Purpose – The purpose of this research is to test for price threshold effects in the demand for high-involvement services for small businesses. Design/methodology/approach – The authors use a stated preference choice-based conjoint study of small business telecommunications demand. Using...

This paper describes SIMANN, a Fortran and GAUSS implementation of the simulated annealing algorithm. The Fortran code was used in "Global Optimization of Statistical Functions with Simulated Annealing" (Goffe, Ferrier, and Rogers 1994). In that paper, simulated annealing was found to be...

The purpose of this research was to investigate the relationships with storage location assignment and location of I/O points in details in the warehouse operation planning. Dedicated storage warehouse design and three different allocation methods (throughput-to-storage ratios, space-filling...

The QWERTY keyboard layout can be very inefficient for one-finger typing on virtual keyboards since the letters in many common digrams are placed on opposite sides of the keyboard, resulting in a long finger travel. This paper reports on use of simulated annealing for finding alternate...

One of the main problems attracted researchers' attentions in recent years is Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP). This paper tends to minimize the covered distance, total travelling time, number of vehicles, delay and transportation costs, and to maximize consumers' satisfaction by utilizing...

PSO being a swarm based algorithm, can efficiently lend itself to operate on huge data. This article presents a technique that performs classification using PSO. An initial discussion is carried out describing PSO as a classifier. Three variants of PSO are proposed here; the first variant...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to develop a mathematical model for the design of robust layout for unequal area-dynamic facility layout problem with flexible bay structure (UA-DFLP with FBS) and test the suitability of generated robust layout in a dynamic environment....

Purpose This paper aims to present a set of five models for the economic order quantity problem. Four models solve problems for a single product: incremental discounts with or without backorders and all-unit discounts with or without backorders, and the last model solves problems for the...

Purpose – The traditional practice for maintenance, quality control and production scheduling is to plan independently irrespective of an interrelationship exist between them. The purpose of this paper is to develop an approach for integrating maintenance, quality control and production...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the total cost function of an inventory system with a reorder point/order quantity policy where the lead time is controllable based on the cost paid by the buyer for the service. Design/methodology/approach – Cost functions are presented...