Production scheduling (planning) of an open-pit mine is the procedure during which the rock blocks are assigned to different production periods in a way that the highest net present value of the project achieved subject to operational constraints. The paper introduces a new and computationally less expensive meta-heuristic technique known as imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) for long-term...

This paper aims at determining the optimal number of new facilities besides specifying both the optimal location and design level of them under the budget constraint in a competitive environment by a novel hybrid continuous and discrete firefly algorithm. A real-world application of locating new chain stores in the city of Tehran, Iran, is used and the results are analyzed. In addition, several...

This paper analyses the issue of innovation in developing countries with reference to local production systems populated by small enterprises. In these contexts innovation may result from imitation and from spillovers from foreign direct investments; however, the literature shows that these opportunities frequently find serious obstacles and are less fruitful than expected; for this reason we s...

Several reports on national competitiveness already exists, but they are not satisfactory. This paper corrects the problems of the existing reports and suggests new methodologies of explaining national competitiveness. When comparing national competitiveness, nations should be grouped with regard to similarities in terms of economic scale and structure. For this purpose, this paper introduces 3...

Competitive learning approaches with individual penalization or cooperation mechanisms have the attractive ability of automatic cluster number selection in unsupervised data clustering. In this paper, we further study these two mechanisms and propose a novel learning algorithm called Cooperative and Penalized Competitive Learning (CPCL), which implements the cooperation and penalization mechani...

Several books and articles give glimpses into the knowledge management (KM) phenomena. However, none have identified the specific types of KM activities that can be contributors to competitiveness. The recently advanced knowledge chain (KC) model took the first steps in trying to do this. The KC model identified nine distinct and generic KM activities. The intent of this research is to further ...

With the prosperity of worldwide B2B electronic market, it is necessary to explore the role of its users’ behavior but not only the user base effect on their sustainable competitiveness. The quality of users’ behavior, which is indicated by the activity of two-sided users, are critical important for B2B electronic market makers as there is “chicken and egg problem” between these two users. In t...

This paper presents an innovative initiative of a regional university stimulating the development of a knowledge hub around nanotechnology applications to businesses. The paper argues that the regional industry structure and competitiveness can be influenced by this type of university-industry partnership that initiate, share, facilitate and transfer new technologies and practices. At the same ...

In Packet Scheduling with Adversarial Jamming packets of arbitrary sizes arrive over time to be transmitted over a channel in which instantaneous jamming errors occur at times chosen by the adversary and not known to the algorithm. The transmission taking place at the time of jamming is corrupt, and the algorithm learns this fact immediately. An online algorithm maximizes the total size of pack...

In this paper, we present a novel competitive EM (CEM) algorithm for "nite mixture models to overcome the two main drawbacks of the EM algorithm: often getting trapped at local maxima and sometimes converging to the boundary of the parameter space. The proposed algorithm is capable of automatically choosing the clustering number and selecting the “split” or “merge” operations e7ciently based on...