No abstract

The artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is a popular swarm based technique, which is inspired from the intelligent foraging behavior of honeybee swarms. This paper proposes a new variant of ABC algorithm, namely, enhanced ABC with solution acceptance rule and probabilistic multisearch (ABC-SA) to address global optimization problems. A new solution acceptance rule is proposed where, instead of greedy selection between old solution and new candidate solution, worse candidate solutions have a probability to be accepted. Additionally, the acceptance probability of worse candidates is nonlinearly decreased throughout the search process adaptively. Moreover, in order to improve the performance of the ABC and balance the intensification and diversification, a probabilistic multisearch strategy is presented. Three different search equations with distinctive characters are employed using predetermined search probabilities. By implementing a new solution acceptance rule and a probabilistic multisearch approach, the intensification and diversification performance of the ABC algorithm is improved. The proposed algorithm has been tested on well-known benchmark functions of varying dimensions by comparing against novel ABC variants, as well as several recent state-of-the-art algorithms. Computational results show that the proposed ABC-SA outperforms other ABC variants and is superior to state-of-the-art algorithms proposed in the literature.

No abstract

Managing healthcare delivery systems plays an important role for healthcare providers in order to have high quality service performances. Inpatient pharmacy delivery systems are one of those that have a key role in hospital's service quality. Simulation is the best tool to analyze the hospital pharmacy operations due to their inherent complexity. In this article, a simulation model is developed based on data collected from a hospital in Turkey to analyze its pharmacy delivery system. In comparison to the baseline system, two different scenarios with varying factors are investigated, seeking to minimize drug delivery time to patients. The results presented here indicate the possibility for improved system performance.

No abstract