A new type of tardy cost, called stepwise tardiness, is considered in a single machine problem. The stepwise tardiness scheduling has been found in many practical situations. To the best of our knowledge, there exist few studies directly addressing the problem. In this paper, we develop a heuristic for the single machine total stepwise tardiness (SMTST) problem. In addition, a variable neighbor...

Office-based pulmonary function testing, also known as spirometry, is a powerful tool for primary care physicians to diagnose and manage respiratory problems. An obstructive defect is indicated by a low forced expiratory volume in one second/forced vital capacity (FEV1/FVC) ratio, which is defined as less than 70% or below the fifth percentile based on data from the Third National Health and Nu...

In this paper a recursive control theoretic smoothing spline approach is proposed for reconstructing a closed contour. Periodic splines are generated through minimizing a cost function subject to constraints imposed by a linear control system. The optimal control problem is shown to be proper and sufficient optimality conditions are derived for a special case of the problem using Hamilton-Jacob...

the purpose of this paper is to estimate the welfare cost of inflation in iran. we first use the long-horizon regression approach developed by fisher and seater (1993) to obtain an estimate of the inflation rate elasticity of money demand and then the baily’s consumer surplus approach to calculate the welfare cost function. the results show that reducing inflation rate from 40% to 0% increases ...

‎artificial neural networks have the advantages such as learning, ‎adaptation‎, ‎fault-tolerance‎, ‎parallelism and generalization‎. ‎this ‎paper is a scrutiny on the application of diverse learning methods‎ ‎in speed of convergence in neural networks‎. ‎for this aim‎, ‎first we ‎introduce a perceptron method based on artificial neural networks‎ ‎which has been applied for solving a non-singula...

artificial neural networks have the advantages such as learning, adaptation, fault-tolerance, parallelism and generalization. this paper mainly intends to offer a novel method for finding a solution of a fuzzy equation that supposedly has a real solution. for this scope, we applied an architecture of fuzzy neural networks such that the corresponding connection weights are real numbers. the sugg...

Joux’s multicollision attack is one of the most striking results on hash functions and also one of the simplest: it computes a k-collision on iterated hashes in time ⌈log2 k⌉ · 2 , whereas k! · 2 was thought to be optimal. Kelsey and Schneier improved this to 3 · 2 if storage 2 is available and if the compression functions admits easily found fixed-points. This paper presents a simple technique...

cost optimization of the reinforced concrete cantilever soil retaining wall of a given height satisfying some structural and geotechnical design constraints is performed utilizing harmony search and improved harmony search algorithms. the objective function considered is the cost of the structure, and design is based on aci 318-05. this function is minimized subjected to design constraints. a n...