The broad applications of cellular manufacturing make the cell formation problem (CFP) a core subject in the field of manufacturing. Due to the combinatorial nature of the CFP, a simulated annealing-based meta-heuristic with variable neighbourhood was developed to form part-machine cells. To...

Flowshop manufacturing cell scheduling problems (FMCSPs) with sequence-dependent family setup times (SDFSTs) have become a key area in the field of scheduling. Though the need to consider multiple criteria in real-world scheduling is widely recognised, most of the currently available algorithms...

The blocking flowshop scheduling problem has a strong industrial background but is under-represented in the research literature. In this study, a revised artificial immune system (RAIS) algorithm based on the features of artificial immune systems and the annealing process of simulated annealing...

Meta-heuristics that attempt to obtain (near) global optimal solutions of NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems generally require diversification to escape from local optimality. One way to achieve diversification is to utilize the multi-start hill climbing strategy. By combining the...

The personnel task scheduling problem is a subject of commercial interest which has been investigated since the 1950s. This paper proposes an effective and efficient three-phase algorithm for solving the shift minimization personnel task scheduling problem (SMPTSP). To illustrate the increased...

Supplier selection as an essential component of supply chain management is usually a multi-criteria decision problem which, in actual business contexts, may have to be solved in the absence of precise information. To tackle with the multiple criteria and the inherent uncertainty in supplier...

This study applies a modified VIKOR method to improve service quality among domestic airlines in Taiwan. Our model allows decision-makers to understand the gaps between alternatives and aspired-levels in practice. A large sample is used to establish a complete service quality evaluation...

This paper presents a simulated annealing based heuristic approach for the team orienteering problem with time windows (TOPTW). Given a set of known locations, each with a score, a service time, and a time window, the TOPTW finds a set of vehicle tours that maximizes the total collected scores....

This paper is an extension of two papers. The first of these, published in European Journal of Operational Research, 2007, 112-120 is by Deng et al. (2007) and concerns inventory models for deteriorating items with ramp type demand. The second, published in Computer & Industrial Engineering,...