Order picking is a labour-intensive operation and so it represents significant costs, with any underperformance leading to high operational cost for the whole supply chain. Hence, the objective of the present work is to assess and restructure the storage assignment in the picking area and the order picking process (namely the routing method) in order to enhance the order picking process of Luis...

Deterministic branch and bound methods for the solution of general nonlinear programs have become increasingly popular during the last decade or two, with increasing computer speed, algorithmic improvements, and multiprocessors. There are presently several commercial packages. Although such packages are based on exhaustive search, not all of them rigorously take account of roundoff error, singu...

Given N real numbers whose sum is an integer, we study the problem of finding N integers which match these real numbers as closely as possible, in the sense of Lp norm, while preserving the sum. We describe the structure of solutions for this integer optimization problem and propose an algorithm with complexity O(N logN) for solving it. In contrast to fractional rounding and randomized rounding...

A recent experiment has shown that the force required to pull off a flat circular rigid punch in adhesive contact with an array of elastic fibrils is sensitive to the thickness of the elastic backing layer to which these fibrils are attached. This result motivates us to study the effect of sample compliance on the adhesion of fibril arrays. A closed form expression for the compliance of such ar...

Individuals with Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS), a genetic disorder caused by mutations to the q11-13 region on chromosome 15, commonly show severe skin-picking behaviors that can cause open wounds and sores on the body. To our knowledge, however, no studies have examined the potential neural mechanisms underlying these behaviors. Seventeen individuals with PWS, aged 6-25 years, who showed severe ...