this paper presents a multi-criteria vehicle routing problem with soft time windows (vrpstw) to mini-mize fleet cost, routes cost, and violation of soft time windows penalty. in this case, the fleet is heterogene-ous. the vrpstw consists of a number of constraints in which vehicles are allowed to serve customers out of the desirable time window by a penalty. it is assumed that this relaxation a...

under the smart grid environment, demand response resources (drrs) are introduced as a virtual power plant to enhance power system adequacy. drrs often fail to reduce their load due to some external factors. in this paper, a reliability model of a drr is constructed as multi-state conventional generation units, where the probability, frequency of occurrence, and departure rate of each state can...

b a c k g r o u n d & aim: multi-state models can help better understand the process of chronic diseases such as cancers.  these models  are influenced  by assumptions  like individual  homogeneity.  this study aimed to investigate the effect of lack of individual homogeneity  assumption  in multi-state models. methods & materials: to investigate the effect of lack of individual homogeneity ass...

abstract. when a production facility is designed, there are various parameters affecting the number machines such as production capacity and reliability. it is often a tedious task to optimize different objectives simultaneously. the other issue is the uncertainty in many design parameters which makes it difficult to reach a desirable solution. in this paper, we present a new mathematical model...

design of a logistics network in proper way provides a proper platform for efficient and effective supply chain management. this paper studies a multi-period, multi echelon and multi-product integrated forward-reverse logistics network under uncertainty. first, an efficient complex mixed-integer linear programming (milp) model by considering some real-world assumptions is developed for the inte...

background: functional appliances such as bionator have been used to treat class ii malocclusion. the purpose of this study was to compare the skeletal, dental and soft tissue effects of bionator appliances with multi-p (a newly developed appliance) in the treatment of class ii malocclusion. subjects and methods: 45 class ii children were chosen and randomly assigned to either the bionator or m...

in this paper, distributed parameter process systems behavior is studied in frequency domain. based on the dominant gain concept that is developed for such studies, a method is presented to control distributed parameter process systems. by using dominant gain concept, the location of open loop zeros, resulted from the time delay parameter in the process model, were changed from the right half p...

Using “clean-slate approach” to redesign the Internet has attracted considerable attention. ZNA (Z Network Architecture) is one of clean-slate network architectures based on the layered model. The major features of ZNA are as follows: (1) introducing the session layer to provide the applications with sophisticated communication services, (2) employing inter-node cross-layer cooperation to adapt...