no unique method has been so far specified for determining the number of neurons in hidden layers of multi-layer perceptron (mlp) neural networks used for prediction. the present research is intended to optimize the number of neurons using two meta-heuristic procedures namely genetic and hill climbing algorithms. the data used in the present research for prediction are consumption data of water...

Investment decision making is one of the key issues in financial management. Selecting the appropriate tools and techniques that can make optimal portfolio is one of the main objectives of the investment world. This study tries to optimize the decision making in stock selection or the optimization of the portfolio by means of the artificial colony of honey bee algorithm. To determine the effect...

The supply chain network design not only assists organizations production process (e.g.,plan, control and execute a product’s flow) but also ensure what is the growing need for companies in a longterm. This paper develops a three-echelon supply chain network problem including multiple plants, multiple distributors, and multiple retailers with amulti-mode demand satisfaction policy inside of pro...

Recently, many meta-heuristic algorithms are proposed for optimization of various problems. Some of them originally are presented for continuous optimization problems and some others are just applicable for discrete ones. In the literature, sizing optimization of truss structures is one of the discrete optimization problems which is solved by many meta-heuristic algorithms. In this paper, in or...

This paper presents application of an improved Harmony Search (HS) technique and Charged System Search algorithm (CSS) to estimate transport energy demand in Iran, based on socio-economic indicators. The models are developed in two forms (exponential and linear) and applied to forecast transport energy demand in Iran. These models are developed to estimate the future energy demands based on pop...

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...

Water distribution networks are one of the important and costly infrastructures of cities and many meta-heuristic algorithms in standard or hybrid forms were used for optimizing water distribution networks. These algorithms require a large amount of computational cost. Therefore, the converging speed of algorithms toward the optimization goal is as important as the goal itself. In this paper, a...

Vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) is an important component of intelligent transportation systems, in which vehicles are equipped with on-board computing and communication devices which enable vehicle-to-vehicle communication. Consequently, with regard to larger communication due to the greater number of vehicles, stability of connectivity would be a challenging problem. Clustering technique as ...

This paper develops Order Acceptance for an Integrated Production-Distribution Problem in which Batch Delivery is implemented. The aim of this problem is to coordinate: (1) rejecting some of the orders (2) production scheduling of the accepted orders and (3) batch delivery to maximize Total Net Profit. A Mixed Integer Programming is proposed for the problem. In addition, a hybrid meta-heuristic...