Increasing fuel costs, post-911 security concerns, and economic globalization provide a strong incentive for container carriers to use available container space more efficiently, thereby minimizing the number of container trips and reducing socio-economic vulnerability. A heuristic algorithm based on a tertiary tree model is proposed to handle the container loading problem (CLP) with weakly het...

fuzzy linear programming models and methods has been one ofthe most and well studied topics inside the broad area of soft computing. itsapplications as well as practical realizations can be found in all the real worldareas. in this paper a basic introduction to the main models and methods infuzzy mathematical programming, with special emphasis on those developedby the authors, is presented. as ...

In practice, apart from the problem of vehicle routing, schedulers also face the problem of finding feasible driver schedules complying with complex restrictions on drivers’ driving and working hours. To address this complex interdependent problem of vehicle routing and break scheduling, we propose a restricted dynamic programming heuristic for the vehicle routing problem with time windows and ...

Thermostatic loads are promising energy buffers that could be unlocked through Demand Response. Existing research has shown that an aggregation of thermostatic loads can be made to follow a power curve using reactive control. In this paper we investigate the use of planning to proactively control an aggregation of Thermostatic Loads as storage to overcome temporary dips in power availability. W...

the set covering problem (scp) is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem. this paper investigates development of a local branching approach for the scp. this solution strategy is exact in nature, though it is designed to improve the heuristic behavior of the mixed integer programming solver. the algorithm parameters are tuned by design of experiments approach. the proposed method is te...

The general problem for the prediction of RNA secondary structure with pseudoknots is NP-hard. For a restricted class of pseudoknots, it was traditionally solved by the dynamic programming approach. However, these algorithms are computationally very expensive, when the input sequence or the contained pseudoknot is too long. We present a heuristic algorithm for RNA secondary structures with pseu...

In this paper, a value-iteration based heuristic dynamic programming (HDP) algorithm is developed to solve the optimal control for the continuous time affine nonlinear systems. First, a rigorous convergence proof of the HDP algorithm is given. Second, stability issues of the HDP algorithm for nonlinear systems are investigated. It is commonly believed that the main drawback of the HDP algorithm...

In this paper, we propose a virtual reality (VR) platform as a case study of machine learning, in this case applied to the goal representation heuristic dynamic programming (GrHDP) approach. In general, a VR platform normally includes a physical module, a control/learning module, and a VR module. It facilitates machine learning research, where scientists and engineers can participate in the sim...

Energy management in smart home environment is nowadays a crucial aspect on which technologies have been focusing on in order to save costs and minimize energy waste. This goal can be reached by means of an energy resource scheduling strategy provided by a suitable optimization technique. The proposed solution involves a class of Adaptive Critic Designs (ACDs) called Action Dependent Heuristic ...

Approximate/adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) has been studied extensively in recent years for its potential scalability to solve large state and control space problems, including those involving continuous states and continuous controls. The applicability of ADP algorithms, especially the adaptive critic designs has been demonstrated in several case studies. Direct heuristic dynamic programmi...