Formulating and Solving Sustainable Stochastic Dynamic Facility Layout Problem: A Key to Sustainable Operations

Facility layout design, a NP Hard problem, is associated with the arrangement of facilities in a manufacturing shop floor, which impacts the performance, and cost of system. Efficient design of facility layout is a key to the sustainable operations in a manufacturing shop floor. An efficient layout design not only optimizes the cost and energy due to proficient handling but also increase flexibility and easy accessibility. Traditionally, it is solved using meta-heuristic techniques. But these algorithmic or procedural methodologies do not generate effective and efficient layout design from sustainable point of view, where design should consider multiple criteria such as demand fluctuations, material handling cost, accessibility, maintenance, waste and more. In this paper, to capture the sustainability in the layout design these parameters are considered, and a new Sustainable Stochastic Dynamic Facility Layout Problem (SDFLP) is formulated and solved. SDFLP is optimized for material handling cost and rearrangement cost using various meta-heuristic techniques. The pool of layouts thus generated is then analyzed by Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to identify efficient layouts. A novel hierarchical methodology of consensus ranking of layouts is proposed which combines the multiple attributes/criteria. Multi Attribute decision-making (MADM) Techniques such as Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), Interpretive Ranking Process (IRP) and Analytic hierarchy process (AHP), Borda-Kendall and Integer Linear Programming based rank aggregation techniques are applied. To validate the proposed methodology data sets for facility size N=12 for time period T=5 having Gaussian demand are considered

Pan-cancer analysis of whole genomes

Cancer is driven by genetic change, and the advent of massively parallel sequencing has enabled systematic documentation of this variation at the whole-genome scale(1-3). Here we report the integrative analysis of 2,658 whole-cancer genomes and their matching normal tissues across 38 tumour types from the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium of the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). We describe the generation of the PCAWG resource, facilitated by international data sharing using compute clouds. On average, cancer genomes contained 4-5 driver mutations when combining coding and non-coding genomic elements; however, in around 5% of cases no drivers were identified, suggesting that cancer driver discovery is not yet complete. Chromothripsis, in which many clustered structural variants arise in a single catastrophic event, is frequently an early event in tumour evolution; in acral melanoma, for example, these events precede most somatic point mutations and affect several cancer-associated genes simultaneously. Cancers with abnormal telomere maintenance often originate from tissues with low replicative activity and show several mechanisms of preventing telomere attrition to critical levels. Common and rare germline variants affect patterns of somatic mutation, including point mutations, structural variants and somatic retrotransposition. A collection of papers from the PCAWG Consortium describes non-coding mutations that drive cancer beyond those in the TERT promoter(4); identifies new signatures of mutational processes that cause base substitutions, small insertions and deletions and structural variation(5,6); analyses timings and patterns of tumour evolution(7); describes the diverse transcriptional consequences of somatic mutation on splicing, expression levels, fusion genes and promoter activity(8,9); and evaluates a range of more-specialized features of cancer genomes(8,10-18).Peer reviewe

A pattern adaptive thinning algorithm

A simple sequential thinning algorithm for peeling off pixels along contours is described. An adaptive algorithm obtained by incorporating shape adaptivity into this sequential process is also given. The distortions in the skeleton at the right-angle and acute-angle corners are minimized in the adaptive algorithm. The asymmetry of the skeleton, which is a characteristic of sequential algorithm, and is due to the presence of T-corners in some of the even-thickness pattern is eliminated. The performance (in terms of time requirements and shape preservation) is compared with that of a modern thinning algorithm

Artificial database for character recognition research

This paper describes a technique for artificial generation of learning and test sample sets suitable for character recognition research. Sample sets of English (Latin), Malayalam, Kannada and Tamil characters are generated easily through their prototype specifications by the endpoint co-ordinates, nature of segments and connectivity

Character recognition — A review

The machine replication of human reading has been the subject of intensive research for more than three decades. A large number of research papers and reports have already been published on this topic. Many commercial establishments have manufactured recognizers of varying capabilities. Handheld, desk-top, medium-size and large systems costing as high as half a million dollars are available, and are in use for various applications. However, the ultimate goal of developing a reading machine having the same reading capabilities of humans still remains unachieved. So, there still is a great gap between human reading and machine reading capabilities, and a great amount of further effort is required to narrow-down this gap, if not bridge it. This review is organized into six major sections covering a general overview (an introduction), applications of character recognition techniques, methodologies in character recognition, research work in character recognition, some practical OCRs and the conclusions

Underlay aware resiliency in P2P overlays

Modern distributed applications that run on P2P overlays need the overlay to be resilient to failures in the underlying communications network. An example application is that of event dissemination where the P2P overlay (the event broker network) delivers events published by a client to subscribers based on subscription filters. Achieving high availability requires that the overlay be aware of, and utilize the path redundancies in the underlying physical network. In addition, the overlay should be self organizing, as broker nodes may dynamically join or leave the network and centralized control is not an option in large scale networks. In this paper, we present Trimarg, an efficient distributed algorithm for achieving a self organizing overlay with an availability degree of three. Our algorithm is based on a graph theoretic foundation for highly available overlay networks and is designed to handle the concurrency issues of a large scale distributed system. The resulting unstructured P2P overlay ensures 3-degree of availability in the presence of node and link failures in the underlying physical network. We have proved the correctness of the algorithm and analyzed its complexity to show that the time complexity is O(diameter * degree)(2) of the network and the message complexity is O(diameter * degree). Our algorithm is the first of its kind to deal with concurrency issues and self organizing capabilities of the resultant overlay

Oerskovia turbata and Myroides species: Rare isolates from a case of acalculus cholecystitis

Here we report a case of acalculus cholecystitis, which presented with features of obstructive jaundice of one-week duration. The patient underwent cholecystectomy and bile grew a mixed culture of Oerskovia turbata and Myroides spp. Being a rare isolate, characteristic features of the former are described in this report. The patient recovered without any complication