in the field of health losses resulting from failure to establish the facilities in a suitable location and the required number, beyond the cost and quality of service will result in an increase in mortality and the spread of diseases. so the facility location models have special importance in this area. in this paper, a successively inclusive hierarchical model for location of health centers i...

The topic ofthis paper was already fonnulated and solved at a theoretical level around 500 BC by Heraklit of Ephesos. Essentially Heraklit reminds us that we will never understand human behavior: 'You cannot discover the limits of the soul, even if you use all possible means available, since it is without limits and its capacity can never be exhausted.' .. Now, 2500years after his death, we may...

this article presents the application of two algorithms: heuristic big bang-big crunch (hbb-bc) and a heuristic particle swarm ant colony optimization (hpsaco) to discrete optimization of reinforced concrete planar frames subject to combinations of gravity and lateral loads based on aci 318-08 code. the objective function is the total cost of the frame which includes the cost of concrete, formw...

Cuckoo search (CS) is a novel biologically inspired algorithm and has been widely applied to many fields. Although some binary-coded CS variants are developed to solve 0-1 knapsack problems, the search accuracy and the convergence speed are still needed to further improve. According to the analysis of the shortcomings of the standard CS and the advantage of the global harmony search (GHS), a no...

This paper discuss the utilization of the complex chaotic dynamics given by the selected time-continuous chaotic systems as well as by the discrete chaotic maps, as the chaotic pseudo random number generators and driving maps for the chaos based optimization. Such an optimization concept is utilizing direct output iterations of chaotic system transferred into the required numerical range or it ...

Among variety of meta-heuristic population-based search algorithms, particle swarm optimization (PSO) with adaptive inertia weight (AIW) has been considered as a versatile optimization tool, which incorporates the experience of the whole swarm into the movement of particles. Although the exploitation ability of this algorithm is great, it cannot comprehensively explore the search space and may ...