In most real world application and problems, a homogeneous product is carried from an origin to a destination by using different transportation modes (e.g., road, air, rail and water). This paper investigates a fixed charge transportation problem (FCTP), in which there are different routes with different capacities between suppliers and customers. To solve such a NP-hard problem, four meta-heur...

In this paper we propose five heuristic procedures for the solution of the multiple competitive facilities location problem. A franchise of several facilities is to be located in a trade area where competing facilities already exist. The objective is to maximize the market share captured by the franchise as a whole. We perform extensive computational tests and conclude that a two-step heuristic...

The combined simulated annealing (CSA) algorithm was developed for the discrete facility location problem (DFLP) in the paper. The method is a two-layer algorithm, in which the external subalgorithm optimizes the decision of the facility location decision while the internal subalgorithm optimizes the decision of the allocation of customer's demand under the determined location decision. The per...

The aim of this paper is to examine two new simulated annealing approaches for Uncapacitated Facility Location (UFL) problems with some useful comparisons with the latest genetic algorithm approach (Jaramillo et al, 2002) to the problem. As it is mentioned in various publications, the simulated annealing approach may be very successful in terms of quality of the solution but not so impressive w...

Bus network design is an important problem in public transportation. A main step to this design is determining the number of required terminals and their locations. This is a special type of facility location problem, which is a time-consuming, large scale, combinatorial problem. In a previous attempt by the authors, this problem had been solved by GAMS, based on a branch and bound algorithm.&...

Single row layout is one of the most usually used layout patterns in industries, particularly in flexible manufacturing systems. Here actual sequencing of machine and arrangement of parts, no doubt, have a great influence on the throughput of the flexible manufacturing system i.e., (F.M.S). This paper discusses the single row layout design in flexible manufacturing system (F.M.S). This paper fu...