Employment of Older People in the European Union

Abstract. This article identifies the alternative employment modes of older workers in the European Union. Against a background of changing levels of labour force participation and declining employment opportunities the paper describes and discusses the relative significance for older workers of alternative employment modes. Two atypical modes, part‐time and self‐employment, are discussed in detail. The paper concludes that atypical employment modes offer ageing employees the opportunity to gradually retire by providing a bridge between full‐time employment and final retirement.     

A New Multiperiod Multiple Traveling Salesman Problem with Heuristic and Application to a Scheduling Problem

A new multiperiod variation of the M-traveling salesman problem is introduced. The problem arises in efficient scheduling of optimal interviews among tour brokers and vendors at conventions of the tourism and travel industry. In classical traveling salesman problem vocabulary, a salesman is a tour broker at the convention and a city is a vendor's booth. In this problem, more than one salesman may be required to visit a city, but at most one salesman per time period can visit each city. The heuristic solution method presented is polynomial and is guaranteed to produce a nonconflicting set of salesmen's tours. The results of an implementation of the method for a recent convention are also reported.     

A MULTIATTRIBUTE DECISION-MAKING APPROACH TO THE SELECTION OF AN AUXILIARY DEVICE FOR ICEBREAKERS*

This paper describes the use of multiattribute decision making by the U.S. Coast Guard when choosing the most appropriate auxiliary device to use on an icebreaker. Five different missions of icebreakers are defined, and the objectives and attributes that describe the effectiveness of each auxiliary device in accomplishing these missions are established. For each geographical area of interest, the missions are weighted using the analytical hierarchy process. Also, group utilities are developed for attribute vectors in order to incorporate the judgments of different icebreaker operators.