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Cost Control (cost + control)
Selected AbstractsLMI Approach to Guaranteed Cost Control for Networked Control SystemsASIA-PACIFIC JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL ENGINEERING, Issue 3-4 2005Shanbin Li This paper addresses the time-varying but bounded delay issue of networked control systems (NCS) within the framework of a discrete-time linear state-delayed system with norm-bounded uncertainty. A delay-dependent sufficient condition for the existence of a guaranteed cost controller for NCS is presented by a new Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional. The condition is formulated as a set linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). The resulting controller can not only asymptotically stabilize the system but also guarantee an adequate level of performance. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the control strategy presented in this paper is effective and feasible. [source] Health systems in East Asia: what can developing countries learn from Japan and the Asian Tigers?HEALTH ECONOMICS, Issue 5 2007Adam Wagstaff Abstract The health systems of Japan and the Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan), and the recent reforms to them, provide many potentially valuable lessons to East Asia's developing countries. All five systems have managed to keep a check on health spending despite their different approaches to financing and delivery. These differences are reflected in the progressivity of health finance, but the precise degree of progressivity of individual sources and the extent to which households are vulnerable to catastrophic health payments depend on the design features of the system , the height of any ceilings on social insurance contributions, the fraction of health spending covered by the benefit package, the extent to which the poor face reduced copayments, whether there are caps on copayments, and so on. On the delivery side, too, Japan and the Tigers offer some interesting lessons. Singapore's experience with corporatizing public hospitals , rapid cost and price inflation, a race for the best technology, and so on , illustrates the difficulties of corporatization. Korea's experience with a narrow benefit package illustrates the danger of providers shifting demand from insured services with regulated prices to uninsured services with unregulated prices. Japan, in its approach to rate setting for insured services, has managed to combine careful cost control with fine-tuning of profit margins on different types of care. Experiences with DRGs in Korea and Taiwan point to cost-savings but also to possible knock-on effects on service volume and total health spending. Korea and Taiwan both offer important lessons for the separation of prescribing and dispensing, including the risks of compensation costs outweighing the cost savings caused by more ,rational' prescribing, and cost-savings never being realized because of other concessions to providers, such as allowing them to have onsite pharmacists. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Reducing avoidable inequalities in health: a new criterion for setting health care capitation paymentsHEALTH ECONOMICS, Issue 8 2002Katharina Hauck Abstract Traditionally, most health care systems which pretend to any sort of rationality and cost control have sought to allocate their limited funds in order to secure equal opportunity of access for equal need. The UK government is implementing a fundamental change of resource allocation philosophy towards ,contributing to the reduction of avoidable health inequalities'. The purpose of this essay is to explore some of the economic issues that arise when seeking to allocate health care resources according to the new criterion. It indicates that health inequalities might arise because of variations in the quality of health services, variations in access to those services, or variations in the way people produce health, and that the resource allocation consequences differ depending on which source is being addressed. The paper shows that an objective of reducing health inequalities is not necessarily compatible with an objective of equity of access, nor with the objective of maximising health gain. The results have profound consequences for approaches towards economic evaluation, the role of clinical guidelines and performance management, as well as for resource allocation methods. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] LMI approach to reliable guaranteed cost control with multiple criteria constraints: The actuator faults caseINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ROBUST AND NONLINEAR CONTROL, Issue 8 2009Dengfeng Zhang Abstract Based on the multi-objective optimization strategy and linear matrix inequality approach, the problem of reliable guaranteed cost control with multiple criteria constraints is investigated for a class of uncertain discrete-time systems subject to actuator faults. A fault model in actuators, which considers outage or partial degradation in independent actuators, is adopted. The quadratic stability is proved to be independent of the disturbance and the upper bound of a quadratic cost index is improved. The reliable feedback controller is designed to minimize the upper bound of the quadratic cost index, place all the closed-loop poles in a specified disk, constrain the H, norm level of the disturbance attenuation into a given range and guarantee the magnitudes of control inputs less than the given bound, as well. Thus, the resulting closed-loop system can provide satisfactory stability, transient behavior, disturbance rejection level and optimized upper bound of the quadratic cost performance despite possible actuator faults. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Guaranteed cost control of T,S fuzzy systems with input delayINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ROBUST AND NONLINEAR CONTROL, Issue 12 2008Bing Chen Abstract This paper is concerned with the problem of guaranteed cost control for Takagi,Sugeno (T,S) fuzzy systems with time-varying input delay. The input delay is of interval type, and no restriction is imposed on the derivative of the time delay. Based on free-weighting matrix method, new delay-dependent sufficient conditions for the existence of a fuzzy guaranteed cost controller are provided by means of linear matrix inequalities. Some examples are used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] On delay-dependent LMI-based guaranteed cost control of uncertain neutral systems with discrete and distributed time-varying delaysINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ROBUST AND NONLINEAR CONTROL, Issue 12 2007Jenq-Der Chen Abstract In this paper, the problem of designing robust guaranteed cost control law for a class of uncertain neutral system with a given quadratic cost function is considered. Based on Lyapunov,Krasovskii functional theory, a delay-dependent criterion for the existence of guaranteed cost controller is expressed in the form of two linear matrix inequalities (LMIs), which can be solved by using effective LMI toolbox. Moreover, a convex optimization problem satisfying some LMI constraints is formulated to solve a guaranteed cost controller which achieves the minimization of the closed-loop guaranteed cost. An efficient approach is proposed to design the guaranteed cost control for uncertain neutral systems. Computer software Matlab can be used to solve all the proposed results. Finally, a numerical example is illustrated to show the usefulness of our obtained design method. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Using Interorganizational Information Systems to Support Environmental Management Efforts at ASGJOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY, Issue 4 2001Teresa M. Shaft Summary We examine use of environmental information systems by ASG AB (hereafter ASG), an international logistics and transport firm headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, as a case study to illustrate the role of information systems in life-cycle-oriented environmental management. This case provides an example of how a firm can use interorganizational information systems (IOISs) to move toward environmentally sustainable business practices. Through the use of IOISs, ASG has been able to improve its environmental performance and that of its suppliers. Further, this improved environmental performance has been a competitive advantage for ASG and enabled it to attract new business. As such, ASG's experiences illustrate how aggressive practices move environmental management beyond compliance and cost control, at which many firms have been successful, to revenue generation. The case also shows how environmentally sustainable business practices can be integrated into a firm's strategy. In addition to illustrating how ASG has used IOISs to improve environmental performance, we compare their use of environmental ISs with the expected evolution of environmental ISs presented in the Shaft and colleagues (1997) framework. Although some of ASG's experiences verify the expected progression of these types of systems, some developments are not as expected. These differences have implications for the framework. [source] THE SOCIAL EFFICIENCY OF INSTRUMENTS FOR THE PROMOTION OF RENEWABLE ENERGIES IN THE LIBERALISED POWER INDUSTRYANNALS OF PUBLIC AND COOPERATIVE ECONOMICS, Issue 3 2006Dominique Finon ABSTRACT,:,This paper compares the social efficiency of the two main regulatory instruments used to promote renewable energy sources in electricity generation (RES-E), taking into consideration their role in promoting the preservation of the climate. They are based on a purchase obligation and act either by price (feed-in tariffs) or by quantity (RES-E quotas). In their reference design, the instruments show different performances in several dimensions: market incentives intensity, control of the cost for consumers, safeguards of RES-E investments, and conformity with the new market regime of the electricity industry. The comparison shows that neither instrument offers an optimal solution in each of these dimensions. In particular, the intrinsic qualities of the quotas instrument that are put forward to mandate its adoption by the EU members are overestimated. A government will thus select an instrument in accordance with the relative importance of its objectives: environmental policy versus cost control by market pressure. [source] Guaranteed Cost Sampled-Data Control for Refining ProcessASIA-PACIFIC JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL ENGINEERING, Issue 1-2 2001Yingquan Lu This paper presents a synthetic design procedure of guaranteed cost sampled-data control (GCSDC) for refining process. When a digital controller controls the refining process with appropriate sample and hold devices, the closed loop system is periodic time varying. Based on this sampled-data system, considering the uncertainties in the continuous-time plant, we define the guaranteed cost control and a controller that not only stabilizes the closed loop system but also guarantees an adequate level of the performance. Simulation results show that the control scheme is effective and practicable. [source] Health-care reform and the dimensions of professional autonomyCANADIAN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION/ADMINISTRATION PUBLIQUE DU CANADA, Issue 1 2009Glen E. Randall With this model, it was assumed that competitive forces would encourage quality while driving down costs. While such reforms often achieve cost controls by constraining the incomes and practices of health-care workers, there has been relatively little analysis of the extent to which self-governing health-care professionals, particularly those outside of medicine and nursing, may experience a decline in their ability to control the content and context of their professional work. In this article, the authors analyse the results of thirty-six in-depth interviews with representatives of Community Care Access Centres (CCACs), the organizations that purchase and coordinate the delivery of home-care services, and rehabilitation provider agencies to examine the impact of Ontario's managed competition reform on rehabilitation professionals. Findings suggest that the impact of the reform varied across the economic, political, and clinical dimensions of professional autonomy and that, despite a general loss of autonomy under the managed competition model, market forces also served to mitigate the loss of autonomy, thus contributing to a remarkable resilience of professional autonomy. Sommaire: Un modèle de « concurrence dirigée » a été introduit récemment dans la province canadienne de l'Ontario dans le cadre de la réforme gouvernementale des soins à domicile. Avec ce modèle, il était présumé que les forces de la concurrence encourageraient la qualité tout en faisant baisser les coûts. Alors que de telles réformes parviennent souvent à maîtriser les coûts en réduisant les revenus et les pratiques des travailleurs de la santé, il y a eu relativement peu d'analyses de faites sur la mesure dans laquelle les professionnels de la santé autonomes, particulièrement ceux qui exercent en dehors de la médecine et de la profession infirmière, connaissent une perte de contrôle sur le contenu et le contexte de leur travail professionnel. Dans le présent article, les auteurs analysent les résultats de trente-six entrevues en profondeur menées auprès de représentants des Centres d'accès aux soins communautaires (CASC), organismes qui achètent et coordonnent la prestation des services de soins à domicile, et organismes de prestation de soins de réadaptation, afin d'examiner les conséquences de la réforme de la concurrence dirigée de l'Ontario sur les professionnels de la réadaptation. Les résultats laissent entendre que l'effet de la réforme a varié en fonction des dimensions économiques, politiques et cliniques de l'autonomie professionnelle et que, malgré une perte d'autonomie générale liée au modèle de concurrence dirigée, les forces du marché ont également permis d'atténuer la perte d'autonomie, contribuant ainsi à la remarquable résilience dont font preuve ces professionnels en la matiére. [source] | ||||||||||