Primäres Ziel dieser Arbeit war die Entwicklung neuer heuristischer Lösungsverfahren für die logistische Tourenplanung bei restringierendem Anhängereinsatz (engl. Truck and Trailer Routing Problem). Kennzeichnend für dieses kombinatorische Optimierungsproblem ist, dass Fahrzeuge einen...

For the past several years, competing resource demands within BPA have forced the Agency to stretch Operations, Maintenance and Replacement (OM R) resources. There is a large accumulation of tasks that were not accomplished when scheduled. Maintenance and replacements and outages, due to...

Search and optimization in the context of blackbox objective function evaluation subject to blackbox constraints satisfaction is the thesis of this work. The SEARCH (Search Envisioned As Relation and Class Hierarchizing) framework introduced by Kargupta (1995) offered an alternate perspective of...

The SEARCH (Search Envisioned As Relation and Class Hierarchizing) framework developed elsewhere (Kargupta, 1995; Kargupta and Goldberg, 1995) offered an alternate perspective toward blackbox optimization -- optimization in presence of little domain knowledge. The SEARCH framework investigates the...

The development of an expert system for instrumentation and control operations is sometimes particularly difficult because (a) the expert system must implement the consensus opinion of a group of several human experts in all circumstances, (b) there may be 20 or more complex, dynamic,...

In this paper we consider the problem of grouping machine and human resources in mixed model assembly process so that sequencing and scheduling decisions may be performed more efficiently. Resource aggregation can potentially and significantly improve production efficiency and throughput by...

In this paper, Statistical Activity Cost Analysis (SACA) is used to identify the interaction of mutually dependent physical and financial aspects of a fixed asset-like system configuration. The novelty of the approach is, having established a rational description of the uncertainty inherent in...

In some manufacturing situations, station tasks or operations can be shifted or redistributed to adjacent stations when adjacent stations have the appropriate equipment and the workers on that station can perform the shifted work to a reasonable level of competency. This paper addresses such an...

Electric utilities in Australia have been developing policies to stimulate interest and permit the purchase of electricity generated by renewable energy sources such as photovoltaic systems (PV). Studies show that under current conditions, it is technically feasible to introduce small-scale,...