Optimization of the complete manufacturing and supply process has become a critical ingredient for gaining a competitive advantage. This article provides a unified mathematical framework for modeling manufacturing cell configuration and raw material supplier selection in a two-level supply chain network. The commonly used manufacturing design parameters along with supplier selection and a subco...

This paper provides a test method to make a fair comparison between different heuristics in structure optimization. When statistical methods are applied to the structural optimization (namely heuristics or meta-heuristics with several tunable parameters and starting seeds), the "one problem - one result" is extremely far from the fair comparison. From statistical point of view, the minimal requ...

Abstract— In this paper we have tried to develop an altered version of the artificial bee colony algorithm which is inspired from and combined with the meta-heuristic algorithm of firefly. In this method, we have tried to change the main equation of searching within the original ABC algorithm. On this basis, a new combined equation was used for steps of employed bees and onlooker bees. For this...

Stochastic nature of earthquake has raised a challenge for engineers to choose which record for their analyses. Clustering is offered as a solution for such a data mining problem to automatically distinguish between ground motion records based on similarities in the corresponding seismic attributes. The present work formulates an optimization problem to seek for the best clustering measures. In...

One of the most significant and effective criteria in the process of cutting dimensional rocks using the gang saw is the maximum energy consumption rate of the machine, and its accurate prediction and estimation can help designers and owners of this industry to achieve an optimal and economic process. In the present research work, it is attempted to study and provide models for predicting the m...

Cloud computing is considered to be a new service provider technology for users and businesses. However, the cloud environment is facing a number of challenges. Resource allocation in a way that is optimum for users and cloud providers is difficult because of lack of data sharing between them. On the other hand, job scheduling is a basic issue and at the same time a big challenge in reaching hi...

One of the most important and valuable goal of software development life cycle is software cost estimation or SCE. During the recent years, SCE has attracted the attention of researchers due to huge amount of software project requests. There have been proposed so many models using heuristic and meta-heuristic algorithms to do machine learning process for SCE. COCOMO81 is one of the most popular...

The vehicle routing problem (VRP) is one of the most important combinational optimization problems that has nowadays received much attention because of its real application in industrial and service problems. The VRP involves routing a fleet of vehicles, each of them visiting a set of nodes such that every node is visited by exactly one vehicle only once. So, the objective is to minimize the to...

Abstract Hybridization is a widespread phenomenon in animals, and hybrid heterosis/breakdown could be key processes determining the evolutionary dynamics of hybrids. Indeed, hybrids are not consistently disadvantaged compared to parental lineages, as was historically assumed. Multiple lead performance differences between lineages their Despite many studies evaluated hybrids, quantitative synthe...