Heuristic algorithms for the unrelated parallel machine scheduling problem with one scarce additional resource

[EN] In this paper, we study the unrelated parallel machine scheduling problem with one scarce additional resource to minimise the maximum completion time of the jobs or makespan. Several heuristics are proposed following two strategies: the first one is based on the consideration of the resource constraint during the whole solution construction process. The second one starts from several assignment rules without considering the resource constraint, and repairs the non feasible assignments in order to obtain a feasible solution. Several computation experiments are carried out over an extensive benchmark. A comparative evaluation against previously proposed mathematical models and matheuristics (combination of mathematical models and heuristics) is carried out. From the results, we can conclude that our methods outperform the existing ones, and the second strategy performs better, especially for large instances. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.The authors are supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, under the projects "SCHEYARD - Optimization of Scheduling Problems in Container Yards" (No. DPI2015-65895-R) and "OPTEMAC - Optimizacion de Procesos en Terminales Maritimas de Contenedores" (No. DPI2014-53665-P), all of them partially financed with FEDER funds. The authors are also partially supported by the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 731932 "Transforming Transport: Big Data Value in Mobility and Logistics". Interested readers can download contents from http://soa.iti.es, like the instances used and a software for generating further instances. Source codes are available upon justified request from the authors.Villa Juliá, MF.; Vallada Regalado, E.; Fanjul Peyró, L. (2018). Heuristic algorithms for the unrelated parallel machine scheduling problem with one scarce additional resource. Expert Systems with Applications. 93:28-38. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2017.09.054S28389

Flowshop with additional resources during setups: Mathematical models and a GRASP algorithm

[EN] Machine scheduling problems arise in many production processes, and are something that needs to be consider when optimizing the supply chain. Among them, flowshop scheduling problems happen when a number of jobs have to be sequentially processed by a number of machines. This paper addressees, for the first time, the Permutation Flowshop Scheduling problem with additional Resources during Setups (PFSR-S). In this problem, in addition to the standard permutation flowshop constraints, each machine requires a setup between the processing of two consecutive jobs. A number of additional and scarce resources, e.g. operators, are needed to carry out each setup. Two Mixed Integer Linear Programming formulations and an exact algorithm are proposed to solve the PFSR-S. Due to its complexity, these approaches can only solve instances of small size to optimality. Therefore, a GRASP metaheuristic is also proposed which provides solutions for much larger instances. All the methods designed for the PFSR-S in this paper are computationally tested over a benchmark of instances adapted from the literature. The results obtained show that the GRASP metaheuristic finds good quality solutions in short computational times.Juan C. Yepes-Borrero acknowledges financial support by Colfuturo under program Credito-Beca grant number 201503877 and from ElInstituto Colombiano de Credito Educativo y Estudios Tecnicos en el Exterior - ICETEX under program Pasaporte a la ciencia - Doctor-ado, Foco-reto pais 4.2.3, grant number 3568118. This research hasbeen partially supported by the Agencia Estatal de Investigacion (AEI)and the European Regional Development's fund (ERDF): PID2020-114594GB-C21; Regional Government of Andalusia: projects FEDER-US-1256951, AT 21_00032, and P18-FR-1422; Fundacion BBVA: project Netmeet Data (Ayudas Fundacion BBVA a equipos de investigacioncientifica 2019). The authors are partially supported by Agencia Valenciana de la Innovacion (AVI) under the project ireves (innovacionen vehiculos de emergencia sanitaria): una herramienta inteligente dedecision'' (No. INNACC/2021/26) partially financed with FEDER funds(interested readers can visit http://ireves.upv.es), and by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under the project OPRES-RealisticOptimization in Problems in Public Health'' (No. PID2021-124975OB-I00), partially financed with FEDER funds. Part of the authors aresupported by the Faculty of Business Administration and Managementat Universitat Politecnica de ValenciaYepes-Borrero, JC.; Perea, F.; Villa Juliá, MF.; Vallada Regalado, E. (2023). Flowshop with additional resources during setups: Mathematical models and a GRASP algorithm. Computers & Operations Research. 154. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cor.2023.10619215

A mixed integer linear program for a real relocation problem of emergency medical vehicles in the province of Valencia

[EN] The rapid intervention of Advanced Life Support (ALS) and Basic Life Support (BLS) when an emergency arises is of vital importance for the welfare of citizens. Currently, these Emergency Medical Vehicles (EMV) are located, in the province of Valencia, in certain logistical bases according to the criteria of those responsible for the Emergency Medical Services (EMS). However, it is not possible to cover the entire population of the province within the stipulated maximum times of 12 and 15 minutes (depending on whether it is an ALS or BLS, respectively). For this reason, a maximum coverage model is used to relocate the EMV bases in order to minimize the amount of uncovered population in the province. Thanks to the proposed model, the total coverage defect of the province's population is reduced by more than half compared to the current distribution.This work is part of the project submitted to the Valencian Innovation Agency (AVI) in the 2021 call entitled iREVES (innovación en Reubicación de Vehículos de Emergencias Sanitarias): an intelligent decision-making tool. Part of the authors are supported by the Faculty of Business Administration and Management at Universitat Politècnica de València. This work is part of a Bachelor’s Degree Final Project awarded with a mention in Missions València 2030 and the second prize of CEMEX at Universitat Politècnica de València. Mention should also be made to all those responsible for the EMS from Comunitat Valenciana for providing all the necessary information and being willing to offer their help at all times.Vecina García, MÁ.; Villa Juliá, MF.; Vallada Regalado, E.; Karpova Krylova, Y. (2022). A mixed integer linear program for a real relocation problem of emergency medical vehicles in the province of Valencia. Journal of Applied Research in Technology & Engineering. 3(2):85-92. https://doi.org/10.4995/jarte.2022.16984OJS85923

Evaluación de la Competencia Transversal 2: Aplicación y pensamiento práctico

[ES] En este trabajo se presenta la competencia transversal 2 evaluada en la Universitat Politècnica de València, “Aplicación y Pensamiento Práctico”. En concreto se centra en la evaluación de dicha competencia en 3 asignaturas del Grado en Administración y Dirección de Empresas que se imparte en dicha Universidad. Las asignaturas corresponden tanto al nivel uno (primer y segundo curso) como al dos (tercer y cuarto curso) de la titulación.[EN] En este trabajo se presenta la competencia transversal 2 evaluada en la Universitat Politècnica de València, “Aplicación y Pensamiento Práctico”. En concreto se centra en la evaluación de dicha competencia en 3 asignaturas del Grado en Administración y Dirección de Empresas que se imparte en dicha Universidad. Las asignaturas corresponden tanto al nivel uno (primer y segundo curso) como al dos (tercer y cuarto curso) de la titulaciónVallada Regalado, E.; Martín Marín, J.; Úbeda García, JE.; Crespo Abril, F. (2019). Evaluación de la Competencia Transversal 2: Aplicación y pensamiento práctico. En JIDDO. I Jornada de innovación en docencia universitaria para la dirección de organizaciones públicas y privadas. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 17-23. https://doi.org/10.4995/JIDDO2019.2019.10188OCS172

Consumption of fruits and vegetables in a group of valencian children of school age.

Introducción: En los últimos 25 años ha habido un gran cambio en los hábitos alimentarios en España. Objetivos: Calcular y valorar el consumo de frutas, verduras y hortalizas en niños de edad escolar e identificar el tipo de postre que toman analizando la influencia de los niños en la compra de fruta y verdura que realizan los padres. Material y métodos: Se realizó un cuestionario dirigido a los padres de niños y niñas en edad escolar que estaban cursando primaria. De 155 cuestionarios entregados en el colegio, se obtuvo una muestra de 116. Resultados: Solo el 5,17% de los niños consumen 3 ó más raciones de frutas al día. El 30,17% consumen 1 ó 2 raciones de verduras y hortalizas al día. El 18,97% toman fruta como postre de forma habitual. El 25% de los padres compran fruta la mayoría de los días porque sus hijos se la piden y el 12,93% compran verdura. Discusión: No hay un consumo suficiente de frutas, verduras y hortalizas entre los escolares estudiados. Los niños influyen en la compra de frutas, verduras y hortalizas que realizan sus padres. Conclusiones: El consumo de frutas, verduras y hortalizas en la mayoría de estos niños, no sigue las recomendaciones de las Guías Dietéticas. El consumo de fruta como postre de forma habitual es bajo. Los niños tienen más influencia en la compra de frutas que en las de verduras.Introduction: In the last 25 years there has been a great change in the food habits in Spain. Objectives: To calculate and assess the consumption of fruits and vegetables in school children. To identify the type of desserts eaten and analyze the influence children have on the purchase of fruit and vegetables made by parents. Materials and methods: A survey was carried out on parents of primary school children. A total of 155 questionnaires were handed into the school, obtaining a sample of 116 completed questionnaires. Results: Only 5.17% eat 3 or more portions of fruit per day. Regarding vegetables, 30.17% consume 1 or 2 portions. 18.97% have fruit as a dessert. 25% of the parents purchase fruit most days as a result of the children request and 12.93% purchase vegetables. Discussion: Children do not consume enough fruit and vegetables. Children have an influence on fruit and vegetable purchases. Conclusions: The majority of the studied children do not follow the dietary recommendations regarding consumption of fruit and vegetables. Consumption of fruit for dessert is low. Children have a bigger influence on fruit purchases than in vegetables purchases.Nutrición humana y dietétic

New hard benchmark for flowshop scheduling problems minimising makespan

[EN] In this work a new benchmark of hard instances for the permutation flowshop scheduling problem with the objective of minimising the makespan is proposed. The new benchmark consists of 240 large instances and 240 small instances with up to 800 jobs and 60 machines. One of the objectives of the work is to generate a benchmark which satisfies the desired characteristics of any benchmark: comprehensive, amenable for statistical analysis and discriminant when several algorithms are compared. An exhaustive experimental procedure is carried out in order to select the hard instances, generating thousands of instances and selecting the hardest ones from the point of view of a gap computed as the difference between very good upper and lower bounds for each instance. Extensive generation and computational experiments, which have taken almost six years of combined CPU time, demonstrate that the proposed benchmark is harder and with more discriminant power than the most common benchmark from the literature. Moreover, a website is developed for researchers in order to share sets of instances, best known solutions and lower bounds, etc. for any combinatorial optimisation problem.Eva Vallada and Ruben Ruiz are partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, 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. The authors would like to acknowledge the help received from Juan Cabota in the early development of the web of instances.Vallada Regalado, E.; Ruiz García, R.; Framinan, JM. (2015). New hard benchmark for flowshop scheduling problems minimising makespan. European Journal of Operational Research. 240(3):666-677. doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2014.07.033S666677240

Enriched metaheuristics for the resource constrained unrelated parallel machine scheduling problem

[EN] A Scatter Search algorithm together with an enriched Scatter Search and an enriched Iterated Greedy for the unrelated parallel machine problem with one additional resource are proposed in this paper. The optimisation objective is to minimise the maximum completion of the jobs on the machines, that is, the makespan. All the proposed methods start from the best known heuristic for the same problem. Non feasible solutions are allowed in all the methods and a Repairing Mechanism is applied to obtain a feasible solution from a resource constraint point of view. All the proposed algorithms apply different local search procedures based on insertion, swap and restricted neighbourhoods. Computational experiments are carried out using an exhaustive benchmark of instances. After analysing the results, we can conclude that the enriched methods obtain superior results, outperforming the best known solutions for the same problem.The authors are supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, under the projects "SCHEYARD - Optimization of Scheduling Problems in Container Yards" (No. DPI201565895-R) and "OPTEMAC -Optimizacion de Procesos en Terminales Maritimas de Contenedores" (No. DPI2014-53665-P), all of them partially financed with FEDER funds. The authors are also partially supported by the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 731932 "Transforming Transport: Big Data Value in Mobility and Logistics". Interested readers can download contents from http://soa.iti.es, like the instances used and a software for generating further instances. Source codes are available upon justified request from the authors.Vallada Regalado, E.; Villa Juliá, MF.; Fanjul-Peyro, L. (2019). Enriched metaheuristics for the resource constrained unrelated parallel machine scheduling problem. Computers & Operations Research. 111:415-424. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cor.2019.07.016S41542411

A simheuristic algorithm for solving the permutation flow shop problem with stochastic processing times

This paper describes a simulation optimization algorithm for the Permutation Flow shop Problem with Stochastic processing Times (PFSPST). The proposed algorithm combines Monte Carlo simulation with an Iterated Local Search metaheuristic in order to deal with the stochastic behavior of the problem. Using the expected makespan as initial minimization criterion, our simheuristic approach is based on the assumption that high-quality solutions (permutations of jobs) for the deterministic version of the problem are likely to be high-quality solutions for the stochastic version i.e., a correlation will exist between both sets of solutions, at least for moderate levels of variability in the stochastic processing times. No particular assumption is made on the probability distributions modeling each job-machine processing times. Our approach is able to solve, in just a few minutes or even less, PFSPST instances with hundreds of jobs and dozens of machines. Also, the paper proposes the use of reliability analysis techniques to analyze simulation outcomes or historical observations on the random variable representing the makespan associated with a given solution. This way, criteria other than the expected makespan can be considered by the decision maker when comparing different alternative solutions. A set of classical benchmarks for the deterministic version of the problem are adapted and tested under several scenarios, each of them characterized by a different level of uncertainty variance level of job-machine processing times.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (TRA2010-21644-C03). It has been developed in the context of the IN3-ICSO program and the CYTED-HAROSA network (http://dpcs.uoc.edu).Juan, AA.; Barrios, BB.; Vallada Regalado, E.; Riera, D.; Jorba, J. (2014). A simheuristic algorithm for solving the permutation flow shop problem with stochastic processing times. Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory. 46:101-117. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.simpat.2014.02.005S1011174

Heuristic algorithms based on the isochron analysis for dynamic relocation of medical emergency vehicles

[EN] Among the wide range of medical services, prehospital health care is one of the most relevant, as it usually involves an emergency situation. The qualified medical team is dispatched to the scene of the incident as soon as possible. One of the most influential factors in response time depends on where the ambulances are stationed, however, when a medical vehicle is attending an emergency, it becomes unavailable for other calls. Increasing the ambulance fleet is a costly option that does not guarantee efficiency. An alternative solution is the relocation of available ambulances to increase the population covered by them. Obtaining the optimal solution in real time is not feasible for this problem. Therefore, this work addresses the problem of dynamic relocation of ambulances through the design and development of heuristic tools. The isochron overlap analysis defines possible scenarios that may occur when ambulances become unavailable for emergencies and determines the appropriate conditions to carry out the relocation of ambulances. Computational experiments are run using a benchmark of instances based on the characteristics of a real Emergency Medical Service. Based on the results of the study, we can conclude that the designed relocation algorithms perform better than if there was no relocation strategy.The authors are supported by Agència Valenciana de la Innovació (AVI), Spain under the project ireves (innovación en vehículos de emergencia sanitaria): una herramienta inteligente de decisión (No. INNACC/2021/26). This project has been partially financed with FEDER, Spain funds. Interested readers can visit http://ireves.upv.es. The authors are supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under the project ``OPRES-Realistic Optimization in Problems in Public Health¿¿(No. PID2021-124975OB-I00), partially financed with FEDER funds. Part of the authors are supported by the Faculty of Business Administration and Management at Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain and Yulia Karpova is supported under the project Programa de Ayudas de Investigación y Desarrollo (PAID-01-21) de la Universitat Politècnica de València. Special thanks to Servicio de Atención Sanitaria a Urgencias Emergencias (SASUE) and to Servicios de Emergencias Sanitarias (SES) of the Comunitat Valenciana, and Department of Coordination of Medical Transport for the information and data provided. All authors have contributed to all sections and tasks performed in this article.Karpova-Krylova, Y.; Villa Juliá, MF.; Vallada Regalado, E.; Vecina, MÁ. (2023). Heuristic algorithms based on the isochron analysis for dynamic relocation of medical emergency vehicles. Expert Systems with Applications. 212. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2022.11877321

Proyecto PIME para la certificación de competencias digitales en hoja de cálculo y software estadístico en la titulación de Grado en ADE

[ES] El proyecto institucional de la Facultad de Administración y Dirección de Empresas denominado ¿Certificación de competencias digitales en hoja de cálculo y software estadístico en la titulación Grado en ADE¿ tiene como objetivo evaluar el nivel de adquisición de competencias relacionadas con los programas informáticos más utilizados en el Grado en ADE. Para ello se ha realizado una rúbrica para determinar el nivel adquirido y el grado de manejo de los programas que utilizan durante sus estudios.[EN] The institutional project of the Faculty of Business Administration and Management called "Certification of digital skills in spreadsheets and statistical software in the Degree in Business Administration" aims to assess the level of acquisition of skills related to the most used computer programs in this degree. For this purpose, a rubric has been designed. It measures the acquired skills and studuents¿ proficiency in the use of the mentioned software programs.Nos gustaría agradecer a todo el profesorado de la FADE que ha colaborado cumplimentando las rúbricas de los programas informáticos evaluados. Este trabajo ha sido realizado gracias a la financiación del Proyecto de Innovación y Mejora Educativa (PIME/21-22/272) de la convocatoria Aprendizaje + Docencia de la Universitat Politècnica de València de título Certificación de competencias digitales en hoja de cálculo y software estadístico en la titulación Grado en ADE.Vallada Regalado, E.; Debón, A.; Ribal, J.; Chirivella González, V.; Cervelló Royo, RE.; Calafat Marzal, C.; Marin-Sanchez, MDM.... (2022). Proyecto PIME para la certificación de competencias digitales en hoja de cálculo y software estadístico en la titulación de Grado en ADE. EscuelaTécnica Superior de Ingeniería del Diseño. Universitat Politècnica de València. 445-450. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/19176244545