Supply chain demand forecast and inventory purchase planning are essential business operations to many businesses. In this paper, we discuss the strategies and techniques in the supply chain demand forecast and inventory purchase planning for small businesses from practitioner's perspective. The...

Adaptive sample size and sampling intervals schemes have been widely used to improve the statistical efficiency of Hotelling T² control chart in detecting small changes when the quality of a product or a process can be characterised by the multivariate distribution of quality characteristics....

TREPAN is decision tree algorithm that utilises artificial neural networks (ANNs) in order to improve partitioning conditions when sample data is sparse. When sample sizes are limited during the tree-induction process, TREPAN relies on an ANN oracle in order to create artificial sample...

This study considers an alternative to zero-one encoding representation of binary chromosomes. In a proposed so-called Hadamard representation the square of each coordinate equals 1. This fact allows the formulation of rules for phenotypes and the development of automated methods of moving frame...

The agile New Product Development (NPD) process is a complex and integrated process wherein all of its main factors have cause-and-effect relationships. A Fuzzy Cognitive Map (FCM) can be successfully applied to show the cause-and-effect relationships between the essential components in this...

Machining operations are used for creating surfaces by cutting away unwanted materials from workpieces. These operations are highly constrained and non-linear in nature. As a result traditional techniques are not suitable for machining parameter optimisation. Turning and milling are the two most...

This paper investigates the optimization of the performance of a solar powered Stirling engine based on finite-time thermodynamics. Heat transference in the heat exchangers between a concentrating solar collector and the Stirling engine is studied. The irreversibility of a Stirling engine is...

This paper formulates the 3D containership loading planning problem (3D CLPP) and also proposes a new and compact representation to efficiently solve it. The key objective of stowage planning is to minimise the number of container movements and also the ship's instability. The binary formulation...

Transportation electrification has become an important issue in recent decades and the large scale deployment of electric vehicles (EVs) has yet to be achieved. The smart coordination of EV demand addresses an improvement in the flexibility of power systems and reduces the costs of power system...

Reconfiguration, by exchanging the functional links between the elements of the system, represents one of the most important measures which can improve the operational performance of a distribution system. The authors propose an original method, aiming at achieving such optimization through the...