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Transportation is an important component in the logistics and production processes. To accurately match rapidly growing demand and limited transport capacity, the goal of minimising costs while ensuring high service quality under existing infrastructure has received significant attention. This paper presents an integrated optimisation approach for the short-term operational management under daily fluctuating demand, with a focus on two key strategic decisions: train timetabling and coupling. In particular, an integrated two-stage stochastic model and a combined heuristic local search algorithm with the branch-and-bound method are developed to (1) obtain the optimal demand assignment to the rail network, (2) investigate trains' coupling plans to avoid waste of resources when demand is low, and (3) add candidate trains to generate new feasible timetables when demand surges. To verify the solving method, a lower bound algorithm is introduced. Using a hypothetical small-scale and a real-world China high-speed rail network as numerical experiments, different demand scales and critical parameters are tested to obtain optimised timetables. The results show that good solutions are achieved in several seconds, making it possible to adjust trains' schedules efficiently and effectively according to the variable demand in short-term operational management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cancer is a growing worldwide health problem with the most broadly studied treatments, in which immunotherapy has made notable advancements in recent years. However, innumerable patients have presented a poor response to immunotherapy and simultaneously experienced immune-related adverse events, with failed therapeutic results and increased mortality rates. Consequently, it is crucial to develop alternate tactics to boost therapeutic effects without producing negative side effects. Ultrasound is considered to possess significant therapeutic potential in the antitumor field because of its inherent characteristics, including cavitation, pyrolysis, and sonoporation. Herein, this timely review presents the comprehensive and systematic research progress of ultrasound-enhanced cancer immunotherapy, focusing on the various ultrasound-related mechanisms and strategies. Moreover, this review summarizes the design and application of current sonosensitizers based on sonodynamic therapy, with an attempt to provide guidance on new directions for future cancer therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lithology identification is the fundamental work of oil and gas reservoir exploration and reservoir evaluation. The lithology of volcanic reservoirs is complex and changeable, the longitudinal lithology changes a great deal, and the log response characteristics are similar. The traditional lithology identification methods face difficulties. Therefore, it is necessary to use machine learning methods to deeply explore the corresponding relationship between the conventional log curve and lithology in order to establish a lithology identification model. In order to accurately identify the dominant lithology of volcanic rock, this paper takes the Carboniferous intermediate basic volcanic reservoir in the Hongche fault zone as the research object. Firstly, the Synthetic Minority Over-Sampling Technique–Edited Nearest Neighbours (SMOTEENN) algorithm is used to solve the problem of the uneven data-scale distribution of different dominant lithologies in the data set. Then, based on the extreme gradient boosting tree model (XGBoost), the honey badger optimization algorithm (HBA) is used to optimize the hyperparameters, and the HBA-XGBoost intelligent model is established to carry out volcanic rock lithology identification research. In order to verify the applicability and efficiency of the proposed model in volcanic reservoir lithology identification, the prediction results of six commonly used machine learning models, XGBoost, K-nearest neighbor (KNN), gradient boosting decision tree model (GBDT), adaptive boosting model (AdaBoost), support vector machine (SVM) and convolutional neural network (CNN), are compared and analyzed. The results show that the HBA-XGBoost model proposed in this paper has higher accuracy, precision, recall rate and F1-score than other models, and can be used as an effective means for the lithology identification of volcanic reservoirs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the peak period of a railway system, operators typically add additional trains to provide increased capacity to satisfy the increasing passenger demand. The paper proposes a new optimization framework for designing the operation plan, which includes the number of additional trains, train type, stop plan, and timetable, for additional trains in a peak period. A space-time network representation is used to obtain a feasible primary operation plan by finding a set of feasible space-time paths in the space-time network. Considering simultaneously the passenger demand and the trains' total travel times, we formulate a biobjective integer programming model for generating a cost and passenger responsible primary operation plan. A set of loading capacity constraints are formulated in the model to guarantee a suitable loading capacity for each station's passenger demand and better service for passengers. The CPLEX solver is used to solve the proposed model and to generate the optimal operation plan. Two sets of numerical experiments are conducted on a small-scale rail corridor and on the Wuhan-Guangzhou rail corridor to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The results of the experiments show that the primary operation plan can be obtained within an acceptable computation time., 1. Introduction With the development of science, technology, and economics, numerous kilometers of high-speed railway have been constructed in some countries to meet increasing passenger demands. The efficient operation of [...]