En förstudie till kvalitetsutveckling på GD-tryck

The print- and mailroom at Gefle Dagblad (GD-tyck) is handling an increasing amount of commercial jobsalong with the newspaper production. Investments have above all been done in the mailroom to be able tooffer commercial costumers a higher degree of finishing and there are plans to expand further in the commercialmarket. GD-tryck is of the opinion that they need to secure the quality of their production to be ableto do such expansion, which is the reason why a quality system of some kind may be appropriate. Howeverthere are no plans to certify such a quality system according to ISO 9001:2000.In this exam report the present methods of working have been analysed from a quality perspective.Suggestions on how GD-tryck should be working with quality development is presented in the fields whereshortage of quality has been discovered. The suggestions taken together do not form a quality system butcan be looked at as ideas of approach to quality fields that have to be developed if a working quality systemshall be accomplished.Many of the quality fields that have been discussed do not have anything to do with technical qualitydirectly but are in some degree requirements for a working quality system. It also feels urgent to illustratethese fields in this exam report when most people at GD seems to place quality as identical with technicalquality. Technical quality is also a quality field where GD-tryck has few concrete problems today and theyalready produce printed matters of a high quality. Afact that might make it difficult to adopt a quality systemas the benefits of such a system is not obvious.

Statistical bound of genetic solutions to quadratic assignment problems

Quadratic assignment problems (QAPs) are commonly solved by heuristic methods, where the optimum is sought iteratively. Heuristics are known to provide good solutions but the quality of the solutions, i.e., the confidence interval of the solution is unknown. This paper uses statistical optimum estimation techniques (SOETs) to assess the quality of Genetic algorithm solutions for QAPs. We examine the functioning of different SOETs regarding biasness, coverage rate and length of interval, and then we compare the SOET lower bound with deterministic ones. The commonly used deterministic bounds are confined to only a few algorithms. We show that, the Jackknife estimators have better performance than Weibull estimators, and when the number of heuristic solutions is as large as 100, higher order JK-estimators perform better than lower order ones. Compared with the deterministic bounds, the SOET lower bound performs significantly better than most deterministic lower bounds and is comparable with the best deterministic ones. 

Health problems in elderly patients during the first post-stroke year

BACKGROUND: A wide range of health problems has been reported in elderly post-stroke patients. AIM: The aim of this study was to analyse the prevalence and timing of health problems identified by patient interviews and scrutiny of primary health care and municipality elderly health care records during the first post-stroke year. METHODS: A total of 390 consecutive patients, ≥65 years, discharged alive from hospital after a stroke event, were followed for 1 year post-admission. Information on the health care situation during the first post-stroke year was obtained from primary health care and municipal elderly health care records and through interviews with the stroke survivors, at 1 week after discharge, and 3 and 12 months after hospital admission. RESULTS: More than 90% had some health problem at some time during the year, while based on patient record data only 4-8% had problems during a given week. The prevalence of interview-based health problems was generally higher than record-based prevalence, and the ranking order was moderately different. The most frequently interview-reported problems were associated with perception, activity, and tiredness, while the most common record-based findings indicated pain, bladder and bowel function, and breathing and circulation problems. There was co-occurrence between some problems, such as those relating to cognition, activity, and tiredness. CONCLUSIONS: Almost all patients had a health problem during the year, but few occurred in a given week. Cognitive and communication problems were more common in interview data than record data. Co-occurrence may be used to identify subtle health problems.

GRASP and statistical bounds for heuristic solutions to combinatorial problems

The quality of a heuristic solution to a NP-hard combinatorial problem is hard to assess. A few studies have advocated and tested statistical bounds as a method for assessment. These studies indicate that statistical bounds are superior to the more widely known and used deterministic bounds. However, the previous studies have been limited to a few metaheuristics and combinatorial problems and, hence, the general performance of statistical bounds in combinatorial optimization remains an open question. This work complements the existing literature on statistical bounds by testing them on the metaheuristic Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedures (GRASP) and four combinatorial problems. Our findings confirm previous results that statistical bounds are reliable for the p-median problem, while we note that they also seem reliable for the set covering problem. For the quadratic assignment problem, the statistical bounds has previously been found reliable when obtained from the Genetic algorithm whereas in this work they found less reliable. Finally, we provide statistical bounds to four 2-path network design problem instances for which the optimum is currently unknown.