The goal of block mining is to obtain a set of genes that contain dependency among gene relationships. Such blocks without overlapping of genes can be further merged to form a new chromosome and the quality of the new chromosome can be greatly improved. Based on this concept, we propose a novel...

Market-based instruments provide incentives for conservation on private lands, combining the economic efficiency of an auction with ecological site prioritization to select the best sites from those offered by landholders. However, landscape-scale goals such as increased habitat connectivity are...

The mixed refrigerant (MR) process is widely used for the liquefaction of natural gas (NG). The determination of MR composition with respect to variations in ambient conditions is crucial but difficult. PRICO is one of the simplest MR processes, and it is frequently used in small and mid-scale...

A distributed energy system is a multi-input and multi-output energy system with substantial energy, economic and environmental benefits. The optimal design of such a complex system under energy demand and supply uncertainty poses significant challenges in terms of both modelling and...

Flow-based methods based on the outranking relation theory are extensively used in multiple criteria classification problems. Flow-based methods usually employed an overall preference index representing the flow to measure the intensity of preference for one pattern over another pattern. A...

Climate change will alter the environmental conditions for crop growth and require adjustments in management practices at the field scale. In this paper, we analyzed the impacts of two different climate change scenarios on optimal field management practices in winterwheat and grain maize...

One concern of many investors is to own the assets which can be liquidated easily. Thus, in this paper, we incorporate portfolio liquidity in our proposed model. Liquidity is measured by an index called turnover rate. Since the return of an asset is uncertain, we present it as a trapezoidal...

The goal of a Virtual Organization is to find the most appropriate partners in terms of expertise, cost wise, quick response, and environment. In this study we propose a model and a solution approach to a partner selection problem considering three main evaluation criteria: cost, time and risk....

This paper evaluates the performances of a new type of genetic algorithms - anticipatory genetic algorithms (AGA) versus traditional genetic algorithms (GA). The performances are evaluated based on two simple problems using different genetic operators. The evaluation included in the paper shows...

University course timetabling is one of the important and time consuming issues that each University is involved with at the beginning of each university year. This problem is in class of NP-hard problem and is very difficult to solve by classic algorithms. Therefore optimization techniques are...