The novel Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) that was recently introduced has a good performance in some optimization problems. The ICA inspired by socio-political process of imperialistic competition of human being in the real world. In this paper, a new Imperialist Competitive Algorithm with Adaptive Radius of Colonies movement (ICAR) is proposed. In the proposed algorithm, for an effect...

fuzzy clustering methods are conveniently employed in constructing a fuzzy model of a system, but they need to tune some parameters. in this research, fcm is chosen for fuzzy clustering. parameters such as the number of clusters and the value of fuzzifier significantly influence the extent of generalization of the fuzzy model. these two parameters require tuning to reduce the overfitting in the...

resource limitation in zero time may cause to some profitable projects not to be selected in project selection problem, thus simultaneous project portfolio selection and scheduling problem has received significant attention. in this study, budget, investment costs and earnings are considered to be stochastic. the objectives are maximizing net present values of selected projects and minimizing v...

the multiple traveling salesman problem (mtsp) is a generalization of the famous traveling salesman problem (tsp), where more than one salesman is used in the solution. although the mtsp is a typical kind of computationally complex combinatorial optimization problem, it can be extended to a wide variety of routing problems. this paper presents an efficient and evolutionary optimization algorith...

Article history: Received 18 January 2011 Received in revised form 14 March 2012 Accepted 3 August 2012 Available online xxxx

this paper deals with volume fraction optimization of functionally graded (fg) beams resting on elastic foundation for maximizing the first natural frequency. the two-constituent functionally graded beam consists of ceramic and metal. these constituents are graded through the thickness of beam according to a generalized power-law distribution. one of the advantages of using generalized power- l...

an optimal desirability function method is proposed to optimize multiple responses in multiple production scenarios, simultaneously. in dynamic environments, changes in production requirements in each condition create different production scenarios. therefore, in multiple production scenarios like producing in several production lines with different technologies in a factory, various fitted res...

Although there is no more iconic, stalwart, and eloquent defender of liberty and representative democracy than J. S. Mill, he sometimes endorses nondemocratic forms of governance. This article explains the reasons behind this seeming aberration and shows that Mill actually has complex and nuanced views of the transition from nondemocratic to democratic government, including the comprehensive an...

This paper investigates the problem of selecting and scheduling a set of projects among available projects. Each project consists of several tasks and to perform each one some resource is required. The objective is to maximize total benefit. The paper constructs a mathematical formulation in form of mixed integer linear programming model. Three effective metaheuristics in form of the imperialis...