The transportation processes for patients, personnel, and material in large and complex maximum-care hospitals with many departments can consume significant resources and thus induce substantial logistics costs. These costs are largely determined by the allocation of the different departments...

This paper addresses an airport gate assignment problem with multiple objectives. The objectives are to minimize the number of ungated flights and the total passenger walking distances or connection times as well as to maximize the total gate assignment preferences. The problem examined is an...

Purpose Due to unceasing declination in environment, sustainable agro-food supply chains have become a topic of concern to business, government organizations and customers. The purpose of this study is to examine a problem associated with sustainable network design in context of Indian agro-food...

In this paper, a hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm, based on imperialistic competition algorithm (ICA), harmony search (HS), and simulated annealing (SA) is presented. The body of the proposed hybrid algorithm is based on ICA. The proposed hybrid algorithm inherits the advantages of the process of...

This paper draws on the 'human reliability' concept as a structure for gaining insight into the maintenance workforce assessment in a process industry. Human reliability hinges on developing the reliability of humans to a threshold that guides the maintenance workforce to execute accurate...