A multi-objective multi-item solid transportation problem with vehicle cost, volume and weight capacity under fuzzy environment

Generally, in transportation problem, full vehicles (e.g., light commercial vehicles, medium duty and heavy duty trucks, etc.) are to be booked, and transportation cost of a vehicle has to be paid irrespective of the fulfilment of the capacity of the vehicle. Besides the transportation cost, total time that includes travel time of a vehicle, loading and unloading times of products is also an important issue. Also, instead of a single item, different types of items may need to be transported from some sources to destinations through different types of conveyances. The optimal transportation policy may be affected by many other issues like volume and weight of per unit of product, unavailability of sufficient number of certain types of vehicles, etc. In this paper, we formulate a multi-objective multi-item solid transportation problem by addressing all these issues. The problem is formulated with the transportation cost and time parameters as fuzzy variables. Using credibility theory of fuzzy variables, a chance-constraint programming model is formulated, and is then transformed into the corresponding deterministic form. Finally numerical example is provided to illustrate the problem

A multi-objective reliability-redundancy allocation problem with active redundancy and interval type-2 fuzzy parameters

This paper considers a multi-objective reliability-redundancy allocation problem (MORRAP) of a series-parallel system, where system reliability and system cost are to be optimized simultaneously subject to limits on weight, volume, and redundancy level. Precise computation of component reliability is very difficult as the estimation of a single number for the probabilities and performance levels are not always possible, because it is affected by many factors such as inaccuracy and insufficiency of data, manufacturing process, environment in which the system is running, evaluation done by multiple experts, etc. To cope with impreciseness, we model component reliabilities as interval type-2 fuzzy numbers (IT2 FNs), which is more suitable to represent uncertainties than usual or type-1 fuzzy numbers. To solve the problem with interval type-2 fuzzy parameters, we first apply various type-reduction and defuzzification techniques, and obtain corresponding defuzzified values. As maximization of system reliability and minimization of system cost are conflicting to each other, so to obtain compromise solution of the MORRAP with defuzzified parameters, we apply five different multi-objective optimization methods, and then corresponding solutions are analyzed. The problem is illustrated numerically for a real-world MORRAP on pharmaceutical plant, and solutions are obtained by standard optimization solver LINGO, which is based on gradient-based optimization - Generalized Reduced Gradient (GRG) technique

Some Network Optimization Models under Diverse Uncertain Environments

Network models provide an efficient way to represent many real life problems mathematically. In the last few decades, the field of network optimization has witnessed an upsurge of interest among researchers and practitioners. The network models considered in this thesis are broadly classified into four types including transportation problem, shortest path problem, minimum spanning tree problem and maximum flow problem. Quite often, we come across situations, when the decision parameters of network optimization problems are not precise and characterized by various forms of uncertainties arising from the factors, like insufficient or incomplete data, lack of evidence, inappropriate judgements and randomness. Considering the deterministic environment, there exist several studies on network optimization problems. However, in the literature, not many investigations on single and multi objective network optimization problems are observed under diverse uncertain frameworks. This thesis proposes seven different network models under different uncertain paradigms. Here, the uncertain programming techniques used to formulate the uncertain network models are (i) expected value model, (ii) chance constrained model and (iii) dependent chance constrained model. Subsequently, the corresponding crisp equivalents of the uncertain network models are solved using different solution methodologies. The solution methodologies used in this thesis can be broadly categorized as classical methods and evolutionary algorithms. The classical methods, used in this thesis, are Dijkstra and Kruskal algorithms, modified rough Dijkstra algorithm, global criterion method, epsilon constraint method and fuzzy programming method. Whereas, among the evolutionary algorithms, we have proposed the varying population genetic algorithm with indeterminate crossover and considered two multi objective evolutionary algorithms.Comment: Thesis documen