Cargo terminals are the gateways for entrance of commodities into the transportation network. Therefore, locating them in optimal location could have a major impact on the cost effectiveness and efficiency of transport, traffic safety and reduction in environmental pollutions. Due to the presence of a large number of parameters involved and the existing uncertainties, decision making in this fi...

We consider an investment problem such as a construction of power plants. The uncertainties, which are considered in this investment problem, are the evolution of cash flows obtained from the plant operation, and the catastrophic event, which drives the value of the project to zero due to external factors, such as earthquake. We show the model of a sequential investment as well as that of a sin...

We address optimal group manipulation in multidimensional, multi-facility location problems. We focus on two families of mechanisms, generalized median and quantile mechanisms, evaluating the difficulty of group manipulation of these mechanisms. We show that, in the case of single-facility problems, optimal group manipulation can be formulated as a linear or second-order cone program, under the...

We present e cient algorithms for two problems of facility location. In both problems we want to determine the location of a single facility with respect to n given sites. In the rst we seek a location that maximizes a weighted distance function between the facility and the sites, and in the second we nd a location that minimizes the sum (or sum of the squares) of the distances of k of the site...

Location decision is an integral part of organizational strategies involving many factorsthat may be conflicting in nature. This paper presents a holistic approach of the multi-criteria decisionmaking (MCDM) methodology to select the optimal location(s), which fits best for both investors andmanagers. A case study is also provided to illustrate the application of the proposed holistic approach....

In the most recent heuristic methods, the high potential buses for capacitor placement are initially identified and ranked using loss sensitivity factors (LSFs) or power loss index (PLI). These factors or indices help to reduce the search space of the optimization procedure, but they may not always indicate the appropriate placement of capacitors. This paper proposes an efficient approach for t...

In recent years, in Iran and other countries the power systems are going to move toward creating a competition structure for selling and buying electrical energy. These changes and the numerous advantages of DGs have made more incentives to use these kinds of generators than before. Therefore, it is necessary to study all aspects of DGs, such as size selection and optimal placement and impact o...

Background and Objectives: One of the key issues in determining location for blood supply center is the design of blood supply chain. To minimize the cost of blood supply, the donors should be reached easily with appropriate distribution of blood and blood products to the hospital. The aim of this study was calculating of the optimal number and location of different various t...

The large amount of computation necessary for obtaining time optimal solution for moving a manipulator on specified path has made it impossible to introduce an on line time optimal control algorithm. Most of this computational burden is due to calculation of switching points. In this paper a learning algorithm is proposed for finding the switching points. The method, which can be used for both ...