Outpatient practice constitutes an integral part of medical care in hospital for patients who are not admitted into the hospital, but receive the preliminary care services and are discharged the same day. As hospital managements evaluate potential approaches to improve cost, quality, waiting times and throughput efficiencies in the hospital outpatient clinic (HOC), the deployment of cost-effective outpatient settings emerges to be the dominant issues. The research on the optimal deployment of medical resources appears to be a crucial issue of hospital steady-state management. In terms of patients flow and scarce medical resources, the queue-based methodology can be applied to approach the cost optimization and provide a trade-off study between average waiting times (AWT) and the cost issue for hospital management as well. To model the proposed approach for HOC qualitative profile, a generic outpatient clinic system is mapped into the M/M/R/K queue with reneging for application. On quantitative work, comprehensive mathematic analysis on cost and AWT pattern has been made in detail. Relevant simulations have also been conducted to validate the proposed optimization model. The design illustration is presented to demonstrate the application scenario in HOC platform. Hence the proposed approach indeed provides a feasibly cost-oriented decision support framework to adapt management requirement.

Echinococcosis is a zoonotic parasitic disease caused by the larval stages of taeniid tapeworm of the genus Echinococcus . Four out of six species have been considered as a public health concern: Echinococcus granulosus (which causes cystic echinococcosis), Echinococcus multilocularis (which causes alveolar echinococcosis), and Echinococcus vogeli and Echinococcus oligarchs (which causes polycystic echinococcosis). Two new species have recently been identified: Echinococcus shiquicus in small mammals from the Tibetan plateau and Echinococcus felids in African lions, but their zoonotic transmission potential is equivocal. Several studies have shown that this disease is of increasing public health concern and that it can be regarded as emerging or re-emerging disease. The disease is found in many parts of the world specifically in the agricultural inclined regions in the northern part of Africa, the southern part of South America, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East and Southern West part of Asia (Eckert and Deplazes, 2004). This short review is intended to underscore the general aspect of the disease with particular reference to public health importance.

The contribution summarizes author’s experiences of leading a course on process modelling & simulation at Faculty of Applied Informatics, Tomas Bata University in Zlin, Czech Republic. It presents contents of the course for both, lectures and tutorials together with the used methods and software tools. Necessary requirements for passing the course successfully are also provided together with some statistics concerning students’ results. The paper ends presenting one typical students’ final project followed by teacher’s reflection on this course and its possible future directions. As such, this paper can serve as an inspiration for other similarly oriented departments where modelling & simulation tools and methods play important roles in engineering education.

As air travelling increases rapidly past decades, airport service providers need to improve the quality of their airports’ informative service setting items (ISSI) in order to enhance value of the service and to satisfy travellers. This study therefore suggests several ways to improve the service quality using a multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) model by combining a decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) method with a Višekriterijumsko Kompromisno Rangiranje (VIKOR) method to assess service performance. The assessment result provides an influential network relationship map (INRM), finding the influential factors with a DEMATEL-based analytic network process (DANP). The result shows that the quality of information and service staffs’ attitudes toward ISSI are important factors to consider when improving service quality. The quality of information also influences service staffs’ attitudes as well as visitors’ knowledge and involvement in the service. The knowledge of the systems and services and users’ participation are also important, whereas the reliability of ISSI and the relevance of information service are less important. In general, we find that there is still a need for improving the serving quality of ISSI at airports. This result provides managers of airports and airlines with a knowledge-based understanding of strategies to satisfy air travellers’ needs and to encourage them to use airports’ ISSI more actively.

In this article, a new four-parameter lifetime distribution, namely, Weibull-Linear ex- ponential distribution is defined and studied. A several of its structural properties such as quartiles, moments, mean waiting time, mean residual lifetime, Renyi entropy, mode and order statistics are derived. Based on the idea of the Weibull T − X family which was proposed by Alzaatreh [6] the new density function of this model is developed. The model parameters, as well as some of the lifetime parameters (reliability and failure rate functions), are estimated using the maximum likelihood method. Asymptotic confidence intervals estimates of the model parameters are also evaluated by using the Fisher informa- tion matrix. Moreover, to construct the asymptotic confidence intervals of the reliability and failure rate functions, we need to find the variance of them, which are approximated by the delta method. A real data set is used to illustrate the application of the Weibull-Linear Exponential distribution. The new distribution can be considered an alternative model to other lifetime distributions which can be fit for modeling positive real data in many fields.