in order to equip medical students with all the necessary skills in dealing with patients to provide optimal treatment, the need for the use of real patients in educational settings has become prominent. but all the required skills cannot be practiced on real patients due to patients’ safety and well-being. thus, the use of standardized patients (sps) or simulated patients (sips) as a substitut...

in this paper, a new approach to overlapping operations in job shop scheduling is presented. in many job shops, a customer demand can be met in more than one way for each job, where demand determines the quantity of each finished job ordered by a customer. in each job, embedded operations can be performed due to overlapping considerations in which each operation may be overlapped with the other...

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...

this study aims to deal with a more realistic combined problem of project scheduling and material ordering. the goal is to minimize the total material holding and ordering costs by determining the starting time of activities along with material ordering schedules subject to some constraints. the problem is first mathematically modelled. then a hybrid simulated annealing and genetic algorithm is...

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 ...

biomimetic method was used to apply hydroxyapatite (ha) coating onto ti6al4v cylinders. this process is a physicochemical method in which a substrate is soaked in a solution simulating the physiological conditions, for a period of time enough to form a desirable layer of the calcium phosphate on the substrate. in the present study, specimens were soaked in 5, 10 m solutions of naoh at temperatu...

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...

Stochastic global optimization is a very important subject, that has applications in virtually all areas of science and technology. Therefore there is nothing more opportune than writing a book about a successful and mature algorithm that turned out to be a good tool in solving difficult problems. Here we present some techniques for solving several problems by means of Fuzzy Adaptive Simulated ...