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...

In today's competitive markets, firms try to reduce their supply cost by selecting efficient suppliers using different techniques. Several methods can be applied to evaluate the efficiency of supplier base. This paper develops generalized network data envelopment analysis models to examine the efficiency of two-tier supplier bases under cooperative and non-cooperative strategies where each tier...

In the last few years, classical planners have achieved impressive results due to the development of problem relaxation techniques for computing distance estimates. In contrast, many large temporal planning systems used for practical applications have not benefitted from these techniques. Instead, these systems rely on careful engineering of the domain knowledge, together with carefully crafted...

A critical advancement in solar photovoltaic (PV) establishment has led to robust acceleration towards the evolution of new MPPT techniques. The sun-oriented PV framework a non-linear characteristic varying climatic conditions, which considerably impact yield. Furthermore, partial shading condition (PSC) causes major problems, such as drop output power yield and multiple peaks P–V attribute. He...

Node cooperation can protect wireless networks from eavesdropping by using the physical characteristics of wireless channels rather than cryptographic methods. Allocating the proper amount of power to cooperative nodes is a challenging task. In this paper, we use three cooperative nodes, one as relay to increase throughput at the destination and two friendly jammers to degrade eavesdropper&rsqu...

While there exist clear methods for validating and ensuring the quality of solutions generated by forest planning heuristic techniques, the use of these methods in the literature varies from one situation to the next. Based on our experience developing and using heuristic forest planning techniques, we describe six levels of heuristic validation that are currently in use, ranging from no valida...

How does one obtain an admissible heuristic for a kinodynamic motion planning problem? This paper develops the analytical tools and techniques to answer this question. A sufficient condition for the admissibility of a heuristic is presented which can be checked directly from the problem data. This condition is also used to formulate a concave program to optimize an admissible heuristic. This op...

The development of modern wide-area power systems, as well as recent trends towards the creation of sustainable energy systems have given birth to complex studies addressing technical, but also economical and environmental, aspects related to simple or multi-objective optimization problems. Recently, heuristic and metaheuristic approaches that apply combinations of different heuristics with or ...

This paper describes three simple heuristics which improve opinion retrieval effectiveness by using blog-specific properties. Blog timestamps are used to increase the retrieval scores of blog posts published near the time of a significant event related to a query; an inexpensive approach to comment amount estimation is used to identify the level of opinion expressed in a post; and query-specifi...