This paper presents makespan algorithms and scheduling heuristic for an Internet-based collaborative design and manufacturing process using bottleneck approach. The collaborative manufacturing process resembles a permutation re-entrant flow shop environment with four machines executing the process routing of M1,M2,M3,M4,M3,M4 in which the combination of the last three processes of M4,M3,M4 has ...

The Steiner Tree Problem (STP) in graphs is a well-known NP-hard problem. It has regained attention due to the introduction of new telecommunication technologies, since it is the mathematical structure behind multi-cast communications. The goal of this paper is to design an ant algorithm (called ANT-STP) for the STP in graphs which is better than TM, which is a greedy constructive method for th...

Email: [email protected] Abstract: The NP-hard (complete) team orienteering problem is a particular vehicle routing problem with the aim of maximizing the profits gained from visiting control points without exceeding a travel cost limit. The team orienteering problem has a number of applications in several fields such as athlete recruiting, technician routing and tourist trip. Therefore, so...

We present two new integer programming formulations for the equitable coloring problem. We also propose a primal constructive heuristic, branching strategies, and branch-and-cut algorithms based on each of these two formulations. The computational experiments showed that the results obtained by the new algorithms are far superior to those obtained by previously existing approaches.

We propose simple heuristics for the assembly line worker assignment and balancing problem. This problem typically occurs in assembly lines in sheltered work centers for the disabled. Different from the classical simple assembly line balancing problem, the task execution times vary according to the assigned worker. We develop a constructive heuristic framework based on task and worker priority ...

An equitable k-coloring of a graph is defined by a partition of its vertices into k disjoint stable subsets, such that the difference between the cardinalities of any two subsets is at most one. The equitable coloring problem consists of finding the minimum value of k such that a given graph can be equitably k-colored. We present two new integer programming formulations based on representatives...

The present paper considers a hybrid local search approach to the Eternity II puzzle and to unsigned, rectangular, edge matching puzzles in general. Both an original mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulation and a novel Max-Clique formulation are presented for this NP-hard problem. Although the presented formulations remain computationally intractable for medium and large sized instan...

In this paper, we propose an iterated greedy algorithm for solving the blocking flow shop scheduling problem with total flow time minimization objective. The steps of this algorithm are designed very efficient. For generating an initial solution, we develop an efficient constructive heuristic by modifying the best known NEH algorithm. Effectiveness of the proposed iterated greedy algorithm is t...

The problem of inferring ancestral genetic information in terms of a set of founders of a given population arises in various biological contexts. In optimization terms, this problem can be formulated as a combinatorial string problem. The main problem of existing techniques, both exact and heuristic, is that their time complexity scales exponentially, which makes them impractical for solving la...

Given a graph G = (V,E), the minimum branch vertices problem consists in finding a spanning tree T = (V,E′) of G minimizing the number of vertices with degree greater than two. We consider a simple combinatorial lower bound for the problem, from which we propose a decomposition approach. The motivation is to break down the problem into several smaller subproblems which are more tractable comput...