We consider the mid-term production planning problem in make-to-order production, which consists in scheduling production orders so that the variability in the resource utilization over time is minimized. The problem is modeled as a resource leveling project scheduling problem, where production orders for final products and main components correspond to activities of a project. We present a ne...

sustainable management of limited land and water resources is urgently needed to meet the increasing demand for food and to protect the environment. land suitability analysis is a prerequisite in assessing and proposing sustainable land use alternatives for an area. soil data are usually available at different levels of detail and stored in various forms, usually soil maps and/or soil observati...

the present study was carried out to evaluate three interpolation methods including weighted moving average (wma) with the power of 2 and 3, kriging and cokriging methods. data of 23 wells in mazandaran province were collected in fall and spring 2006. seven parameters including electrical conductivity (ec), ph, total dissolved solids (tds), sodium adsorption ratio (sar), total hardness (th), ch...

background: national institute of environmental health sciences (niehs) scientists shows that long-term exposure to air pollutants increases the risk of respiratory diseases such as allergies, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and lung cancer. children and the elderly are particularly vulnerable to the health effects of ozone, fine particles, and other airborne toxicants. air pollu...

This chapter proposes a combination of estimation of distribution algorithm (EDA) and the 2-opt local search algorithm (EDA/LS) for the quadratic assignment problem (QAP). In EDA/LS, a new operator, called guided mutation, is employed for generating new solutions. This operator uses both global statistical information collected from the previous search and the location information of solutions ...

The ever-increasing popularity of intelligent image search and video retrieval warrants a comprehensive study of the major feature representation and extraction methods often applied in image search and video retrieval. Towards that end, this chapter reviews some representative feature representation and extraction approaches, such as the Spatial Pyramid Matching (SPM), the soft assignment codi...

This paper presents a constraint optimization approach to walling in real-time strategy (RTS) games. Walling is a specific type of spatial reasoning, typically employed by human expert players and not currently fully exploited in RTS game AI, consisting on finding configurations of buildings to completely or partially block paths. Our approach is based on local search, and is specifically desig...

This study proposes a novel algorithm that enhances the distinctiveness of the traditional vector of locally aggregated descriptors (VLAD) using spatial distribution clue of local features. The algorithm introduces a new method to compute the spatial distribution entropy (SDE) of clusters. Unlike conventional methods, this algorithm considers the distribution of full spatial information provide...

Medical image segmentation often involves variants of deformable models to account for both the variability of object shapes and variation in image quality. Segmentation quality, however, highly depends on the initial estimate, and human guidance is often needed to guarantee acceptable results. For automating segmentation, our method employs a quality–of–fit function associated with a finite el...