The problem of the distribution of dairy products, which is classified as a combinatorial optimization problem, cannot be solved in polynomial time. In this paper, an algorithm based on Ant Colony Hybrid meta-heuristic system and Geographic Information System (GIS) was used to find a near-optimal solution to this problem. Using the former method, the nearest neighbor heuristic algorithm was use...

Water distribution networks are one of the important and costly infrastructures of cities and many meta-heuristic algorithms in standard or hybrid forms were used for optimizing water distribution networks. These algorithms require a large amount of computational cost. Therefore, the converging speed of algorithms toward the optimization goal is as important as the goal itself. In this paper, a...

Meta-heuristics have already received considerable attention in various engineering optimization fields. As one of the most rewarding tasks, eigenvalue optimization of truss structures is concerned in this study. In the proposed problem formulation the fundamental eigenvalue is to be maximized for a constant structural weight. The optimum is searched using Particle Swarm Optimization, PSO and i...

This paper investigates the problem of just-in-time permutation flow shop scheduling with limited buffers and linear job deterioration in an uncertain environment. The fuzzy set theory is applied to describe this situation. A novel mixed-integer nonlinear program is presented to minimize the weighted sum of fuzzy earliness and tardiness penalties. Due to the computational complexities, the prop...

One of the most important and valuable goal of software development life cycle is software cost estimation or SCE. During the recent years, SCE has attracted the attention of researchers due to huge amount of software project requests. There have been proposed so many models using heuristic and meta-heuristic algorithms to do machine learning process for SCE. COCOMO81 is one of the most popular...

This study is devoted to discrete sizing optimization of truss structures employing an efficient discrete evolutionary meta-heuristic algorithm which uses the Newton gradient-based method as its updating scheme and it is named here as Newton Meta-heuristic Algorithm (NMA). In order to enable the NMA population-based meta-heuristic to effectively explore the discrete design space, a term contain...

In combinatorial solution spaces Iterated Local Search turned out to be exceptionally successful. The question arises: is the Iterated Local Search heuristic also able to improve the optimization process in real-valued solution spaces? This paper introduces a hybrid meta-heuristic based on Iterated Local Search and Powell’s optimization method combined with elements from stochastic search in re...

Back-propagation Neural Network (BPNN) algorithm is one of the most widely used and a popular technique to optimize the feed forward neural network training. Traditional BP algorithm has some drawbacks, such as getting stuck easily in local minima and slow speed of convergence. Nature inspired meta-heuristic algorithms provide derivative-free solution to optimize complex problems. This paper pr...

in present paper, a point to point optimal path is planned for a mobile manipulator with flexible links and joints. for this purpose, a perfect dynamic modeling is performed for mobile manipulators considering large deformation in links, shear effects, elastic joints, effect of gravitation, and non-holonomic constraints. to study large deformation of links, non-linear relation of displacement-s...

the capacitated location-routing problem (clrp) is a new research area in logistics and distribution management. this problem combines two difficult problems: the facility location problem (flp) and vehicle routing problem (vrp). the goal of the clrp is to open a subset of depots, assign the customers into open facilities, and then design vehicle tours in order to minimize the total cost. the t...