The dynamic facility layout problem (DFLP) is the problem of finding positions of departments onthe plant floor for multiple periods (material flows between departments change during the planning horizon)such that departments do not overlap, and the sum of the material handling and rearrangement costs isminimized. In this paper a new optimization algorithm inspired from colonizing weeds, Invasi...

One of the key elements in production planning hierarchy is master production scheduling. The aim of this study is to evaluate and compare thirteen alternative MPS development methods, including multi-objective optimization as well as twelve heuristics, in different operating conditions for multi-product single-level capacity-constrained production systems. We extract six critical criteria from...

Private landowners are often de facto stewards of biodiversity and ecosystem services. In California’s Sierra Nevada foothills, ranchers frequently present the only defense against biological invasions in private rangelands. Although ranchers’ land management goals (e.g., the desire to control invasive species) can be consistent with ecosystem protection, practical constraints often limit their...

Multiple-target tracking (MTT) in the presence of spurious measurements poses difficult computational challenges related to the measurement-to-track data association problem. Different solution approaches have been proposed to tackle this problems, including various approximations and heuristic optimization tools. The Cross Entropy method is a recent optimization heuristic that has proved usefu...

Clements, D. R. and DiTommaso, A. 2012. Predicting weed invasion in Canada under climate change: Evaluating evolutionary potential. Can. J. Plant Sci. 92: 1013 1020. Many weed species have already advanced northward from the United States into Canada, and their number threatens to increase with warming trends under climate change. For many weed species, this range expansion can be attributed to...

Invasive weeds threaten the biodiversity and forage productivity of grasslands worldwide. However, management of these weeds is constrained by the practical difficulty of detecting small-scale infestations across large landscapes and by limits in understanding of landscape-scale invasion dynamics, including mechanisms that enable patches to expand, contract, or remain stable. While high-end hyp...