An employee transporting problem is described and a set partitioning model is developed. An investigation of the model leads to a knapsack problem as a surrogate problem. Finding a partition corresponding to the knapsack problem provides a solution to the problem. An exact algorithm is proposed...

Nowadays, organizations have to compete with different competitors in regional, national and international levels, so they have to improve their competition capabilities to survive against competitors. Undertaking activities on a global scale requires a proper distribution system which could...

This paper considers open-shop scheduling with no intermediate buffer to minimize total tardiness. This problem occurs in many production settings, in the plastic molding, chemical, and food processing industries. The paper mathematically formulates the problem by a mixed integer linear program....

Warranty is now an integral part of each product. Since its length is directly related to the cost of production, it should be set in such a way that it would maximize revenue generation and customers’ satisfaction. Furthermore, based on the behavior of customers, it is assumed that increasing...

Railroad blocking problem (RBP) is one of the problems that need an important decision in freight railroads. The objective of solving this problem is to minimize the costs of delivering all commodities by deciding which inter-terminal blocks to build and by specifying the assignment of...

The vehicle routing problem (VRP) is one of the most important combinational optimization problems that has nowadays received much attention because of its real application in industrial and service problems. The VRP involves routing a fleet of vehicles, each of them visiting a set of nodes such...

This study aims to discuss the solution methodology for a closed-loop supply chain (CLSC) network that includes the collection of used products as well as distribution of the new products. This supply chain is presented on behalf of the problems that can be solved by the proposed meta-heuristic...

The choice of suitable robots in manufacturing, to improve product quality and to increase productivity, is a complicated decision due to the increase in robot manufacturers and configurations. In this article, a novel approach is proposed to choose among alternatives, differently assessed by...

The primary objective of this research is to obtain an accurate forecasting model for the US presidential election. To identify a reliable model, artificial neural networks (ANN) and support vector regression (SVR) models are compared based on some specified performance measures. Moreover, six...

Flexible flow shop (or a hybrid flow shop) scheduling problem is an extension of classical flow shop scheduling problem. In a simple flow shop configuration, a job having ‘g’ operations is performed on ‘g’ operation centres (stages) with each stage having only one machine. If any stage...