Sharif Digital Repository

In this paper, the tardiness flow shop models with intermediate due date were considered. The flow shop models consist of a set of jobs each having a number of operations, while each operation is performed in a single machine. All the jobs are considered having the same unidirectional precedence order. In the tardiness flow shop models with intermediate due date, which we call the generalized tardiness flow shop models, there exist a due date associated with the completion of each operation, and we want to find a schedule which minimizes the total tardiness of the jobs. This is a more general version of tardiness flow shop in the sense that, by assigning a large value to each of the... 

In this paper, the problem of scheduling commercial messages during the peak of viewing time of a TV channel is formulated as a combinatorial auction-based mathematical programming model. Through this model, a profitable and efficient mechanism for allocating the advertising time to advertisers is developed by which the revenue of TV channels is maximised while the effectiveness of advertising is increased. We developed a steady-state genetic algorithm to find an optimal or a near optimal solution for the proposed problem. A computational experiment was conducted for evaluating the efficiency of the proposed algorithm. A set of test problems with different sizes were generated, using the... 

Multi-floor facility layout problem concerns the arrangement of departments on the different floors. In this paper, a new mathematical model is proposed for multi-floor layout with unequal department area. Maximising the number of useful adjacencies among departments is considered as the objective function. The adjacencies are divided into two major categories: horizontal and vertical adjacencies. The horizontal adjacency may be occurred between the departments assigned to same floors while the vertical can be happened between departments assigned to any consecutive floors. A minimum common boundary length (surface area) between any two horizontal (vertical) adjacent departments is... 

In this study a new version of adjacency, which provides a more flexible layout design, is proposed. In the proposed version, departments which are nonadjacent yet close to each other are considered to be adjacent with a smaller adjacency rating. It is shown that the proposed adjacency is a generalized version of the traditional adjacency. A mathematical programming model is developed for the proposed facility layout problem. To show the flexibility and efficacy of the proposed model, a computational study is conducted. The solution of an illustrative example as well as the solutions of several test problems, reveal flexibility and efficacy of the proposed model  

In this manuscript, a vehicle allocation problem involving a heterogeneous fleet of vehicles for delivering products from a manufacturing firm to a set of depots is considered. Each depot has a specific order quantity and transportation costs consist of fixed and variable transportation cost. The objective is to assign the proper type and number of vehicle to each depot route to minimize the total transportation costs. It is assumed that the number of chartering vehicle types is limited. It is also assumed that a discount mechanism is applied to the vehicles renting cost. The discount mechanism is applied to the fixed cost, based on the number of vehicles to be rented. A mathematical... 

In this manuscript a new phenomenon of adjacency and closeness rating is proposed for constructing the optimal facility layout design. In the proposed approach, the closeness rating is applied to every pair of neighboring departments in a range of their attached point up to a predefined distance between them. Also, while in the traditional approach the closeness rating is applied for determining either the proximity or farness of two departments, the proposed approach considers both the degree of closeness as the economical purposes, and farness as the safety purposes concurrently. A mathematical model is proposed for constructing the optimal layout design. For evaluating the efficiency and... 

An effective facility layout implies that departments with high flow are laid adjacent. However, in the case of a very narrow boundary length between the neighbouring departments, the adjacency would actually be useless. In traditional layout design methods, a score is generally assigned independent of the department’s boundary length. This may result in a layout design with a restricted material flow. This article proposes a new concept of adjacency in which the department pairs are laid adjacent with a wider path. To apply this concept, a shop with unequal rectangular departments is contemplated and a mathematical programming model with the objective of maximizing the sum of the adjacency... 

The problem of allocating different types of vehicles for transporting a set of products in an existing transportation network, to minimize the total transportation costs, is considered. The distribution network involves a heterogeneous fleet of vehicles each with the given capacity and with a variable transportation cost and a fixed cost with a discounting mechanism. Due to nonlinearity of the discounting mechanism, a nonlinear mathematical programming model is developed. A prioritized K-mean clustering encoding is introduced to designate the distribution depots distances, their demands, and the vehicles’ capacity. Using this priority clustering, a heuristic routine is developed by which... 

The problem of allocating heterogeneous fleet of vehicles to the existing distribution network for dispensing products fro. manufacturing firm t. set of depots is considered. It is assume. heterogeneous fleet of vehicles with the given capacities and total costs consisting o. discounted fixed cost an. variable cost proportional to the amount shipped is employed for handling products. To minimize the total transportation costs, the problem is modeled i. form of the nonlinear mixed integer program. Due to the NP hard complexity of the mathematical model, three prioritized K-mean clustering hybrid GAs, by incorporating two new heuristic algorithms, are proposed. The efficiency of the algorithms... 

This paper presents a facility layout design for a cellular manufacturing system (CMS), with the automated guided vehicles (AGVs) as the transportation device, to minimize the total material handling costs. A new concept of assigning the workstations to the non-overlapping closed zones, by which independent AGVs are allocated for internal transfer of materials/parts in each zone, is proposed. To handle this problem, a mathematical programming model is developed. The problem has been shown to be NP-hard. This computational difficulty has led us to consider suboptimal solutions generated by a Tabu search with three algorithmic variants. To evaluate the efficiencies of these algorithms, an... 

In this document, allocation of different types of vehicles for transporting products from a manufacturing firm to its depots is considered. The problem involves a limited number of vehicles of various capacities, with the fixed and variable costs as well as a discount mechanism. The objective is defined as the minimisation of the total transportation costs. A mathematical model in the form of nonlinear integer programming is developed and converted to the linear zero-one programme. Due to the NP hard complexity of the proposed mathematical model, a Prufer-based genetic algorithm capable of solving large instances is developed. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm is compared with the... 

A multiple-choice knapsack problem can be formulated as a discrete nonlinear knapsack problem (DNKP). A powerful method for solving DNKP is the dynamic programming solution approach. The use of this powerful approach however is limited since the growth of the number of decision variables and state variables requires an extensive computer memory storage and computational time. In this paper we developed a hybrid algorithm for improving the computational efficiency of the dynamic programming when it is applied for solving the DNKP. In the hybrid algorithm, three routines of the imbedded state, surrogate constraints, and bounding scheme are incorporated for increasing the efficiency of this... 

In this paper we present a method for transient analysis of availability and survivability of a system with the identical components and identical repairmen. The considered system is supposed to consist of series of k-out-of-n or parallel components. We employed the Markov models, eigen vectors and eigenvalues for analyzing the transient availability and survivability of the system. The method is implemented through an algorithm which is tested in MATLAB programming environment. The new method enjoys a stronger mathematical foundation and more flexibility for analyzing the transient availability and survivability of the system. © 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved  

In this paper, the Markov models, eigenvectors and eigenvalue concepts are used to propose a methodology for analyzing the transient reliability of a system with identical components and identical repairmen. The components of the systems under consideration can have two distinct configurations, namely; they can be arranged in series or in parallel. A third case is also considered, in which the system is up (good) if k-out-of-n components are good. For all three cases, a procedure is proposed for calculating the transient probability of the system availability and the duration of the system to reach the steady state. © Sharif University of Technology, February 2007