For a number of years, researchers have described and analysed the shift from traditional adversarial, 'arm's length' buyer-supplier relationships towards longer term, more cooperative relationships in which buyers and suppliers regard each other more as 'partners'. The supply chain management...

The present scenario of global economy, the competition is not between individual organisations but between competing supply chains to optimise revenue and reduce the operating cost of supply chain. The areas of Revenue Management and Supply Chain Management represent two fundamental pillars for...

Many practical problems in mathematics and computer science may be formulated as Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs). Although CSPs are NP-hard in general, it has been proven that instances of CSPs may be solved efficiently, if they have generalised hypertree decompositions of small width....

This article presents the methodology for calculation of the optimum size of a Photovoltaic (PV) system. Long-term data of PV radiation were used to calculate the average power generated by a PV generator for every hour of a typical day in a month. A load of a typical house in the south of...

Generalised assignment problem (GAP) is a well-known non-deterministic polynomial (NP) hard combinatorial optimisation problem to find the minimum cost during assignment of jobs to agents so that each job is assigned exactly once and agents are not overloaded. In this research, we look at the...

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...

This paper aims to minimise the makespan of a set of identical batch processing machines in parallel. The batch processing machine can process a batch of jobs as long as the total size of all the jobs in the batch does not exceed its capacity. The processing time of the job and its size are...

This paper presents a new statistics-based evolutionary algorithm to improve the qualities of power supplies, in which operational costs and the stability of the power supply are optimised to provide a highly smooth but low-cost power supply service to customers. The proposed method is...

A popular argument states that most of the diversification in a portfolio can be obtained with a rather small number of securities. In this paper we present three algorithms to approach the underlying NP-hard problem of portfolio optimization with a cardinality constraint. All three of these...