background: acute appendicitis is one of the common and urgent illnesses among children.  children usually are unable to help the physicians completely due to weakness in describing the medical history. moreover, acute appendicitis overlaps with conditions of other diseases in terms of symptoms and signs in the first hours of presentation. these conditions lead to unwanted biases as well as err...

in today's globalization, an effective integration of production and distribution plans into a unified framework is crucial for attaining competitive advantage. this paper addresses an integrated multi-product and multi-time period production/distribution planning problem for a two-echelon supply chain subject to the real-world variables and constraints. it is assumed that all transportations a...

the capacitated vehicle routing problem (cvrp) is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem that holds a central place in logistics management. the vehicle routing is an applied task in the industrial transportation for which an optimal solution will lead us to better services, save more time and ultimately increase in customer satisfaction. this problem is classified into np-hard problem...

This paper presents two meta-heuristic algorithms to solve an extended portfolio selection model. The extended model is based on the Markowitz's Model, aiming to minimize investment risk in a specified level of return. In order to get the Markowitz model close to the real conditions, different constraints were embedded on the model which resulted in a discrete and non-convex solution space. ...

Meta-heuristic algorithms are applied in optimization problems in a variety of fields, including engineering, economics, and computer science. In this paper, seven population-based meta-heuristic algorithms are employed for size and geometry optimization of truss structures. These algorithms consist of the Artificial Bee Colony algorithm, Cyclical Parthenogenesis Algorithm, Cuckoo Search algori...

the travelling salesmen problem (tsp) is one of the most important and famous combinational optimization problems that aim to find the shortest tour. in this problem, the salesman starts to move from an arbitrary place called depot and after visiting all nodes, finally comes back to depot. solving this problem seems hard because program statement is simple and leads this problem belonging to np...

wireless sensor networks are the new generation of networks that typically are formed great numbers of nodes and the communications of these nodes are done as wireless. the main goal of these networks is collecting data from neighboring environment of network sensors. since the sensor nodes are battery operated and there is no possibility of charging or replacing the batteries, the lifetime of ...

Preventive healthcare aims at reducing the likelihood and severity of potentially life-threatening illnesses by protection and early detection. In this paper, a bi-objective mathematical model is proposed to design a network of preventive healthcare facilities so as to minimize total travel and waiting time as well as establishment and staffing cost. Moreover, each facility acts as M/M/1 queuin...

The p-median problem is one of the discrete optimization problem in location theory which aims to satisfy total demand with minimum cost. A high-level algorithmic approach can be specialized to solve optimization problem. In recent years, meta-heuristic methods have been applied to support the solution of Combinatorial Optimization Problems (COP). Collision Bodies Optimization algorithm (CBO) a...

Feature selection is of great importance in Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship (QSAR) analysis. This problem has been solved using some meta-heuristic algorithms such as: GA, PSO, ACO, SA and so on. In this work two novel hybrid meta-heuristic algorithms i.e. Sequential GA and LA (SGALA) and Mixed GA and LA (MGALA), which are based on Genetic algorithm and learning automata for QSAR f...