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From a research and literature survey, the incidence of alcohol related problems is discussed and past and current approaches to intervention and treatment outlined. An ideal model for intervention and treatment based on inter professional work in Primary Health Care Teams is proposed. One Health Centre is the basis of study of responses by the professionals working on a primary health care team approach to the alcohol and alcohol related problems in the area. The knowledge and attitudinal basis of the professionals are measured by questionnaire and interview. Incidence of alcohol and alcohol related problems in one of the two practices in the Health Centre is measured and compared with national guideline figures. Professional responses by professionals to drinkers and to affected persons are analysed by questionnaire and particular attention is given to responses to people living in nuclear families. Two case studies are included for illustrative purposes. The discrepancy between the ideal model and actual practice is established in relation to numbers treated, division of labour and lack of ongoing support to the patient. The model is accepted as the desirable method of intervention. The study ends with sets of recommendations relating to community based prevention strategies, early detection and intervention, ongoing support, monitoring and interdisciplinary collaboration, methodological weaknesses are acknowledged and areas for further future research identified.

The thesis analyzes the capability transformation process of NATO to measure the progress made by the European NATO member states in narrowing the capability gap between the United States and European forces. Since the end of the Cold War, the capability gap among the NATO members has become a major concern because it hinders NATO's operational ability. Operation Allied Force and new strategic and operational challenges of the 21st century have driven NATO's capability transformation process. The thesis analyzes NATO military capabilities exhibited in Operation Allied Force by analyzing the individual national contributions of the Allies to highlight the imbalance in the capabilities of the Alliance. The thesis then examines the capability transformation process regarding the commitments made by the Allies at the Washington, Prague and Istanbul Summits to reinforce capabilities for modern warfare in high threat environments and narrow the growing capability gap. It focuses on the decisions and achievements of each summit to measure the progress made by the European NATO member states in bridging the capabilities gap between the United States and European forces. To do this, it analyzes military expenditures, defense capabilities, national regulations and strategies that slowed down or reinforced the capability transformation process. The conclusion is that, despite encouraging trends in the capability transformation process, the balance in the military capabilities continues to favor the United States by a wide margin.

The asymmetric distance-constrained vehicle routing problem (ADVRP) looks at finding vehicle tours to connect all customers with a depot, such that the total distance is minimised; each customer is visited once by one vehicle; every tour starts and ends at a depot; and the travelled distance by each vehicle is less than or equal to the given maximum value. We present three basic results in this thesis. In the first one, we present a general flow-based formulation to ADVRP. It is suitable for symmetric and asymmetric instances. It has been compared with the adapted Bus School Routing formulation and appears to solve the ADVRP faster. Comparisons are performed on random test instances with up to 200 customers. We reach a conclusion that our general formulation outperforms the adapted one. Moreover, it finds the optimal solution for small test instances quickly. For large instances, there is a high probability that an optimal solution can be found or at least improve upon the value of the best feasible solution found so far, compared to the other formulation which stops because of the time condition. This formulation is more general than Kara formulation since it does not require the distance matrix to satisfy the triangle inequality. The second result improves and modifies an old branch-and-bound method suggested by Laporte et al. in 1987. It is based on reformulating a distance-constrained vehicle routing problem into a travelling salesman problem and uses the assignment problem as a lower bounding procedure. In addition, its algorithm uses the best-first strategy and new branching rules. Since this method was fast but memory consuming, it would stop before optimality is proven. Therefore, we introduce randomness in choosing the node of the search tree in case we have more than one choice (usually we choose the smallest objective function). If an optimal solution is not found, then restart is required due to memory issues, so we restart our procedure. In that way, we get a multistart branch and bound method. Computational experiments show that we are able to exactly solve large test instances with up to 1000 customers. As far as we know, those instances are much larger than instances considered for other VRP models and exact solution approaches from recent literature. So, despite its simplicity, this proposed algorithm is capable of solving the largest instances ever solved in literature. Moreover, this approach is general and may be used in solving other types of vehicle routing problems. In the third result, we use VNS as a heuristic to find the best feasible solution for groups of instances. We wanted to determine how far the difference is between the best feasible solution obtained by VNS and the value of optimal solution in order to use the output of VNS as an initial feasible solution (upper bound procedure) to improve our multistart method. Unfortunately, based on the search strategy (best first search), using a heuristic to find an initial feasible solution is not useful. The reason for this is because the branch and bound is able to find the first feasible solution quickly. In other words, in our method using a good initial feasible solution as an upper bound will not increase the speed of the search. However, this would be different for the depth first search. However, we found a big gap between VNS feasible solution and an optimal solution, so VNS can not be used alone unless for large test instances when other exact methods are not able to find any feasible solution because of memory or stopping conditions.

In November 1968, the United States 7th Air Force began a year-round bombing campaign of southeastern Laos to slow the infiltration of Vietnamese troops and supplies into South Vietnam. Despite the massive amount of bombs dropped, the campaigns of Operation Commando Hunt were unable to stop the Communists from sending men and materiel down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to support their operations in the south. This thesis seeks to show that President Lyndon Johnson's decision to stop bombing North Vietnam and President Richard Nixon's Vietnamization policy, along with the North Vietnamese's determination to keep their supply route open, combined to prevent Operation Commando Hunt from achieving its goal.