The past ten years has seen significant advances in low-cost micro-controllers, data communications and personal computing. Applying these technologies to small hydro automation, affordable multifunctional distributed processing solutions is now a commercial reality. The ability to reduce costs...

The increasing globalisation of the world economy is having a profound impact on logistics. Emerging economies are experiencing rapid developments that affect their warehousing facilities. The purpose of this study is to explore the strategic roles that warehousing plays and the changes therein....

The move of Hong Kong International Airport from the city centre to a suburban area in July 1998 provided sufficient capacity to meet the increasing demand of passenger and air-cargo flows in Hong Kong in the foreseeable future. However, the move has adverse side effects such as causing the...

Facility layout problems involve the location of facilities in a planar arrangement such that facilities that are strongly connected to one another are close to each other and facilities that are not connected may be far from one another. Pairs of facilities that have a negative connection...

Pareto Local Search (PLS) is a simple and effective local search method for tackling multi-objective combinatorial optimization problems. It is also a crucial component of many state-of-the-art algorithms for such problems. However, PLS may be not very effective when terminated before...

In this paper we investigate the problem of locating medications in automated dispensing cabinets (ADCs) to minimize human selection errors. We formulate the multiple-drawer medication layout problem and show that the problem can be formulated as a quadratic assignment problem. As a way to...

Since procedures for producing optimal solutions to a quadratic assignment problem are computationally infeasible for any but small problems, heuristic techniques for producing approximate solutions must be employed for the solution of real practical problems. This paper presents the results of...

Facility layout problems involve the location of facilities in a planar arrangement such that facilities that are strongly connected to one another are close to each other and facilities that are not connected may be far from one another. Pairs of facilities that have a negative connection...

The transportation processes for patients, personnel, and material in large and complex maximum-care hospitals with many departments can consume significant resources and thus induce substantial logistics costs. These costs are largely determined by the allocation of the different departments...

The continuous-valued Hopfield neural network (CHN) is a popular and powerful metaheuristic method for combinatorial optimization. However, it is difficult to select appropriate penalty parameters for constraints so as to obtain a feasible and desirable solution by CHN. Thus, various improved...