Non-asset based third-party logistics providers manage fleets of leased vehicles for their customers. Due to high leasing costs, minimizing the number of vehicles employed in daily operations is of primary concern to such firms. Consequently, routings that involve fewer vehicles and potentially longer travel times are favored over routings that involve additional vehicles. Constructing routes t...

in this article, multiple-product pvrp with pickup and delivery that is used widely in goods distribution or other service companies, especially by railways, was introduced. a mathematical formulation was provided for this problem. each product had a set of vehicles which could carry the product and pickup and delivery could simultaneously occur. to solve the problem, two meta-heuristic methods...

Cloud computing promises a more cost effective enabling technology to outsource storage and computations. Existing approaches for secure outsourcing of data and arbitrary computations are either based on a single tamper-proof hardware, or based on recently proposed fully homomorphic encryption. The hardware based solutions are not scaleable, and fully homomorphic encryption is currently only of...

The rapid expansion of commodity agriculture in tropical forest landscapes is a key driver of deforestation. To meet the growing demand from a more prosperous and expanding global population, it is imperative to develop sustainable commodity supply chains that support higher agricultural productivity, and that enable improved environmental, economic, and social outcomes. Interventions by commun...

We propose a heuristic for a class of vehicle routing problems (VRPs) with minmax objective. These include the Capacitated VRP, the Capacitated VRP with multiple use of vehicles, and the Traveling Salesman Problem with multiple use of vehicles. A tabu search based adaptive memory procedure of instances indicate that the method produces very good solutions within reasonable computing times.

Co-movement between futures prices can arise when commodities are substitutes. Using Johansen’s co-integration procedure, we fail to find a significant long-run link between soybean and corn prices on the Dalian Commodity Exchange of China. This relationship is re-examined using Johansen’s co-integration procedure that permits structural breaks. Results show evidence of co-integration and...

We present a vision-based algorithm for the detection of multiple autonomous vehicles for a pursuit-evasion game scenario. Our algorithm computes estimates of the pose of multiple moving evaders from visual information collected by multiple moving pursuers, without previous knowledge of the segmentation of the image measurements or the number of moving evaders. We evaluate our algorithm in purs...