A flowline-based manufacturing system is a manufacturing environment where machines are arranged in accordance with the order of processing of jobs, with all jobs having an identical and unidirectional flow pattern through the machines; however, some or all jobs may have missing operations on some machines. In several practical situations the setup times of jobs are separable, significant and s...

Flow-shop scheduling problem (FSP) deals with the scheduling of a set of jobs that visit a set of machines in the same order. The FSP is NP-hard, which means that an efficient algorithm for solving the problem to optimality is unavailable. To meet the requirements on time and to minimize the make-span performance of large permutation flow-shop scheduling problems in which there are sequence dep...

We give central and local limit theorems for the number of excedances of a uniformly distributed random permutation belonging to certain sequences of conjugacy classes and belonging to the sequence of derangements.

E-cigarettes are the most popular method of quitting smoking in England and most are purchased in specialist vape shops. This qualitative study explores how the vape shop environment is experienced by quitters to support smoking abstinence. Semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted to elicit experiences of e-cigarette use, including experiences of vape shops, in 40 people who had us...

Stores that sell electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS) as their primary product are a new phenomenon and often termed "vape shops". While vape shops are now regulated by state and federal agencies, not all states maintain lists of vape shops in operation. Standard ways of identifying tobacco retailers through off-premise alcohol permits and business listing services may not identify vape ...

500 Abstract— This research aims to improve the plant layout of manufacturing industry to make optimum space utilization, eliminate obstructions in material flow and thus obtain maximum productivity. The present layout and operation process of each section (i.e. material storage, cutting, machining shop, fabrication shop, assembly and inspection section and finish product storage) have been inv...

This paper deals with performance evaluation and scheduling problems in m machine stochastic flow shop with unlimited buffers. The processing time of each job on each machine is a random variable exponentially distributed with a known rate. We consider permutation flow shop. The objective is to find a job schedule which minimizes the expected makespan. A classification of works about stochastic...