No abstract

Assembly line balancing (ALB) aims at distributing those work required to assemble a product in mass or series production among a set of workstations in an assembly line. Heuristics approaches, in corporation with computer simulation, have demonstrated a number of advantages in practice. Recognizing the importance of interactions between production planners and the scheduling system, this paper discusses the design and implementation of a Web-based ALB advisor for scheduling hard disk drive assembly involving multiple criteria. With the assistance of such an ALB advisor, production engineers, who may have difficulties in understanding those sophisticated ALB heuristics, can remotely present and specify their particular ALB problems. Based on the user input, the advisor will compose a schedule based on various heuristic algorithms embedded in its library. The schedule can be manipulated directly via a graphical user interface. The advisor also generates simulation models for the user-specified ALB problems and presents the user with performance evaluation of the suggested ALB solutions.

The tension-free pubourethral sling procedure using a small intestinal submucosa sling (e.g., Stratasis, Cook Urological, Spencer/IN, USA) is of interest to the reconstructive urologist because of its reported regenerative capabilities and lack of immunogenicity. We report a severe postoperative inflammatory complication 4 weeks after the procedure. Severe inflammation with abscess formation led to reconstructive surgery to deal with the secondary complications.

No abstract

Ductal adenocarcinoma of the prostate is a rare entity. The lack of correlation between the prostate-specific antigen value and the tumor stage, as well as early dissemination, are major differences from acinar cancer. Due to a lack of early symptoms, the tumor is often found in an advanced stage. Urinary obstruction and hematuria lead to clinical assessment. The characteristic tumor growth near the seminal colliculus can yield a negative digital rectal examination. Despite a lack of treatment guidelines, authors recommend an aggressive surgical concept. First approaches include radical prostatectomy, transurethral resection, and high-dose radiotherapy. Subsequent androgen deprivation is recommended. We report the case of a 64-year-old man with ductal prostate cancer who underwent radical cystectomy followed by androgen deprivation therapy. This is the first such case reported in both the German and the English literature.