An improved particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is proposed to solve a typical batching problem in a batch processing plant of the process industry. The batching problem (BP) is to transform the primary requirements for products into sets of batches for each task with the objective of minimizing the total workload. On the basis of some preliminary properties, a novel particle solution r...

The tradeoffs in employing multicasting technology for implementing large scale video on demand (VoD) over Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) system, in general, come to the scheduled multicasting streams and limited video or television program selections. The scheduling strategies presented in this paper will provide several advantages. First, we proposed a near Video on demand architecture c...

Multi-character recognition in arbitrary photographs on mobile platform is difficult, in terms of both accuracy and real-time performance. In this paper, we focus on the domain of hand-written multi-digit recognition. Convolutional neural network (CNN) is the state-of-the-art solution for object recognition, and presents a workload that is both compute and data intensive. To reduce the workload...

Production decisions in a manufacturing supply chain are no longer driven by manual systems based on instinct and experience. They are regulated interactions between analysts, production managers and their collective manipulation of policies within the production information system. This paper studies the demand behavior in manufacturing supply chains and its relationships to the logic of produ...

We introduce mix rings, a novel peer-to-peer mixnet architecture for anonymity that yields low-latency networking compared to existing mixnet architectures. A mix ring is a cycle of continuous-time mixes that uses carefully coordinated cover traffic and a simple fan-out mechanism to protect the initiator from timing analysis attacks. Key features of the mix ring architecture include decoupling ...

Batching jobs in a manufacturing system is a very common policy in most industries. Main reasons for batching are avoidance of set ups and/or facilitation of material handling. Examples of batch-wise production systems are ovens found in aircraft industry and in semiconductor manufacturing. Starting from the early nineties much research efforts have been put in constructing strategies for the d...

In this paper, we propose and evaluate the performance of a multicast technique, called controlled CIWP, for supplying video-on-demand services. Similar to batching schemes, controlled CIWP allows two clients that request the same video to share a channel. Unlike batching, the controlled CIWP scheme does not delay the earlier request in order to promote sharing. Instead, sharing is ensured by p...

We study a single batching machine scheduling problem with transportation and deterioration considerations arising from steel production. A set of jobs are transported, one at a time, by a vehicle from a holding area to the single batching machine. The machine can process several jobs simultaneously as a batch. The processing time of a job will increase if the duration from the time leaving the...

In picking product items in a warehouse to fulfill customer orders, a practical way is to classify similar orders as the same batch and then to plan the optimal picker routing when picking each batch of items. Different from the previous problems, this work investigates the joint order batching and picker Manhattan routing problem, which simultaneously determines the optimal order batching allo...