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Since the 1970s, Brazil has carried out the most successful world program of commercial biomass for use and production of energy by stimulating its sugarcane industry and promoting the large-scale production of ethanol nationwide in response to the first oil shock. Today, the technologies behind ethanol production are well established. Brazil is the world's largest sugarcane supplier, producing its ethanol at a competitive price. If other sugarcane producing countries decided to join Brazil's move toward the production of this biofuel, what impacts might there be for each country's economy and employment? This is what we investigate in this paper. Prime candidates for ethanol production include Australia, China, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, and the United States of America. We evaluated the potential socioeconomic impacts of developing this promising industry by using an input–output approach. More specifically, we adapted the Brazilian method of producing ethanol to these countries' distinct economies. We augmented the input–output table of each country, inserting a new ethanol industry based on the Brazilian ethanol production model. We also augmented their new ethanol industry's sales following a hypothetical hydrous and anhydrous ethanol consumption scenario. Thereafter, we reconcile the national accounts, concluding our analysis by quantifying and comparing the different net effects of this new industry for each of the assessed countries for the year of 2009. We demonstrate which industries would be expected to be positively or negatively impacted by this substitution in each country; and find that not all of the countries we assessed would experience positive socioeconomic results from emulating Brazil's production of ethanol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, employing the multicriteria method of decision support MACBETH, proposes a model for the evaluation of interdisciplinary graduate programs, based on indicators already used in the current model of evaluation of Brazilian graduate studies by Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES). In the present work, ten Computational Modeling Programs were considered, and six criteria were selected to verify the performance of these programs. There is presently in Brazil a steady growth of requests for accreditation of interdisciplinary programs and a quest to evaluate them differently, given their peculiarities. The main contribution of this study is to propose an alternative methodology for the evaluation of graduate programs, respecting the characteristics of the area of knowledge in which it is inserted, which is able to rank them based on qualitative judgments and to verify how much each course can progress, according to the score established for each program in a set of criteria considered. A comparison was made with the results of the evaluation methodology used by CAPES in the year 2017, being possible to verify some similarities in the evaluations of the graduate programs by the two methods. Finally, a sensitivity analysis was performed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an integer programming model and a matheuristic for the physician rostering problem. Constraints related to physician's preferences, legal restrictions, hospital requirements and workload balance are investigated. Moreover, a comparison of physician and nurse rostering is analyzed to identify common constraints present in both problems. The lack of a mathematical model that could be applied in the studied problem motivated the development of a new formulation. Data and constraints of the proposed physician rostering problem were provided by Hospital de Clínicas de Porto Alegre (HCPA), Brazil. Due to the difficulty of solving large instances, a matheuristic which combines integer programming and heuristic techniques was proposed to approach the problem. Computational experiments were conducted employing commercial and open-source solvers. Results revealed that open-source solvers are a good alternative to solve small problems, while the proposed matheuristic generated near-optimal results within acceptable computation time employing larger instances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]