In this paper we study the characteristics of population based meta-heuristics that distinguish the procedures from a standard meta-heuristic and that positively contribute to the quality of the solutions obtained. More precisely, we investigate and discuss the importance of a wellconsidered...

We examine the impact of distressed acquisitions on acquirer volatility and default risk for a worldwide sample of distressed firms using several risk measures. We find that, on average, absolute levels of historical and implied volatility do not change following a distressed acquisition....

Custom packs group medical disposable items into a single sterile package that is used for surgical procedures. Although custom packs constitute a well-known concept in the hospital setting, little is known on methodologies to configure them, especially if the number of medical items, procedures...

This study investigates whether and to what extent further unemployment experience for youths who are already long-term unemployed imposes a penalty on subsequent labor market outcomes. We propose a flexible method for analyzing the effect on wages aside of transitions from unemployment and...

The single-vehicle cyclic inventory routing problem (SV-CIRP) consists of a repetitive distribution of a product from a single depot to a selected subset of customers. For each customer, selected for replenishments, the supplier collects a corresponding fixed reward. The objective is to...

In this paper, an Artificial Immune System (AIS) algorithm for the resource availability cost problem (RACP) is presented, in which the total cost of the (unlimited) renewable resources required to complete the project by a pre-specified project deadline should be minimized. The AIS algorithm...

In this paper, we consider the problem of scheduling a number of jobs on a number of unrelated parallel machines in order to minimize the makespan. We develop two heuristic approaches, i.e. a genetic algorithm and a tabu search algorithm and the hybridization of these heuristics with a truncated...

We study the evolution of the public debt to GDP ratio during 40 fiscal consolidation episodes in 21 OECD countries in 1980-2008. We test within a multivariate regression framework seven hypotheses put forward in the literature on the success or failure of consolidation programmes. These...

Personnel costs typically are the second largest costs for airline operations after fuel costs. Since efficient crew employment can drastically reduce operational costs of airline companies, the crew scheduling problem in the airline industry has been extensively investigated in the operations...

In this paper, an overview is presented of the existing metaheuristic solution procedures to solve the multi-mode resource-constrained-project scheduling problem, in which multiple execution modes are available for each of the activities of the project. A fair comparison is made between the...