The allocation of design tolerances between the components of a mechanical assembly and manufacturing tolerances can significantly affect the functionality of products and related production costs. This paper introduces Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) approach to solve the machining tolerance allocation of an overrunning clutch assembly.  The objective is to obtain optimum tolerances of...

Presenting structural damage detection problem as an inverse model-updating approach is one of the well-known methods which can reach to informative features of damages. This paper proposes a model-based method for fault prognosis in engineering structures. A new damage-sensitive cost function is suggested by employing the main concepts of the Modal Assurance Criterion (MAC) on the first severa...

In the recent years, the optimization techniques using evolutionary algorithms have been widely used to solve electromagnetic problems. These algorithms use thinning the antenna arrays with the aim of reducing the complexity and thus achieving the optimal solution and decreasing the side lobe level. To obtain the optimal solution, thinning is performed by removing some elements in an array thro...

This paper presents a new mathematical model for a hybrid flow shop scheduling problem with multiprocessor tasks in which sequence dependent set up times and preemption are considered. The objective is to minimize the weighted sum of makespan and maximum tardiness. Three meta-heuristic methods based on genetic algorithm (GA), imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) and a hybrid approach of GA a...