14,181 research outputs found
Welcome to OR&S! Where students, academics and professionals come together
In this manuscript, an overview is given of the activities done at the Operations Research and Scheduling (OR&S) research group of the faculty of Economics and Business Administration of Ghent University. Unlike the book published by [1] that gives a summary of all academic and professional activities done in the field of Project Management in collaboration with the OR&S group, the focus of the current manuscript lies on academic publications and the integration of these published results in teaching activities. An overview is given of the publications from the very beginning till today, and some of the topics that have led to publications are discussed in somewhat more detail. Moreover, it is shown how the research results have been used in the classroom to actively involve students in our research activities
Supply chain management: An opportunity for metaheuristics
In today’s highly competitive and global marketplace the pressure on organizations to find new ways to create and deliver value to customers grows ever stronger. In the last two decades, logistics and supply chain has moved to the center stage. There has been a growing recognition that it is through an effective management of the logistics function and the supply chain that the goal of cost reduction and service enhancement can be achieved. The key to success in Supply Chain Management (SCM) require heavy emphasis on integration of activities, cooperation, coordination and information sharing throughout the entire supply chain, from suppliers to customers. To be able to respond to the challenge of integration there is the need of sophisticated decision support systems based on powerful mathematical models and solution techniques, together with the advances in information and communication technologies. The industry and the academia have become increasingly interested in SCM to be able to respond to the problems and issues posed by the changes in the logistics and supply chain. We present a brief discussion on the important issues in SCM. We then argue that metaheuristics can play an important role in solving complex supply chain related problems derived by the importance of designing and managing the entire supply chain as a single entity. We will focus specially on the Iterated Local Search, Tabu Search and Scatter Search as the ones, but not limited to, with great potential to be used on solving the SCM related problems. We will present briefly some successful applications.Supply chain management, metaheuristics, iterated local search, tabu search and scatter search
Recommended from our members
Combinatorial optimization and metaheuristics
Today, combinatorial optimization is one of the youngest and most active areas of discrete mathematics. It is a branch of optimization in applied mathematics and computer science, related to operational research, algorithm theory and computational complexity theory. It sits at the intersection of several fields, including artificial intelligence, mathematics and software engineering. Its increasing interest arises for the fact that a large number of scientific and industrial problems can be formulated as abstract combinatorial optimization problems, through graphs and/or (integer) linear programs. Some of these problems have polynomial-time (“efficient”) algorithms, while most of them are NP-hard, i.e. it is not proved that they can be solved in polynomial-time. Mainly, it means that it is not possible to guarantee that an exact solution to the problem can be found and one has to settle for an approximate solution with known performance guarantees. Indeed, the goal of approximate methods is to find “quickly” (reasonable run-times), with “high” probability, provable “good” solutions (low error from the real optimal solution). In the last 20 years, a new kind of algorithm commonly called metaheuristics have emerged in this class, which basically try to combine heuristics in high level frameworks aimed at efficiently and effectively exploring the search space. This report briefly outlines the components, concepts, advantages and disadvantages of different metaheuristic approaches from a conceptual point of view, in order to analyze their similarities and differences. The two very significant forces of intensification and diversification, that mainly determine the behavior of a metaheuristic, will be pointed out. The report concludes by exploring the importance of hybridization and integration methods
A Neighborhood Search for Sequence-dependent Setup Time in Flow Shop Fabrics Making of Textile Industry
Abstract
This paper proposes a neighborhood search to solve scheduling for fabrics making in a textile industry.
The production process consists of three production stages from spinning, weaving, and dyeing. All
stages have one processor. Setup time between two consecutive jobs with different color is considered.
This paper also proposes attribute’s decomposition of a single job to classify available jobs to be
processed and to consider setup time between two consecutive jobs. Neighborhood search (NS) algorithm
is proposed in which the permutation of set of jobs with same attribute and the permutation among set of
jobs is conducted. Solution obtained from neighborhood search, which might be trapped in local solution,
then is compared with other known optimal methods
Optimizing production scheduling of steel plate hot rolling for economic load dispatch under time-of-use electricity pricing
Time-of-Use (TOU) electricity pricing provides an opportunity for industrial
users to cut electricity costs. Although many methods for Economic Load
Dispatch (ELD) under TOU pricing in continuous industrial processing have been
proposed, there are still difficulties in batch-type processing since power
load units are not directly adjustable and nonlinearly depend on production
planning and scheduling. In this paper, for hot rolling, a typical batch-type
and energy intensive process in steel industry, a production scheduling
optimization model for ELD is proposed under TOU pricing, in which the
objective is to minimize electricity costs while considering penalties caused
by jumps between adjacent slabs. A NSGA-II based multi-objective production
scheduling algorithm is developed to obtain Pareto-optimal solutions, and then
TOPSIS based multi-criteria decision-making is performed to recommend an
optimal solution to facilitate filed operation. Experimental results and
analyses show that the proposed method cuts electricity costs in production,
especially in case of allowance for penalty score increase in a certain range.
Further analyses show that the proposed method has effect on peak load
regulation of power grid.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, 4 table
A scatter search algorithm for the distributed permutation flowshop scheduling problem
The distributed permutation flowshop problem has been recently proposed as a generalization of the regular
flowshop setting where more than one factory is available to process jobs. Distributed manufacturing
is a common situation for large enterprises that compete in a globalized market. The problem has two
dimensions: assigning jobs to factories and scheduling the jobs assigned to each factory. Despite being
recently introduced, this interesting scheduling problem has attracted attention and several heuristic
and metaheuristic methods have been proposed in the literature. In this paper we present a scatter search
(SS) method for this problem to optimize makespan. SS has seldom been explored for flowshop settings.
In the proposed algorithm we employ some advanced techniques like a reference set made up of
complete and partial solutions along with other features like restarts and local search. A comprehensive
computational campaign including 10 existing algorithms, together with statistical analyses, shows that
the proposed scatter search algorithm produces better results than existing algorithms by a significant
margin. Moreover all 720 known best solutions for this problem are improved.Ruben Ruiz is partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, under the project "RESULT - Realistic Extended Scheduling Using Light Techniques" with reference DPI2012-36243-C02-01 co-financed by the European Union and FEDER funds and by the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, for the project MRPIV with reference PAID/2012/202.Naderi, B.; Ruiz GarcĂa, R. (2014). A scatter search algorithm for the distributed permutation flowshop scheduling problem. European Journal of Operational Research. 239(2):323-334. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2014.05.024S323334239
Mixed integer programming and adaptive problem solver learned by landscape analysis for clinical laboratory scheduling
This paper attempts to derive a mathematical formulation for real-practice
clinical laboratory scheduling, and to present an adaptive problem solver by
leveraging landscape structures. After formulating scheduling of medical tests
as a distributed scheduling problem in heterogeneous, flexible job shop
environment, we establish a mixed integer programming model to minimize mean
test turnaround time. Preliminary landscape analysis sustains that these
clinics-orientated scheduling instances are difficult to solve. The search
difficulty motivates the design of an adaptive problem solver to reduce
repetitive algorithm-tuning work, but with a guaranteed convergence. Yet, under
a search strategy, relatedness from exploitation competence to landscape
topology is not transparent. Under strategies that impose different-magnitude
perturbations, we investigate changes in landscape structure and find that
disturbance amplitude, local-global optima connectivity, landscape's ruggedness
and plateau size fairly predict strategies' efficacy. Medium-size instances of
100 tasks are easier under smaller-perturbation strategies that lead to
smoother landscapes with smaller plateaus. For large-size instances of 200-500
tasks, extant strategies at hand, having either larger or smaller
perturbations, face more rugged landscapes with larger plateaus that impede
search. Our hypothesis that medium perturbations may generate smoother
landscapes with smaller plateaus drives our design of this new strategy and its
verification by experiments. Composite neighborhoods managed by meta-Lamarckian
learning show beyond average performance, implying reliability when prior
knowledge of landscape is unknown
Solution and quality robust project scheduling: a methodological framework.
The vast majority of the research efforts in project scheduling over the past several years has concentrated on the development of exact and suboptimal procedures for the generation of a baseline schedule assuming complete information and a deterministic environment. During execution, however, projects may be the subject of considerable uncertainty, which may lead to numerous schedule disruptions. Predictive-reactive scheduling refers to the process where a baseline schedule is developed prior to the start of the project and updated if necessary during project execution. It is the objective of this paper to review possible procedures for the generation of proactive (robust) schedules, which are as well as possible protected against schedule disruptions, and for the deployment of reactive scheduling procedures that may be used to revise or re-optimize the baseline schedule when unexpected events occur. We also offer a methodological framework that should allow project management to identify the proper scheduling methodology for different project scheduling environments. Finally, we survey the basics of Critical Chain scheduling and indicate in which environments it is useful.Framework; Information; Management; Processes; Project management; Project scheduling; Project scheduling under uncertainty; Stability; Robust scheduling; Quality; Scheduling; Stability; Uncertainty;
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