one of the most important extensions of the capacitated vehicle routing problem (cvrp) is the vehicle routing problem with simultaneous pickup and delivery (vrpspd) where customers require simultaneous delivery and pick-up service. in this paper, we propose an effective ant colony optimization (eaco) which includes insert, swap and 2-opt moves for solving vrpspd that is different with common an...

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...

Many research works in mathematical modeling of the facility location problem have been carried out in discrete and continuous optimization area to obtain the optimum number of required facilities along with the relevant allocation processes. This paper proposes a new multiobjective facility-location problem within the batch arrival queuing framework. Three objective functions are considered: (...

In most real world application and problems, a homogeneous product is carried from an origin to a destination by using different transportation modes (e.g., road, air, rail and water). This paper investigates a fixed charge transportation problem (FCTP), in which there are different routes with different capacities between suppliers and customers. To solve such a NP-hard problem, four meta-heur...

In today’s global marketplace, an effective integration of production and distribution plans into a unified framework is crucial for attaining competitive advantages. This paper, therefore, addresses an integrated multi-product and multi-time period production-distribution planning problem for a two-echelon supply chain subject to the real-world constraints. It is assumed that all transportatio...

The vehicle routing problem with time windows, widely used in practice, is an NP-hard problem. This paper presents a new meta-heuristic algorithm for solving the problem. Unlike traditional two-steps algorithms, the proposed optimization algorithm, based on the artificial bee colony algorithm combined with the vector evaluated technique, solves the problem as a multi-objective problem. As a res...

The use of meta-heuristic optimization methods have become quite generic in the past two decades. This paper provides a theoretical investigation to find optimum design parameters of the Stirling heat engines using a recently presented nature-inspired method namely the gray wolf optimization (GWO). This algorithm is utilized for the maximization of the output power/thermal efficiency as well as...

Supply chain management (SCM) is a subject that has found so much attention among different commercial and industrial organizations due to competing environment of products. Therefore, integration of constituent element of this chain is a great deal. This paper proposes a multi objective production-allocation and distribution planning problem (PADPP) in a multi echelon supply chain network. We ...

Feature selection is of great importance in Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship (QSAR) analysis. This problem has been solved using some meta-heuristic algorithms such as: GA, PSO, ACO, SA and so on. In this work two novel hybrid meta-heuristic algorithms i.e. Sequential GA and LA (SGALA) and Mixed GA and LA (MGALA), which are based on Genetic algorithm and learning automata for QSAR f...

The efficiency of transportation system management plays an important role in the planning and operation efficiency of flexible manufacturing systems. Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV) are part of diversified and advanced techniques in the field of material transportation which have many applications today and act as an intermediary between operating and storage equipment and are routed and contr...