The solutions used to solve bi-level congestion pricing problems are usually based on heuristic network optimization methods which may not be able to find the best solution for these type of problems. The application of meta-heuristic methods can be seen as viable alternative solutions but so far, it has not received enough attention by researchers in this field. Therefore, the objective of thi...

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 fixed charge transportation problem (FCTP) is a deployment of the classical transportation problem in which a fixed cost is incurred, independent of the amount transported, along with a variable cost that is proportional to the amount shipped. Since the problem is considered as an NP-hard, the computational time grows exponentially as the size of the problem increases. In this pape...

tower cranes are major and expensive equipment that are extensively used at building construction projects and harbors for lifting heavy objects to demand points. the tower crane locating problem to position a tower crane and supply points in a building construction site for supplying all requests in minimum time, has been raised from more than twenty years ago. this problem has already been so...

response surface methodology is a common tool in optimizing processes. it mainly concerns situations when there is only one response of interest. however, many designed experiments often involve simultaneous optimization of several quality characteristics. this is called a multiresponse surface optimization problem. a common approach in dealing with these problems is to apply desirability funct...

This paper investigates the scheduling problems in which the job processing times do not remain constant but are increasing linear functions of their starting times. Two deteriorating scheduling models, Model 1 and Model 2, for multiple machines are considered, with the goal being to minimize the makespan. In this paper, we propose an efficient heuristic for Model 1 and prove that the ratio of ...

ion is widely used for speeding up search. In particular, it can be beneficial in the creation of heuristic functions. For any state s in the original state space, a heuristic function estimates the distance of s to the goal. Given an abstraction, the actual distances in the abstract space can be used to define a heuristic function that never overestimates the true distances. Such heuristic fun...

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...