In some applications of quality control charts it is very important to quickly detect small or moderate shifts in the characteristic that is being monitored when process control starts. In such cases, CUSUM charts with fast initial response (FIR) perform very well. However, optimal performance...

Facility location under uncertain environments is an important and challenging problem. The problem deals with the optimal placement of facilities that serve a set of spatially distributed nodes. One way to deal with this problem is to model uncertainty by means of scenarios and to optimise some...

In this paper, the production process is decomposed for typical manufacturing small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and the metrics of the defined sub processes, based on the requirements of ISO 9001:2008, are developed. The weight values of production process performance indicators are...

This paper chooses a supply chain which involves multiple supply links as the studied object. In each supply link, we consider an integrated scheduling problem in which a set of identical jobs are first processed on a single machine, and then batch delivered to a customer by a transporter. Each...

This paper aims to minimise the makespan of a set of identical batch processing machines in parallel. The batch processing machine can process a batch of jobs as long as the total size of all the jobs in the batch does not exceed its capacity. The processing time of the job and its size are...

This paper presents a new statistics-based evolutionary algorithm to improve the qualities of power supplies, in which operational costs and the stability of the power supply are optimised to provide a highly smooth but low-cost power supply service to customers. The proposed method is...

The Economic Lot Scheduling Problem (ELSP) on a single facility (or machine) with the time-varying lot-sizes approach and with sequence-independent/sequence-dependent setup times of parts or products is studied in this paper. The objective is to minimise the long-run average inventory carrying...

In this paper, we consider heuristic approaches for the determination of delivery quantities in a Supply Chain (SC). The problem under consideration is important for the design of delivery quantity negotiations between manufacturers and suppliers. We describe a Mixed Integer Programming (MIP)...

For a number of years, researchers have described and analysed the shift from traditional adversarial, 'arm's length' buyer-supplier relationships towards longer term, more cooperative relationships in which buyers and suppliers regard each other more as 'partners'. The supply chain management...

Many practical problems in mathematics and computer science may be formulated as Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs). Although CSPs are NP-hard in general, it has been proven that instances of CSPs may be solved efficiently, if they have generalised hypertree decompositions of small width....