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Recent international guidelines recommend rapid initiation and titration of basic treatments of heart failure but do not explain how to achieve this goal. Despite these recommendations, implementation of treatment in daily practice is poor. This may be partly explained by the profile of the patients (frailty, comorbidities), safety considerations and tolerability issues related to kydney function, low blood pressure or heart rate and hyperkalaemia. In this special article, we intended to help the physician, through an algorithmic approach, to quickly and safely introduce guideline-directed medical therapy in the field of heart failure with ejection fraction under 50%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Propose platform-based platooning system to maximize truck platooning participation. • Consider stability of formed platoons arising from truck preference of partners. • Devise a two-phase algorithmic approach to seek an MS-TPP solution. • Key of the approach is progressively reducing lengths of truck preference lists. • Numerical experiments show computational efficiency and scalability of the approach. Truck platooning refers to trucks traveling in convoy with longitudinal proximity. By reducing aerodynamic drag, platooning cuts truck energy use and operating cost along with other benefits to the freight transportation system. This research proposes a platform-based platooning system to maximize the participation of truck platooning considering stability of the formed platoons that arises from truck preferences of platooning partners. Preference-based platooning is of both scientific interest and practical importance to the trucking sector, which is highly fragmented especially in the US. The preferences depend on the benefits of fuel saving and schedule adjustment to coordinate the time for platoon formation. The formed platoons are stable in the sense that no two trucks in two platoons want to break away from their current platoons and platoon with each other. Tackling this operation planning problem, the proposed system involves a platform interacting with individual trucks in a way that reduces truck communication and computation burdens, mitigates truck privacy concerns, and overcomes trucks misreporting private information. The central methodological investigation of the interactive process is on how to solve the Maximum Stable Truck Platooning Participation (MS-TPP) problem, for which a two-phase algorithmic approach is proposed. The underlying idea of this approach is to progressively reduce the lengths of truck preference lists, by eliminating truck pairs that do not affect the MS-TPP solution presence and separating trucks in odd rotations – which are key constructs in this approach – from the rest of the truck population. Theoretical properties and computational complexity of this two-phase algorithmic approach are investigated, along with a comparison with an integer programming approach and extensive numerical experiments in the context of a northern Illinois road network in the US. We find that the proposed two-phase algorithmic approach is very efficient compared to the integer programming approach in forming a maximum number of truck platoons while ensuring stability. In addition, the percentage of trucks that end up platooning by solving MS-TPP is much greater than using a greedy approach. The algorithmic approach is computationally scalable for solving large problem instances. The advantages of MS-TPP, in terms of the percentage of trucks in platooning and the average utility gain, become even more prominent as we deal with a larger system with more trucks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: A methodology and algorithm are proposed in this work to conceive a limited set of dependent elementary reaction steps for a reaction mechanism by exploiting the reaction route (RR) graph of the mechanism. These steps are constrained by the conservation principles and must be subjected to thermodynamic feasibility studies. This method is expected to aid in the conception of new steps, which might otherwise be ignored, especially in the case of large mechanisms. In order to illustrate the method, it is applied to the chlorine electrode reaction mechanism. The result indicated that a reaction pathway consisting of one of the newly proposed steps is the dominant one. This example illustrated the potential of the proposed method to identify new steps to a mechanism and thereby help in mechanism elucidation. However, these new steps must be subjected to further critical study before they can be accepted. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

We present an efficient algorithm, which solves an isoperimetric type problem in the class of Bézier curves of degree . This algorithm requires to compute the maximal characteristic value and the corresponding principal vector of a regular pencil problem with block square matrices of dimension . The coordinates of the principal vector determine the control points of the extremal curve, while the characteristic value gives the maximal area bounded by this curve. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]