This reasearch studies ACO algorithms for the switch engine scheduling in a Railroad Yard. The cars are moved individually or grouped into blocks by a set of locomotives called switch engines which are dedicated to moving around the cars in the yard. The need for moving comes from the fact that the arriving trains are disassembled into blocks of cars, undergo some operations like, loading , unl...

Planning the operational procedures in a railway marshalling yard is a complex problem. When a train arrives at a marshalling yard, it is uncoupled on an arrival yard and then its cars are rolled to a classification yard. All cars should eventually be rolled to the classification track that has been assigned to the train they're supposed to depart with. However, there is normally not enough cap...

The average American generates approximately 4.5 pounds of garbage per day, for a total of 196 million tons of trash per year, most of which ends up in landfills (Shortridge, 1993). Various government and private programs have been organized to divert part of this garbage (metals, plastics, paper and cardboard, and yard and food wastes) from landfills by recycling. Yard and food wastes often ar...

Seaport terminals recognise the need to change current practices in order to improve regional air quality while enhancing their terminals’ competitiveness. One area that terminals can do better at is to improve their yard crane operations and in turn reduce the trucks in-terminal delay. This study examines various container rehandling strategies by the yard cranes with the goal of improving the...

To the Editor: A recent important study1 addressing the prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors in a rural African population, reports that ‘... most participants followed a physically inactive lifestyle’. The validity of their findings is difficult to evaluate as the study provides little information regarding the physical activity questionnaire that was used. Questionnaire validity is relev...

This paper discusses a case study of the board game of Scotland Yard from a computational perspective. Interestingly, Scotland Yard is a genuine “playgame” with imperfect information. For reasons not completely clear to me, games with imperfect information have escaped the interest of researchers in Algorithmic combinatorial gametheory. I show by means of a powerset argument, that Scotland Yard...

In this paper, a method integrating Q-learning algorithm and simulation technique is proposed to optimize the operation scheduling in container terminals. Firstly Q-learning algorithms for yard cranes and yard trailers are designed to obtain the optimal scheduling strategy of yard cranes and yard trailers. Then Q-learning is combined with simulation to develop an integrating scheduling model in...

While bomb blasts are often associated with wars and terrorism in military terrorism-prone areas, these events incredibly rare other civilian areas. Consequently, forensic medicine experts rarely exposed to such cases. Explosion injuries produce a distinctive pattern on the body that can help determine cause of death reconstruct crime scene. As such, it is imperative for an autopsy surgeon be a...