Multi-echelon distribution networks are quite common in supply chain and logistics. Deliveries of multiple items from factories to customers aremanagedby routing and consolidating shipments inwarehouses carrying on long-term inventories. On the other hand, cross-docking is a logistics technique that differs from warehousing because products are no longer stored at intermediate depots. Instead, ...

One of the most important factors in implementing supply chain management is to efficiently control the physical flow of the supply chain. Due to its importance, many companies are trying to develop efficient methods to increase customer satisfaction and reduce costs. In various methods, cross-docking is considered a good method to reduce inventory and improve responsiveness to various customer...

Stress-specific activation of the chaperone Hsp33 requires the unfolding of a central linker region. This activation mechanism suggests an intriguing functional relationship between the chaperone's own partial unfolding and its ability to bind other partially folded client proteins. However, identifying where Hsp33 binds its clients has remained a major gap in our understanding of Hsp33's worki...

objective: the purpose of this study was to compare the use of cross-sectional imaging techniques verses surgery in locating parotid masses. material and methods: our study was performed on patients assumed to have parotid masses from dec 2010 to dec 2011. before surgery, imaging studies (computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging) of parotid were done. after surgery, we compared the su...

The underestimation of data points by a convex quadratic function is a useful tool for approximating the location of the global minima of potential energy functions that arise in protein-ligand docking problems. Determining the parameters that define the underestimator can be formulated as a convex quadratically constrained quadratic program and solved efficiently using algorithms for semidefin...

Human immunodeficiency virus infection / acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) is a disease pertained to the human immune system. Given its crucial role in viral replication, HIV-1 protease (HIV-1 PR) is a prime therapeutic target in AIDS therapy. In this regard, the dynamic aspects of ligand-enzyme interactions may indicate an important role of conformational variability in HIV-1 PR in...

Dilated cardiomyopathy is a disease of left ventricular dysfunction accompanied by impairment of the β1-adrenergic receptor (β1-AR) signal cascade. The disturbed β1-AR function may be based on an elevated sympathetic tone observed in patients with heart failure. Prolonged adrenergic stimulation may induce metabolic and electrophysiological disturbances in the myocardium, resulting in tachyarrhy...

Since the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) was introduced by Dantzig and Ramser, it became one of the most studied problems in Combinatorial Optimization. Different solution approaches were proposed over the past decades to solve the VRP and its variants. In this thesis, we discuss about two VRP variants, resulting from the integration of VRPs with distribution problems. The first problem takes pl...

In the current competitive conditions, all the manufacturers’ efforts are focused on increasing the customer satisfaction as well as reducing the production and delivery costs; thus, there is an increasing concentration on the structure and principles of supply chain (SC). Accordingly, the present research investigated simultaneous optimization of the total costs of a chain and customer satisfa...