One important issue regarding the implementation of cellular manufacturing systems relates to deciding whether to convert an existing job shop into a cellular manufacturing system comprehensively in a single go, or in stages incrementally by forming cells one after the other taking the advantage of the experiences of implementation. In this paper two heuristic methods based on multi-stage progr...

Scheduling sports competitions is a difficult task because it is often very difficult to construct schedules that are considered fair by all competitors. In addition, the schedules should also satisfy a considerably large number of additional requirements and constraints. Most of the sports scheduling problems that have been tackled in the literature refer to competitions in which a venue is as...

In this paper, two heuristic optimization techniques are tested and compared in the application of motion planning for autonomous agricultural vehicles: Simulated Annealing and Genetic Algorithms. Several preliminary experimentations are performed for both algorithms, so that the best neighborhood definitions and algorithm parameters are found. Then, the two tuned algorithms are run extensively...

Portfolio selection represents a challenge where investors look for the best firms of the market to be selected. This research presents a real world application at the Mexican Stock Exchange (La Bolsa) using a set of heuristic algorithms for portfolio selection. The heuristic algorithms (random, genetic, greedy, hill-climbing and simulated annealing) were implemented based on the Markowitz Mode...

formation visualization techniques to the problem of school redistricting, in which students are assigned to home schools within a county or school district. This is a multicriteria optimization problem in which competing objectives, such as school capacity, busing costs, and socioeconomic distribution, must be considered. Because of the complexity of the decision-making problem, tools are need...

Spatial layout design must consider not only ease of movement for pedestrians under normal conditions, but also their safety in panic situations, such as an emergency evacuation in a theatre, stadium or hospital. Using pedestrian simulation statistics, the movement of crowds can be used to study the consequences of different spatial layouts. Previous works either create an optimal spatial arran...

Model calibration is a crucial step in building a reliable microscopic traffic simulation application, because it serves as the additional check to ensure the model parameters accurately reflect the local driving environment, such that decisions made based on these results would not be misinformed decisions. Because of its stochastic nature and complexity, the calibration problem, usually formu...

This article describes applications of modern heuristic search methods to pattern sequencing problems, i.e., problems seeking for a permutation of the rows of a given matrix with respect to some given objective function. We consider two different objectives: Minimization of the number of simultaneously open stacks and minimization of the average order spread. Both objectives require the adaptiv...

In this work, we address the unrestricted Dynamic Container Relocation Problem (DCRP). The DCRP is an extension of the Container Relocation Problem (CRP) that is NPhard. The CRP aims to empty a single yard-bay, which contains containers with a given retrieval sequence from the yardbay, such that the total number of relocations is minimized. The DCRP extends the CRP so that containers both arriv...

Maximum Parsimony (MP) is a character-based approach that relies on the work of the german entomologist Willy Hennig (1913-1976). Although Hennig’s work has generated significant controversy, the principles that underlie what was later called cladistics, laid the basis for a convenient and powerful method for the analysis of molecular data with the use of computers. For more details about the h...