As the long arm of the grinding, deep financial crisis continues to haunt the global economy, the effects of inflation and time value of money cannot be oblivious to an inventory system. Inflation, defined as a general rise in the prices of goods and services over a period of time, has monetary depreciation as one of its major side effects. And, since inventories correspond to substantial investment in capital for any organization, it would be unethical if the effects of inflation and time value of money are not considered while determining the optimal inventory policy. Moreover, deterioration of items is a phenomenon which cannot be ignored, as it may yield misleading results. Further, under the inflationary conditions, the different cost parameters including the price are bound to vary from cycle to cycle over the planning horizon. Another important factor is shortages which no retailer would prefer, and in practice are partially backlogged and partially lost. In order to convert the lost sales into sales, the retailer offers such customers an incentive, by charging them the price prevailing at the time of placing an order, instead of the current inflated price. Therefore, bearing in mind these facts, the present paper develops an inventory model for a retailer dealing with deteriorating items under inflationary conditions over a fixed planning horizon. The objective is to derive the optimal number of cycles and cycle length that maximizes the net present value of the total profit over a fixed planning horizon. An appropriate algorithm has been proposed to obtain the optimal solution. Finally, a numerical example is provided to illustrate the proposed model. Sensitivity analysis of the optimal solution with respect to major parameters is carried out and some managerial inferences have been presented.

This paper deals with the total tardiness minimization problem in a parallel machines manufacturing environment where tool change operations have to be scheduled along with jobs. The mentioned issue belongs to the family of scheduling problems under deterministic machine availability restrictions. A new model that considers the effects of the tool wear on the quality characteristics of the worked product is proposed. Since no mathematical programming-based approach has been developed by literature so far, two distinct mixed integer linear programming models, able to schedule jobs as well as tool change activities along the provided production horizon, have been devised. The former is an adaptation of a well-known model presented by the relevant literature for the single machine scheduling problem with tool changes. The latter has been specifically developed for the issue at hand. After a theoretical analysis aimed at revealing the differences between the proposed mathematical models in terms of computational complexity, an extensive experimental campaign has been fulfilled to assess performances of the proposed methods under the CPU time viewpoint. Obtained results have been statistically analyzed through a properly arranged ANOVA analysis.

Facility location models are observed in many diverse areas such as communication networks, transportation, and distribution systems planning. They play significant role in supply chain and operations management and are one of the main well-known topics in strategic agenda of contemporary manufacturing and service companies accompanied by long-lasting effects. We define a new approach for solving stochastic single source capacitated facility location problem (SSSCFLP). Customers with stochastic demand are assigned to set of capacitated facilities that are selected to serve them. It is demonstrated that problem can be transformed to deterministic Single Source Capacitated Facility Location Problem (SSCFLP) for Poisson demand distribution. A hybrid algorithm which combines Lagrangian heuristic with adjusted mixture of Ant colony and Genetic optimization is proposed to find lower and upper bounds for this problem. Computational results of various instances with distinct properties indicate that proposed solving approach is efficient.

Recently, learning effects have been studied as an interesting topic for scheduling problems, however, most researches have considered single or two-machine settings. Moreover, learning factor has been considered for job times instead of setup times and the same learning effect has been used for all machines. This paper studies the m-machine no-wait flowshop scheduling problem considering truncated learning effect in no-wait flowshop environment. In this problem, setup time is a function of job position in the sequence with a learning truncation parameter and each machine has its own learning effect. In this paper, a mixed integer linear programming is proposed for the problem to solve such problem. This problem is NP-hard so an improved genetic algorithm (GA) and a simulated annealing (SA) algorithm are developed to find near optimal solutions. The accuracy and efficiency of the proposed procedures are tested against different criteria on various instances. Numerical experiments approve that SA outperforms in most instances.

Differential evolution (DE) is an effective and powerful approach and it has been widely used in different environments. However, the performance of DE is sensitive to the choice of control parameters. Thus, to obtain optimal performance, time-consuming parameter tuning is necessary. Backtracking Search Optimization Algorithm (BSA) is a new evolutionary algorithm (EA) for solving real-valued numerical optimization problems. An ensemble algorithm called E-BSADE is proposed which incorporates concepts from DE and BSA. The performance of E-BSADE is evaluated on several benchmark functions and is compared with basic DE, BSA and conventional DE mutation strategy. Also the performance results are compared with state of the art PSO variant.

This paper describes a comparison of surface roughness between ceramics and cubic boron nitride (CBN7020) cutting tools when machining of AISI H11 hot work steels treated at 50 HRC. Plan is designed according to Taguchi’s L18 (21×32) orthogonal array. The response surface methodology (RSM) and analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used to check the validity of multiple linear regression models and to determine the effects, contribution, significance and optimal machine settings of process parameters, namely, cutting speed, feed rate and depth of cut on machining parameters on the Ra and Rt. The results of this research work showed that, the feed rate was found to be a dominant factor on the surface roughness, followed by the cutting speed, lastly the depth of cut. The CBN7020 cutting tool showed the better performance than that of ceramic based cutting tool. In addition, the combination of low feed rate and high cutting speed is necessary for minimizing the surface roughness.

Permutation flow shop scheduling problems have been an interesting area of research for over six decades. Out of the several parameters, minimization of makespan has been studied much over the years. The problems are widely regarded as NP-Complete if the number of machines is more than three. As the computation time grows exponentially with respect to the problem size, heuristics and meta-heuristics have been proposed by many authors that give reasonably accurate and acceptable results. The NEH algorithm proposed in 1983 is still considered as one of the best simple, constructive heuristics for the minimization of makespan. This paper analyses the powerful job insertion technique used by NEH algorithm and proposes seven new variants, the complexity level remains same. 120 numbers of problem instances proposed by Taillard have been used for the purpose of validating the algorithms. Out of the seven, three produce better results than the original NEH algorithm.

This paper provides a review on recent works in the field of competitive facility location models based on the following seven components: 1) Variables, 2) Competition type, 3) Solution space, 4) Customer behavior, 5) Demand type, 6) Number of new facilities and 7) Relocation and redesign possibility. First, the components are introduced and then based on these components; different studies are compared with each other via a proposed taxonomy and finally a review on work of each paper is provided.

A simple yet powerful optimization algorithm is proposed in this paper for solving the constrained and unconstrained optimization problems. This algorithm is based on the concept that the solution obtained for a given problem should move towards the best solution and should avoid the worst solution. This algorithm requires only the common control parameters and does not require any algorithm-specific control parameters. The performance of the proposed algorithm is investigated by implementing it on 24 constrained benchmark functions having different characteristics given in Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC 2006) and the performance is compared with that of other well-known optimization algorithms. The results have proved the better effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Furthermore, the statistical analysis of the experimental work has been carried out by conducting the Friedman’s rank test and Holm-Sidak test. The proposed algorithm is found to secure first rank for the ‘best’ and ‘mean’ solutions in the Friedman’s rank test for all the 24 constrained benchmark problems. In addition to solving the constrained benchmark problems, the algorithm is also investigated on 30 unconstrained benchmark problems taken from the literature and the performance of the algorithm is found better.

This paper presents a multiobjective ant colony algorithm for the Multi-Depot Vehicle Routing Problem with Backhauls (MDVRPB) where three objectives of traveled distance, traveling times and total consumption of energy are minimized. An ant colony algorithm is proposed to solve the MDVRPB. The solution scheme allows one to find a set of ordered solutions in Pareto fronts by considering the concept of dominance. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is examined by considering a set of instances adapted from the literature. The computational results show high quality results within short computing times.