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...

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...

Quadratic assignment problem (QAP) is a well-known problem in the facility location and layout. It belongs to the NP-complete class. There are many heuristic and meta-heuristic methods, which are presented for QAP in the literature. In this paper, we applied 2-opt, greedy 2-opt, 3-opt, greedy 3-opt, and VNZ as heuristic methods and tabu search (TS), simulated annealing, and pa...

this paper presents a new meta-heuristic solution to find the efficient frontier using the mean-variance approach. portfolio optimization problem is a quadratic programming model and, changes to np-hard if the number of assets and constraints has increased, and it cannot be solved using common mathematical methods in a reasonable time. therefore, a heuristic or meta-heuristic algorithm should b...

The purpose of this article is to review the literature on the topic of deterministic vehicle routing problem (VRP) and to give a review on the exact and approximate solution techniques. More specifically the approximate (meta-heuristic) solution techniques are classified into: tabu search, simulated annealing, genetic algorithm, evolutionary algorithm, hybrid algorithm, and Ant Colony Opti...

this study is investigated the optimum parameters for a tuned mass damper (tmd) under the seismic excitation. shuffled complex evolution (sce) is a meta-heuristic optimization method which is used to find the optimum damping and tuning frequency ratio for a tmd. the efficiency of the tmd is evaluated by decreasing the structural displacement dynamic magnification factor (ddmf) and acceleration ...

a new meta-heuristic method, based on neuronal communication (nc), is introduced in this article. the neuronal communication illustrates how data is exchanged between neurons in neural system. actually, this pattern works efficiently in the nature. the present paper shows it is the same to find the global minimum. in addition, since few numbers of neurons participate in each step of the method,...

the cuckoo search algorithm is a recently developedmeta-heuristic optimization algorithm, which is suitable forsolving optimization problems. to enhance the accuracy andconvergence rate of this algorithm, an improved cuckoo searchalgorithm is proposed in this paper. normally, the parametersof the cuckoo search are kept constant. this may lead todecreasing the efficiency of the algorithm. to cop...