Task assignment problem (TAP) involves assigning a number of tasks to a number of processors in distributed computing systems and its objective is to minimize the sum of the total execution and communication costs, subject to all of the resource constraints. TAP is a combinatorial optimization problem and NP-complete. This paper proposes a hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm for solving TAP in a ...

we consider the queueing maximal covering location-allocation problem (qm-clap) with an m/m/1 queueing system. we propose a new solution procedure based on decomposition of the problem into smaller sub-problems. we solve the resulting sub-problems both with a branch and bound algorithm and with the meta-heuristic grasp. we also solve the entire model with grasp. computational results for these ...

This article presents a comprehensive review of chaos embedded meta-heuristic optimization algorithms and describes the evolution of this algorithms along with some improvements, their combination with various methods as well as their applications. The reported results indicate that chaos embedded algorithms may handle engineering design problems efficiently in terms of precision and convergenc...

production planning and scheduling are the most important issues of the production industries, which have a considerable influence on the productivity of the production systems. although, production planning and scheduling are in two different medium-term and short-term decision making levels, there are a very close relationship between them. ignoring this important feature in production planni...

We propose a new distributed and parallel meta-heuristic framework to address the issues of scalability and robustness in the optimization problem. The proposed framework, named PADO (Parallel And Distributed Optimization framework), can utilize heterogeneous computing and communication resources to achieve scalable speedup while maintaining high solution quality. Specifically, we combine an ex...

In this paper we introduce a two phase hyper-heuristic search method for solving the Eternity II puzzle. Eternity II is a challenging money prized edge matching puzzle. Solving the puzzle has been shown to be NP-complete [2]. Hyper-heuristics [1] are a recent trend in heuristic algorithms. They tend to be more general methods than meta-heuristics for solving optimization problems. Hyper-heurist...

Manufacturing process planning and production scheduling functions are usually performed sequentially, disregarding the dynamic nature of manufacturing system. Integrated process planning and scheduling (IPPS) is to combine both the process planning and scheduling problems in the consideration, with the aim to improve the flexibility and adaptability of the actual process plan and the schedule ...

The quadratic assignment problem (QAP) belongs to the class of NP-Hard problems and also is one of the hardest problems in this class. Today, regarding current hardware, solving the large size instances of this problem, using exact methods, is not possible in reasonable amount of time. In this way many heuristic (Meta-heuristic) and approximation methods and soft-computing approaches have been ...

The ability of some RNA molecules to switch between different metastable conformations plays an important role in cellular processes. In order to identify such molecules and to predict their conformational changes one has to investigate the refolding pathways. As a qualitative measure of these transitions, the barrier height marks the energy peak along such refolding paths. We introduce a meta-...

location-allocation is a combinatorial optimization problem, and is defined as non deterministic polynomial hard (np) hard optimization. therefore, solution of such a problem should be shifted from exact to heuristic or meta heuristic due to the complexity of the problem. locating medical centers and allocating injuries of an earthquake to them has high importance in earthquake disaster managem...