this study aims to minimize the total cost of a four-echelon supply chain including suppliers, an assembler, distributers, and retailers. the total cost consists of purchasing raw materials from the suppliers by the assembler, assembling the final product, materials transportation from the suppliers to the assembler, product transportation from the assembler to the distributors, product transpo...

earth dam is a structure as homogeneous or non-homogeneous forms for raising water level or water supply. earth dam consist of different parts that one of the main parts is clay core. choosing an optimal non permeable core which causes reduction of seepage through dam body and also being stable is necessary. the objective of this research is to optimize the geometry of earth dam clay core such ...

Metaheuristics are general problem solving algorithms which abstract from the actual problem description. Therefore they can be easily applied to many optimization problems. Simulated annealing is a simple and fast metaheuristic with an analogy to metal processing. As metal particles generate a solid and regular structure when cooling slowing simulated annealing seeks a low-energy solution avoi...

Simulated annealing is a well-studied local search metaheuristic used to address discrete and, to a lesser extent, continuous optimization problems. The key feature of simulated annealing is that it provides a mechanism to escape local optima by allowing hill-climbing moves (i.e., moves which worsen the objective function value) in hopes of finding a global optimum. A brief history of simulated...

Two well known stochastic optimization algorithms, simulated annealing and genetic algorithm are compared when using a sample to minimize an objective function which is the expectation of a random variable. Since they lead to minimum depending on the sample, a weighted version of simulated annealing is proposed in order to reduce this kind of overt bias. The algorithms are implemented on an opt...

It is difficult to determine the appropriate temperature parameters which control the acceptance probability in Simulated Annealing, which is a typical meta-heuristic method in the optimization methods. In this paper, we propose a new simulated annealing method that determines the maximum temperature adaptively. The proposed method is base on an important temperature where optimum solutions wer...

Adaptive simulated annealing (ASA) is a global optimization algorithm based on an associated proof that the parameter space can be sampled much more efficiently than by using other previous simulated annealing algorithms. The author’s ASA code has been publicly available for over two years. During this time the author has volunteered to help people via e-mail, and the feedback obtained has been...