tower cranes are major and expensive equipment that are extensively used at building construction projects and harbors for lifting heavy objects to demand points. the tower crane locating problem to position a tower crane and supply points in a building construction site for supplying all requests in minimum time, has been raised from more than twenty years ago. this problem has already been so...

Semiconductor manufacturing is one of the most complex and capital-intensive processes composed of several hundreds of operations. In today's competitive business environments, it is more important than ever before to manage manufacturing process effectively to achieve better performances in terms of customer satisfaction and productivity than those of competitors. To obtain such fruitful outco...

Process planning and scheduling are two key sub-functions in the manufacturing system. Traditionally, process planning and scheduling were regarded as the separate tasks to perform sequentially. Recently, a significant trend is to integrate process planning and scheduling more tightly to achieve greater performance and higher productivity of the manufacturing system. Because of the complementar...

The SharedPlans formalization of collaboration (Grosz and Kraus 1999) stipulates that collaborating agents must commit to certain decision-making processes, but it does not specify those processes. This paper presents a mechanism for group decision making that may be applied to the decisions that agents involved in a SharedPlan need to make: adopting the initial commitment, selecting a recipe, ...

With globalization and rapid technological-economic development accelerating the market dynamics, consumers' demand is becoming more volatile diverse. In this situation, capacity adjustment as an operational strategic decision plays a major role to ensure supply chain responsiveness while maintaining costs at reasonable norm. This study contributes literature by developing computationally effic...

Abstract. If you are a geoscientist doing work to achieve impact outside academia or engaging different audiences with the geosciences, planning make this publishable? so, then plan. Such investigations into how people (academics, practitioners, other publics) respond geoscience can use pragmatic, simple research methodologies accessible non-specialist be more complex. To employ medical analogy...

Scheduling is an important tool for a manufacturing system, where it can have a major impact on the productivity of a production process. In manufacturing systems, the purpose of scheduling is to minimize the production time and costs, by assigning a production facility when to make, with which staff, and on which equipment. Production scheduling aims to maximize the efficiency of the operation...

Nowadays, manufacturing organisations face increasing pressures from the frequent change in product type, continuous demand fluctuation and unexpected change in customer requirements. In order to survive in the turbulent environment, manufacturing organisations must become flexible and responsive to these dynamic changes in the business environment. This paper presents a hierarchical agent bidd...