T he topic of the “credit crunch” received considerable attention during the early 1990s. As a result, several initiatives aimed at eliminating regulatory disincentives to lending were put in place. For example, documentation requirements recently were reduced to the legal minimum for loans to small and medium-sized businesses. Also, examiners and bankers were encouraged to emphasize the charac...

In this paper, a step fixed charge transportation problem is developed where the products are sent from the sources to the destinations in existence of both unit and step fixed-charges. The proposed model determines the amount of products in the existing routes with the aim of minimizing the total cost (sum of unit and step fixed-charges) to satisfy the demand of each customer. As the problem i...

In this research, an integrated approach is presented to simultaneously solve quay crane scheduling and yard truck scheduling problems. A mathematical model was proposed considering the main real-world assumptions such as quay crane non-crossing, precedence constraints and variable berthing times for vessels with the aim of minimizing vessels completion time. Based on the numerical results, thi...

This paper considers the Tchebychev distance for a facility location problem with a probabilistic line barrier in the plane. In particular, we develop a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model for this problem that minimizes the total Tchebychev distance between a new facility and the existing facilities. A numerical example is solved to show the validity of the developed model. Becau...

This article addresses a single row facility layout problem where the objective is to optimize the arrangement of some rectangular facilities with different dimensions on a line. Regarding the NP-Hard nature of the considered problem, a hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm based on simulated annealing has been proposed to obtain a near optimal solution. A number of test problems are randomly generat...

In this paper, we study the data collection problem in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) adopting the two interference models: The graph model and the more realistic physical interference model known as Signal-to-Interference-Noise-Ratio (SINR). The main issue of the problem is to compute schedules with the minimum number of timeslots, that is, to compute the minimum latency schedules, such that ...

This paper considers a three-stage assembly flowshop scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setup < /div> times at the first stage and blocking times between each stage in such a way that the weighted mean completion time and makespan are minimized. Obtaining an optimal solution for this type of complex, large-sized problem in reasonable computational time using traditiona...

This paper considers job shop scheduling problem followed by an assembly stage and Lot Streaming (LS). It is supposed here that a number of products have been ordered to be produced. Each product is assembled with a set of several parts. The production system includes two stages. The first stage is a job shop to produce parts. Each machine can process only one part at the same time. The second ...