Just-in-time (JIT) trucking service, i.e., arriving at customers within specified time windows, has become the norm for freight carriers in all stages of supply chains. In this paper, a JIT pickup/delivery problem is formulated as a stochastic dynamic traveling salesman problem with time windows...

In this paper, we study the shortest path tour problem in which a shortest path from a given origin node to a given destination node must be found in a directed graph with non-negative arc lengths. Such path needs to cross a sequence of node subsets that are given in a fixed order. The subsets...

We consider the optimal ship navigation problem wherein the goal is to find the shortest path between two given coordinates in the presence of obstacles subject to safety distance and turn-radius constraints. These obstacles can be debris, rock formations, small islands, ice blocks, other ships,...

We present a capacity constrained network flow optimization approach for finding evacuation paths, flows and schedules so as to maximize the total evacuees for short notice evacuation planning (SNEP). Due to dynamic nature of this optimization problem, we first construct a time-expanded network...

Ant colony system is a well known metaheuristic framework, and many efficient algorithms for different combinatorial optimization problems have been derived from this general framework. In this paper some directions for improving the original framework when a strong local search routine is...

In real life distribution of goods, relatively long service times may make it difficult to serve all requests during regular working hours. These difficulties are even greater if the beginning of the service in each demand site must occur within a time window and violations of routing time...

In this article, we propose UACOR, a unified ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm for continuous optimization. UACOR includes algorithmic components from ACOR,DACOR and IACOR-LS, three ACO algorithms for continuous optimization that have been proposed previously. Thus, it can be used to...

The problem of long-term production planning of open pit mines is a large combinatorial problem. Application of mathematical programming approaches suffer from reduced computational efficiency due to the large amount of decision variables. This paper presents a new metaheuristic approximation...

Two methods for ranking of solutions of multi objective optimization problems are proposed in this paper. The methods can be used, e.g. by metaheuristics to select good solutions from a set of non dominated solutions. They are suitable for population based metaheuristics to limit the size of the...

This paper is concerned with the complex behavior arising in satisfiability problems. We present a new statistical physics-based characterization of the satisfiability problem. Specifically, we design an algorithm that is able to produce graphs starting from a k-SAT instance, in order to analyze...