A great challenge China’s power sector faces is to mitigate its carbon dioxide emissions while satisfying the ever-increasing power demand. Optimal planning of the power sector with consideration of carbon mitigation for a long-term future remains a complex task, involving many technical alternatives and an infinite number of possible plants installations, retrofitting, and decommissioning over...

The nurse scheduling problem (NSP) has received a great amount of attention in recent years. In the NSP, the goal is to assign shifts to the nurses in order to satisfy the hospital’s demand during the planning horizon by considering different objective functions. In this research, we focus on maximizing the nurses’ preferences for working shifts and weekends off by considering several important...

We present a new algorithm for conformant probabilistic planning, which for a given horizon produces a plan that maximizes the probability of success under quantified uncertainty about the initial state and action effects, and absence of sensory information. Recent work has studied systematic search in the space of all candidate plans as a feasible approach to conformant probabilistic planning,...

We consider a multi-period order selection problem in ̄exible manufacturing systems, which is the problem of selecting orders to be produced in each period during the upcoming planning horizon with the objective of minimising earliness and tardiness costs and subcontracting costs. The earliness and tardiness costs are incurred if an order is not ®nished on time, while subcontracting cost is incu...

This paper presents a model predictive control (MPC) formulation for the planning and scheduling problem in process industries. The main idea is to use a moving horizon technique as well as a feedback control concept to continuously update production schedules and plans. In existing planning and scheduling formulations, a mixed integer (non)linear programming is very often solved over a chosen ...

In the Multi-Period Petrol Station Replenishment Problem (MPSRP) the aim is to optimize the delivery of several petroleum products to a set of petrol stations over a given planning horizon. One must determine, for each day of the planning horizon, how much of each product should be delivered to each station, how to load these products into vehicle compartments, and how to plan vehicle routes. T...

A lot of Metaheuristics for solving dynamic combinatorial facility layout problems have been developed, but still require much computation time when the number of facilities or planning horizon is large. Dynamic facility layout should meet a dynamic change in both product mix and demand quantity of each product over a planning horizon by adjusting facility layout effectively under a given syste...

In this paper, a multi-period replacement model, based on a mixed integer nonlinear programming formulation, is developed for flexible automation investments. The model takes into account the costs, benefits and effective utilization of several types of flexibility. The decision variables pertain to the selection and optimal implementation sequence for new, CNC modules, the replacement schedule...

Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a key element of many transportation systems which involve routing of fleet of vehicles from a depot to a set of customers node. It is required that these vehicles return to the depot after serving customers’ demand. This paper investigates a relaxed version of VRP, in which the number of visits to the customer is not restricted to be at most one. The relaxed ve...

Several manpower planning models are presented that exploit the longitudinal stability of manpower cohorts. The manpower planning process is described along with the problem of identifying and obtaining various types of longitudinal data. An infinite horizon linear program for calculating minimum cost manpower input plans is found to have a straightforward solution in a great many cases and to ...