15 resultados para Seasonal workers

em Cambridge University Engineering Department Publications Database


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This paper provides an insight into the long-term trends of the four seasonal and annual precipitations in various climatological regions and sub-regions in India. The trends were useful to investigate whether Indian seasonal rainfall is changing in terms of magnitude or location-wise. Trends were assessed over the period of 1954-2003 using parametric ordinary least square fits and non-parametric Mann-Kendall technique. The trend significance was tested at the 95% confidence level. Apart from the trends for individual climatological regions in India and the average for the whole of India, trends were also specifically determined for the possible smaller geographical areas in order to understand how different the trends would be from the bigger spatial scales. The smaller geographical regions consist of the whole southwestern continental state of Kerala. It was shown that there are decreasing trends in the spring and monsoon rainfall and increasing trends in the autumn and winter rainfalls. These changes are not always homogeneous over various regions, even in the very short scales implying a careful regional analysis would be necessary for drawing conclusions regarding agro-ecological or other local projects requiring change in rainfall information. Furthermore, the differences between the trend magnitudes and directions from the two different methods are significantly small and fall well within the significance limit for all the cases investigated in Indian regions (except where noted). © 2010 Springer-Verlag.

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Methods for determining cost-effectiveness of different treatments are well established, unlike appraisal of non-drug interventions, including novel diagnostics and biomarkers.

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Diagrammatic representations, such as process mapping and care pathways, have been often used for service evaluation and improvement in healthcare. While a broad range of diagrammatic representations exist, their application in healthcare has been very limited. There is a lack of understanding about how and which diagrams could be usable and useful to health workers. In this study, ten mental health workers were asked to discuss positive and negative issues around their service delivery using one or two diagrams of their choice out of seven different diagrams representing their service: care pathway diagram; organisation diagram; communication diagram; service blueprint; patient state transition diagram; free form diagram; geographic map. Their interactions with diagrams were video-taped for analysis. The patient state transition diagram was the most popular choice in spite of relatively low previous familiarity. The overall findings provided insight into a better use of diagrams in healthcare. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.

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Vision based tracking can provide the spatial location of construction entities such as equipment, workers, and materials in large scale, congested construction sites. It tracks entities in video streams by inferring their locations based on the entities’ visual features and motion histories. To initiate the process, it is necessary to determine the pixel areas corresponding to the construction entities to be tracked in the following consecutive video frames. In order to fully automate the process, an automated way of initialization is needed. This paper presents the method for construction worker detection which can automatically recognize and localize construction workers in video frames. The method first finds the foreground areas of moving objects using a background subtraction method. Within these foreground areas, construction workers are recognized based on the histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) and histogram of the HSV colors. HOG’s have proved to work effectively for detection of people, and the histogram of HSV colors helps differentiate between pedestrians and construction workers wearing safety vests. Preliminary experiments show that the proposed method has the potential to automate the initialization process of vision based tracking.

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Confronted with high variety and low volume market demands, many companies, especially the Japanese electronics manufacturing companies, have reconfigured their conveyor assembly lines and adopted seru production systems. Seru production system is a new type of work-cell-based manufacturing system. A lot of successful practices and experience show that seru production system can gain considerable flexibility of job shop and high efficiency of conveyor assembly line. In implementing seru production, the multi-skilled worker is the most important precondition, and some issues about multi-skilled workers are central and foremost. In this paper, we investigate the training and assignment problem of workers when a conveyor assembly line is entirely reconfigured into several serus. We formulate a mathematical model with double objectives which aim to minimize the total training cost and to balance the total processing times among multi-skilled workers in each seru. To obtain the satisfied task-to-worker training plan and worker-to-seru assignment plan, a three-stage heuristic algorithm with nine steps is developed to solve this mathematical model. Then, several computational cases are taken and computed by MATLAB programming. The computation and analysis results validate the performances of the proposed mathematical model and heuristic algorithm. © 2013 Springer-Verlag London.