The largest airports have a daily average throughput of more than 500 passengers with reduced mobility. The problem of transporting these passengers is in some cases a multi-modal transportation problem with synchronization constraints. A description of the problem together with a mathematical...

Deposition of silicon dioxide (SiO2) is a critical step of integrated circuit manufacturing; hence it is monitored during the manufacturing process at a grid of points defined on the wafer area. Since collecting thickness measurements is expensive, it is a compelling issue to investigate how a...

In this paper, we propose a multi-layer ant-based algorithm (MABA), which detects communities from networks by means of locally optimizing modularity using individual ants. The basic version of MABA, namely SABA, combines a self-avoiding label propagation technique with a simulated annealing...

Because of the increasing number of distributed energy sources integrated with the distribution network various optimization methods are very useful in determining the optimal placement, type and size of the distributed generators. One of the most commonly used algorithms are so called...

In this paper, we consider a variant of the Location-Routing Problem (LRP), namely the LRP with simultaneous pickup and delivery (LRPSPD). The LRPSPD seeks to minimize total cost by simultaneously locating the depots and designing the vehicle routes that satisfy pickup and delivery demand of...

We examine neighborhood structures for heuristic search applicable to a general class of vehicle routing problems (VRPs). Our methodology utilizes a cyclic-order solution encoding, which maps a permutation of the customer set to a collection of many possible VRP solutions. We identify the best...

This paper presents a formulation and solution for the train connection services (TCSs) problem in a large-scale rail network in order to determine the optimal freight train services, the frequency of services, and the distribution of classification workload among yards. TCS problem is modeled...

Very large numbers of inventory items complicate the inventory control process. Companies categorize their inventory items into a few groups and take similar inventory control policies for the items in each group to overcome this problem. In this regard many grouping methods have been proposed....

We discuss the use of Tsallis generalized mechanics in simulated annealing algorithms. For a small peptide, it is shown that older implementations are not more effective than regular simulated annealing in finding ground-state configurations. We propose a new implementation which leads to an...

The job shop problem is among the class of non-deterministic polynomial time hard combinatorial problems. This research article addresses the problem of static job shop scheduling on the job-based representation and the rule-based representations. The popular search techniques, such as the...