• Customer satisfaction: The result of optimizing and aligning business processes to fulfi ll customers’ needs, wants, and desires. • Cost reduction: The result of optimizing operations and supplier processes. • Cycle and fulfi llment time reduction: The result of optimizing the manufacturing and logistics processes. • Quality: The result of optimizing the design, development, and production pr...

Abstract—This paper presents the comparative study of two different evolutionary approaches, a genetic algorithm (GA) and an estimation of distribution algorithm (EDA), in co-evolving negotiation strategies with different preference criteria such as optimizing price and optimizing negotiation speed. Empirical studies demonstrate that both GA and EDA are successful in finding good solutions in p...

an experiment was conducted to investigate the effects of thyme (thymus vulgaris) and satureja (satureja khuzestanica) ethanolic extracts on the performance, blood metabolites and immune response of broiler chickens. 300 day-old ross chicks were assigned to six dietary treatments in a randomized 2 × 3 factorial block design. each treatment was given to five replicates of ten birds. variables we...

helicobacter pylori infection is one of the most common human infections which have been associated with many upper gasterointestinal complications. different treatment regimens for helicobacter pylori eradication have been used. one of these regimes is the quadruple therapy regimen which metronidazole is one of the medications. in recent years several reports on h. pylori resistance to this an...

To protect the driver of off-highway dump trucks from the harmful vibration, this paper presents the comparison results to determine the optimal damping of the seat system by different optimization design plans. Three optimization schemes are considered including individually optimizing the damping of the cushion, individually optimizing the damping of the seat suspension, and integrately optim...

Discovering community structure is fundamental for uncovering the links between structure and function in complex networks and modularity optimization is the widely accepted method for this issue. However, there is no consensus criteria for measuring the community structure. In this paper, we propose a new quantitative function for community partition–i.e., generalized modularity or M value. We...

This article concerns peicewise linear systems and determining if they meet given H= performance specifications. Such problems occur in control of linear systems with saturation nonlinearities. While one could imagine many mathematically natural piecewise linear systems we took care to extract one which does correspond to control of saturated plants. We think many such problems will fall into t...

Data mining techniques are used to extract useful knowledge from raw data. The extracted knowledge is valuable and significantly affects the decision maker. Educational data mining (EDM) is a method for extracting useful information that could potentially affect an organization. The increase of technology use in educational systems has led to the storage of large amounts of student data, which ...

In a deregulated power industry, a maintenance strategy is of critical importance for transmission systems composed of aging components. Such a strategy can provide significant cost savings by optimizing maintenance decisions for power system operation. This paper presents a Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) model for developing a maintenance strategy in a transmission system. This model i...