Supply chain management (SCM) is a subject that has found so much attention among different commercial and industrial organizations due to competing environment of products. Therefore, integration of constituent element of this chain is a great deal. This paper proposes a multi objective production-allocation and distribution planning problem (PADPP) in a multi echelon supply chain network. We ...

The communication topology is an essential aspect in designing distributed optimization heuristics. It can influence the exploration and exploitation of search space thus performance terms solution quality, convergence speed collaboration costs – relevant aspects for applications operating critical infrastructure energy systems. In this work, we present approach adapting during runtime, based o...

There is a well-developed theory about the algorithmic complexity of optimization problems. Complexity theory provides negative results which typically are based on assumptions like NP 6=P or NP 6=RP. Positive results are obtained by the design and analysis of clever algorithms. These algorithms are well-tuned for their specific domain. Practitioners, however, prefer simple algorithms which are...

In this paper we prove that in some practical situations, there is a free lunch for hyper-heuristics, i.e., for search algorithms that search the space of solvers, searchers, meta-heuristics and heuristics for problems. This has consequences for the use of genetic programming as a method to discover new search algorithms and, more generally, problem solvers. Furthermore, it has also rather impo...

Constraint satisfaction has received great attention in recent years and a large number of algorithms have been developed. Unfortunately, from the problem solvers’ point of view, it is very difficult to see when and how to use these algorithms. This paper points out the need to map constraint satisfaction problems to constraint satisfaction algorithms and heuristics, and proposes that more rese...

This paper presents a new mathematical model, in which the location of hubs is fixed and their capacity is determined based on facilities and factories allocated to it. In order to feed the client's nodes, different types of vehicles of different capacities are considered, in which the clients are allocated to hubs, and types and numbers of vehicles are allocated to the factory's facilities. To...

This paper develops Order Acceptance for an Integrated Production-Distribution Problem in which Batch Delivery is implemented. The aim of this problem is to coordinate: (1) rejecting some of the orders (2) production scheduling of the accepted orders and (3) batch delivery to maximize Total Net Profit. A Mixed Integer Programming is proposed for the problem. In addition, a hybrid meta-heuristic...

As exact algorithms are unfeasible to solve real optimization problems, due their computational complexity, meta-heuristics usually used them. However, choosing a meta-heuristic particular problem is non-trivial task, and often requires time-consuming trial error process. Hyper-heuristics, which heuristics choose heuristics, have been proposed as means both simplify improve algorithm selection ...