this paper is focused on the tactical design of steel supply chain (ssc). a general mathematical model is proposed to integrate production and transportation planning in multi-commodity ssc. the main purpose is to prepare a countrywide production and distribution plan in an ssc with three layers consisting of iron ore mines as suppliers, steel companies as producers, and subsidiary steel compan...

information on the productivity, costs and applications of the logging system is a key component in the evaluation of management plans for the rehabilitation and utilization of caspian forests. skidding and road construction costs are expensive forest operations. determining the optimum forest road network density is one of the most important factors in sustainable forest management. logging me...

a procedure is presented that synthesizes fractional crystallization separation processes to obtain pure solids from multi-component solutions. the method includes a procedure to generate a network flow model to identify alternative process designs for fractional crystallization. the main advantage of this systematic procedure with respect to other reported procedures is using non-equilibrium s...

many ranking methods have been proposed so far. however, there is yet no method that can always give a satisfactory solution to every situation; some are counterintuitive, not discriminating; some use only the local information of fuzzy values; some produce different ranking for the same situation. for overcoming the above problems, we propose a new method for ranking fuzzy quantities based on ...

abstract a quantitative framework of combination of liner programming and cooperative game theory was used in this study to analyze and model cooperative contracts in production based on rural households' resources cooperation in firoozabad plain. revenues and costs in cooperation game theory have important rule to get agreement. transaction cost function was used in cooperative costs accountin...

Recently, Gasimov and Yenilmez proposed an approach for solving two kinds of fuzzy linear programming (FLP) problems. Through the approach, each FLP problem is first defuzzified into an equivalent crisp problem which is non-linear and even non-convex. Then, the crisp problem is solved by the use of the modified subgradient method. In this paper we will have another look at the earlier defuzzifi...

This paper presents a decomposition method for efficiently constructing 1-norm Support Vector Machines (SVMs). The decomposition algorithm introduced in this paper possesses many desirable properties. For example, it is provably convergent, scales well to large datasets, is easy to implement, and can be extended to handle support vector regression and other SVM variants. We demonstrate the effi...

Optimization problems in discrete time can be modeled more flexibly by extended linearquadratic programming than by traditional linear or quadratic programming, because penalties and other expressions that may substitute for constraints can readily be incorporated and dualized. At the same time, dynamics can be written with state vectors as in dynamic programming and optimal control. This sugge...

We consider the problem of controlling a Markov decision process (MDP) with a large state space, so as to minimize average cost. Since it is intractable to compete with the optimal policy for large scale problems, we pursue the more modest goal of competing with a low-dimensional family of policies. We use the dual linear programming formulation of the MDP average cost problem, in which the var...