No abstract

Following the global outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, work is no longer being conducted in the traditional manner. This has created pressure on businesses to shift into a mode of remote working in order to avoid severe disruption. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has attempted to face challenges accompanying this crisis and explore solutions with the wise vision and constant support of its leadership. This paper examines the transition of working procedures at one of the most influential entities in the UAE; the Ministry of Education (MOE). The purpose here is to shed light on how obstacles have been turned into opportunities in order for MOE employees to continue working remotely during such critical conditions. This is illustrated by the efforts of ministry departments that were interviewed for their feedback during the study. This paper provides insights into the activation of remote work in response to sudden incidents by highlighting measurements and factors that contribute to entities’ readiness for such a transition. This study analyzes the value and originality of MOE remote working practices and their impact on the wider community.

No abstract

Abstract-In the area of applied optimisation, heuristics are a popular means to address computational problems of high complexity. Modelling the problem and mapping all variations of its solution into a so-called solution space are integral parts of this process. Representing solutions as graphs is common and, for a special type of graph, Prüfer Code (PC) offers a computationally efficient mapping (algorithms of Θ(n)-complexity are known) to n−2 dimensional Euclidean space. However, this encoding does not preserve properties such as e.g. locality and therefore PC has been shown to be a bad choice for entire classes of problems. We argue that PC does allow the preservation of some properties (e.g. degree of branching and branching vertices) and that these are sufficiently relevant for certain types of problems to motivate encoding them in PC. We present our investigations and provide an example where PC has been shown to be a useful encoding.

No abstract