in terms of distance traveled) without violating the capacity and time window constraints. A collaborative population-based meta-heuristic called Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is applied to solve the problem. A particle is defined as a multi-dimensional point in space which represents the corresponding schedule for care workers and their clients. Each dimension of a particle represents a care activity and the corresponding, allocated care worker. The continuous position value of each dimension determines the care worker to be assigned and also the assignment priority. A heuristic assignment scheme is specially designed to transform the continuous position value to the discrete job schedule. This job schedule represents the potential feasible solution to the problem. The Earliest Start Time Priority with Minimum Distance Assignment (ESTPMDA) technique is developed for generating an initial solution which guides the search direction of the particle. Local improvement procedures (LIP), insertion and swap, are embedded in the PSO algorithm in order to further improve the quality of the solution. The proposed methodology is implemented, tested, and compared with existing solutions for some 'real' problem instances.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Electromagnetic Engineering and Science
• /
• v.22 no.6
• /
• pp.648-653
• /
• 2011

In this paper, coordinated space division multiple access(SDMA) technology is proposed to mitigate inter-cell interference by using partial channel state information in cooperative wireless communications system with limited feedback. Each AT selects an optimal cluster transmission mode and sends it back to a cluster scheduler, and at the cluster scheduler, ATs are scheduled within a AT group with the identical cluster transmission mode, and the optimal transmission mode and the corresponding scheduled ATs are determined to maximize scheduling priority. Also, in order to enhance multiuser diversity gain, an extended transmission feedback method is proposed to feed back multiple preferred cluster transmission modes at each AT. It is shown that the proposed coordinated SDMA scheme outperforms existing non-coordinated SDMA schemes in terms of the average system throughput.

• The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society
• /
• v.7 no.2
• /
• pp.337-346
• /
• 2000

In a Vod(video0on-demand) system, a scheduling strategy is designed to increase the system efficiency and to eatisfy the isochronous requirements of showing a video to multiple viewers with one disk access. In this paper, we have proposed the Stream Relay Scheme (SRS) which utilizes the client's buffer space to reduce the server's disk I/O, buffer consumption, and stream capacity. Under the SRS which we have proposed in this paper, the server does not service all the requests directly but forwards the new request selectively to the client who is being served currently in order to reduce the initial latency and increase the system throughput. The SRS-BAT which integrated the SRS with the Batching technique is introduced. The results of the simulated experiments which compared the SRS with the conventional technique have shown the noticeable performance improvements in terms of initial latency and the server throughput.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
• /
• v.24 no.11
• /
• pp.1477-1483
• /
• 2020

The stability guarantee of wireless network based control systems is still challenging due to the lossy links and node failures. This paper proposes a hierarchical cluster-based network protocol called robust wireless sensor and actuator network (R-WSAN) by combining time, channel, and space resource diversity. R-WSAN includes a scheduling algorithm to support the network resource allocation and a control task sharing scheme to maintain the control stability of multiple plants. R-WSAN was implemented on a real test-bed using Zolertia RE-Mote embedded hardware platform running the Contiki-NG operating system. Our experimental results demonstrate that R-WSAN provides highly reliable and robust performance against lossy links and node failures. Furthermore, the proposed scheduling algorithm and the task sharing scheme meet the stability requirement of control systems, even if the controller fails to support the control task.

• Quality Improvement in Health Care
• /
• v.4 no.1
• /
• pp.116-124
• /
• 1997

Background : As parking problem caused by increasing owner-driver and patients concentrating to a general hospital is becoming one of the dissatisfactions in medical care. It is time that a general hospital should solve the parking problem in a desirable way. The purpose of this survey is to let the clients understand the basic motivation of the pay parking and develop the better parking system. Methods : Clients of a tertiary care hospital in Chon-ju were surveyed by means of a questionnaire. All in all, 193 subjects answered the questionnaire. Results : In relation to previous experiences, 39.6% of the subjects experienced inconvenience with confused parking lot and the shortage of parking space. Under the current parking system, the subjects who felt the available parking space was enough were more than those who didn't 62.7% of the subjects answered that they could find the parking lot easily. 33.2% of the subjects mentioned that it was not easy to drive in the parking area ; The reasons were pointed out the shortage of space, disordered parking, and insufficient guide. 12.8% of the subjects satisfied with the current administering system of parking lot. The outpatients were more affirmative than the admitted patients about the charging system. As for the parking fee, 64% of the subjects answered that it is expensive, and 89.5% of the subjects thought imposing of parking fee is irrational. Conclusion : To say as a whole, the basic purpose of the charging system are more or less accepted. However, the management details like parking facilities and payment method are dissatisfactory, so it is necessary to improve the management system. It is also noted that the inpatients showed more negative attitude than the outpatients with the charging system. To secure a more convenient parking, the parking system should be considered in relation to the information service, kind guidance, improve facilities, personnel cooperation, fix outpatient scheduling system, etc.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Railway
• /
• v.18 no.6
• /
• pp.619-629
• /
• 2015

The train conflict resolution problem refers to an adjustment of the train operation schedule in order to minimize the delay propagation when a train conflict is predicted or when a train conflict occurs. Previous train studies of train conflict resolutions are limited in terms of the size of the problems to be solved due to exponential increases in the variables. In this paper, we propose a train conflict resolution model using a time-space network to solve the train conflict situation in the operational phase. The proposed model adjusts the size of the problem by giving only the dwell tolerance in the time-space network only for stops at the station after a train conflict. In addition, the proposed model can solve large problems using a path flow variable. The study presents a train delay propagation analysis and experimental results of train conflict resolution assessments as well using the proposed model.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.20 no.12
• /
• pp.230-240
• /
• 2020

To develop a virtual world-based immersive tutoring system, we would like to develop a simulation in the spatial aspect to maximize the diversity and realism of the situation. This implementation requires the modeling of virtual space as well as the knowledge and intelligent thinking functions of virtual humans. First, information structures are needed to simulate the hierarchical and multifaceted composition of space and the corresponding knowledge of virtual humans. Specifically, four structures for 2.5D spatial distribution expression, complex spatial relationship expression, object expression, and temporal and spatial representation of events are developed respectively. It then uses these expressed knowledge to develop the spatial thinking function of virtual humans needed to make spatial movement. In general, events have a chain effect on adjacent or connected objects through force, resulting in a variety of situations and reflected in the planning of the next action by the virtual humans involved. For this purpose, the development of events according to historical trends is recorded on the representation structure of time and space. It embodies typical events to demonstrate the feasibility of independent behavior in complex spaces among virtual people.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
• /
• v.41 no.9
• /
• pp.681-688
• /
• 2013

Several problems caused by inevitable increment of airplane have been issued. The most effective solution to solve the issues is considered as establishing appropriate Air Traffic Management (ATM) that reduces aircraft's delay at an airport and intensify the airport's capacity. The purpose of this paper is to produce the optimum aircraft schedules that maximize the aircraft throughput by smooth air traffic flow near terminal area of an airport In this paper, mathematical formulations of the scheduling problem are firstly specified. Based on the mathematical modelling, an Optimization-Based Flight Scheduler that provides the optimum flight schedules for arriving aircraft is developed by introducing the Mixed Integer Linear Programming(MILP) and the Genetic Algorithms(GA). With this scheduler, we calculated the optimum schedules to compare to real schedule data from an Incheon Airport. As a result, it is validated that aircraft throughput produced by the optimum schedule is much better than that of the schedule from the Incheon airport. The optimization-based flight scheduler is expected to deal with problems due to the aircraft saturation in near future.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
• /
• v.39B no.1
• /
• pp.1-7
• /
• 2014

This paper proposes an efficient test wrapper design that reduces overall test time in multi-core SoC. After initial local wrapper solution sets for all the cores are determined using well-known Combine algorithm, proposed algorithm selects a dominant core which consumes the longest test time in multi-core SoC. Then, the wrapper characteristics in the number of TAM wires and the test time for other cores are adjusted based on test time of the dominant core. For some specific cores, the number of TAM wires can be reduced by increasing its test time for design space exploration purposes. These modified wrapper characteristics are added to the previous wrapper solution set. By expanding previous local wrapper solution set to global wrapper solution set, overall test time for Multi-core SoC can be reduced by an efficient test scheduler. Effectiveness of the proposed wrapper is verified on ITC'02 benchmark circuits using $B^*$-tree based test scheduler. Our experimental results show that the test time is reduced by an average of 4.7% when compared to that of employing previous wrappers.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
• /
• v.39 no.6
• /
• pp.505-511
• /
• 2015

Solid oxide fuel cell operate at high temperature ($800{\sim}1000^{\circ}C$). High temperature have an advantage of system efficiency, but a weak durability. In this study, linear state space controller is designed to handle the temperature of solid oxide fuel cell system for proper thermal management. System model is developed under simulink environment with Thermolib$^{(R)}$. Since the thermally optimal system integration improves efficiency, very complicated thermal integration approach is selected for system integration. It shows that temperature response of fuel cell stack and catalytic burner are operated at severe non-linearity. To control non-linear temperature response of SOFC system, gain scheduled linear quadratic regulator is designed. Results shows that the temperature response of stack and catalytic burner follows the command over whole ranges of operations.