The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), a famous problem of operation research, holds a central place in combinatorial optimization problems. In this problem, a fleet vehicles with Q capacity start to move from depot and return after servicing to customers in which visit only ones each customer and load more than its capacity not at all. The objective is to minimize the number of used vehicles and t...

Production scheduling (planning) of an open-pit mine is the procedure during which the rock blocks are assigned to different production periods in a way that the highest net present value of the project achieved subject to operational constraints. The paper introduces a new and computationally less expensive meta-heuristic technique known as imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) for long-term...

The main purpose of this paper is to show a data mining-based approach to tackle the problem of tuning the performance of a meta-heuristic search algorithm with respect to its parameters. The operational behavior of typical meta-heuristic search algorithms is determined by a set of control parameters, which have to be fine-tuned in order to obtain a best performance for a given problem. The pri...

Optimization of machining parameters is a vital task for increasing machining efficiency and economics. Selection of optimal machining parameters is often performed by integrating empirical models with traditional mathematical and meta-heuristic algorithms. Ability to deal with complex and multi-dimensional optimization problems resulted in growing interest on the application of meta-heuristic ...

Deterring the optimum design of large-scale structures is a difficult task. Great number of design variables, largeness of the search space and controlling great number of design constraints are major preventive factors in performing optimum design of large-scale truss structures in a reasonable time. Meta-heuristic algorithms are known as one of the useful tools to d...

An efficient assignment and scheduling of tasks is one of the key elements in effective utilization of heterogeneous multiprocessor systems. The task scheduling problem has been proven to be NP-hard is the reason why we used meta-heuristic (guided-random-search-based) methods for finding a suboptimal schedule. Due to the large solution space that a meta-heuristic algorithm is required to cover,...

data with high frequency have a particular type of none stationary that is called fractional none stationary. this property causes the emergence of long-term memory in financial time series with high frequency. the existence of long-term memory in cement industry time-series is studied in this paper at first and its presence will be confirmed in a high confidence level by two tests r/s and gph....

Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) have successfully been applied in numerous domains to show the relations between essential components in complex systems. In this paper, a novel learning method is proposed to construct FCMs based on historical data and by using meta-heuristic: Genetic Algorithm (GA), Simulated Annealing (SA), and Tabu Search (TS). Implementation of the proposed method has demonstrat...