Hard or large-scale constraint satisfaction and optimization problems, occur widely in artiicial intelligence and operations research. These problems are often diicult to solve with global search methods, but many of them can be eeciently solved by local search methods. Evolutionary algorithms are local search methods which have considerable success in tackling diicult, or ill-deened optimizati...

This paper deals with the determination of machine numbers and production schedules in manufacturing environments. In this line, a two-stage fuzzy stochastic programming model is discussed with fuzzy processing times where both deterioration and learning effects are evaluated simultaneously. The first stage focuses on the type and number of machines in order to minimize the total costs associat...

poor establishment of seedling due to both drought and lack of water is one of the most important problems in arid and semiarid regions such as iran. so, in order to evaluate the effect of lentil seed size on germination and seedling growth properties affected by drought stress, a completely randomized design with factorial arrangement and 3 replications conducted using two lentils genotypes (r...

This paper offers an approach that could be useful for diverse types of layout problems or even area allocation problems. By this approach there is no need to large number of discrete variables and only by few continues variables large-scale layout problems could be solved in polynomial time. This is resulted from dividing area into discrete and continuous dimensions. Also defining decision var...

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 ...

this paper presents a multi-criteria vehicle routing problem with soft time windows (vrpstw) to mini-mize fleet cost, routes cost, and violation of soft time windows penalty. in this case, the fleet is heterogene-ous. the vrpstw consists of a number of constraints in which vehicles are allowed to serve customers out of the desirable time window by a penalty. it is assumed that this relaxation a...