Group scheduling in flexible flow shops: a hybridised approach of imperialist competitive algorithm and electromagnetic-like mechanism N. Karimi a , M. Zandieh b & A.A. Najafi c a Faculty of Industrial and Mechanical Engineering, Qazvin Islamic Azad University, Qazvin, Iran b Department of Industrial Management, Management and Accounting Faculty, Shahid Beheshti University, G.C., Tehran, Iran c...

Fuzzy clustering methods are conveniently employed in constructing a fuzzy model of a system, but they need to tune some parameters. In this research, FCM is chosen for fuzzy clustering. Parameters such as the number of clusters and the value of fuzzifier significantly influence the extent of generalization of the fuzzy model. These two parameters require tuning to reduce the overfitting in the...

Bankruptcy prediction is a major issue in classification of companies. Since bankruptcy is extremely costly, investors, owners, managers, creditors, and government agencies are interested in evaluating the financial status of companies. This study tried to predict bankruptcy among companies registered in Tehran Stock Exchange (Iran) by designing imperialist competitive algorithm and genetic alg...

There are two types of digital filters including Infinite Impulse Response (IIR) and Finite Impulse Response (FIR). IIR filters attract more attention as they can decrease the filter order significantly compared to FIR filters. Owing to multi-modal error surface, simple powerful optimization techniques should be utilized in designing IIR digital filters to avoid local minimum. Imperialist compe...

The allocation of design tolerances between the components of a mechanical assembly and manufacturing tolerances can significantly affect the functionality of products and related production costs. This paper introduces Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) approach to solve the machining tolerance allocation of an overrunning clutch assembly.  The objective is to obtain optimum tolerances of...

Planning of wind farms appears to be a complicated matter in Switzerland and all over Europe, causing growing government and business frustration. The implementation often fails on the local level when it comes to choosing a suitable location for a wind farm, although the public generally supports wind power (DEVINE-WRIGHT 2005, WOLSINK, 2005). Social acceptance is a key issue for successful wi...

Utilization of wind turbines as economic and green production units, poses new challenges to the power system planners, mainly due to the stochastic nature of the wind, adding a new source of uncertainty to the power system. Different types of distribution and correlation between this random variable and the system load makes conventional method inappropriate for modeling such a correlation. In...

In the present research, the Wind Turbine placement problem for renewable energy utilization is solved using a viral systems optimization algorithm which finds the optimum configuration of wind turbines within a wind farm considering uniform wind-speed, and unidirectional wind. The problem is solved using a single type of turbine and constraining the available space to a flat scenario with a sq...