In this paper, we study the Generalized Bin Covering problem. For this problem an exact algorithm is introduced which can nd optimal solution for small scale instances. To nd a solution near optimal for large scale instances, a heuristic algorithm has been proposed. By computational experiments, the eciency of the heuristic algorithm is assessed.

Coordinating procurement decisions for a family of products that share a constrained resource, such as an ocean shipping container, is an important managerial problem. However due to the problem’s difficult mathematical properties, efficient and effective solution procedures for the problem have eluded researchers. This paper proposes two heuristics, for the capacitated, coordinated dynamic dem...

purchase or non-purchase of one item or itemset on the purchase or non-purchase of another item or itemset. The research in this paper models for incorporating purchase dependencies in retail multi-item inventory management. One illustrative example has been discussed with data mining in retail sale data. Various types of purchase dependencies including negative dependency have been identified ...

Although evolutionary algorithms have often been used to address VRPs and VRPTWs [1], applications to other routing problems such as period routing and inventory routing are less common. In this paper, a versatile hybrid evolutionary algorithm is developed that can be used for cyclic inventory routing and a variety of capacitated and periodic vehicle routing problems. First, a random insertion ...

vehicle routing problem (vrp) is one of the major problems in the transportation and distribution planning. in the most previous studies, the objective of vrp models was distance and vehicle related costs. however in many industrial cases along with routing distance, vehicle loading amount is a factor of cost function. in this paper, we formulate a mixed integer non-linear programming (minlp) m...

abstract: an efficient supply chain system operates under a strategy to minimize costs by integrating the different functions inside the system and by meeting customer demands in time. in this paper, an integrated supply-production and distribution planning (spdp) is considered despite the fact that in most of the papers, part of the supply chain has been studied, not all parts. therefore, we d...

Operating rooms have become the most important areas in hospitals because of the scarcity and cost of resources. The present study investigates operating room scheduling and rescheduling considering the priority of surgical patients in a specialized hospital. The ultimate purpose of scheduling is to minimize patient waiting time, surgeon idle time between surgeries, and penalties for deviations...

in this paper,  a heuristic algorithm is proposed in order to solve a nonlinear lexicography goal programming (nlgp) by using an efficient initial point. some numerical experiments showed that the search quality by the proposed heuristic in a multiple objectives problem depends on the initial point features, so in the proposed approach the initial point is retrieved by data envelopment analysis...

W designing supply chains, firms are often faced with the competing demands of improved customer service and reduced cost. We extend a cost-based location-inventory model (Shen et al. 2003) to include a customer service element and develop practical methods for quick and meaningful evaluation of cost/service trade-offs. Service is measured by the fraction of all demands that are located within ...

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...