Sharif Digital Repository

The primary objective of this research is to obtain an accurate forecasting model for the US presidential election. To identify a reliable model, artificial neural networks (ANN) and support vector regression (SVR) models are compared based on some specified performance measures. Moreover, six independent variables such as GDP, unemployment rate, the president’s approval rate, and others are considered in a stepwise regression to identify significant variables. The president’s approval rate is identified as the most significant variable, based on which eight other variables are identified and considered in the model development. Preprocessing methods are applied to prepare the data for the... 

This paper introduces a new hub-and-center transportation network problem for a new company competing against an operating company. The new company intends to locate p hubs and assign the center nodes to the located hubs in order to form origin–destination pairs. It desires not only to maximize the total captured flow in the market but also aims to minimize the total transportation cost. Three competition rules are established between the companies which must be abided. According to the competition rules, the new company can capture the full percentage of the traffic in each origin-destination pair if its transportation cost for each route is significantly less than of the competitor. If its... 

Diabetes mellitus is a medical condition examined by data miners for reasons such as significant health complications in affected people, the economic impact on healthcare networks, and so on. In order to find the main causes of this disease, researchers look into the patient's lifestyle, hereditary information, etc. The goal of data mining in this context is to find patterns that make early detection of the disease and proper treatment easier. Due to the high volume of data involved in therapeutic contexts and disease diagnosis, provision of the intended treatment method become almost impossible over a short period of time. This justifies the use of pre-processing techniques and data... 

The primary objective of this research is to obtain an accurate forecasting model for the US presidential election. To identify a reliable model, artificial neural networks (ANN) and support vector regression (SVR) models are compared based on some specified performance measures. Moreover, six independent variables such as GDP, unemployment rate, the president’s approval rate, and others are considered in a stepwise regression to identify significant variables. The president’s approval rate is identified as the most significant variable, based on which eight other variables are identified and considered in the model development. Preprocessing methods are applied to prepare the data for the... 

Supply chain management has gained much interest from researchers and practitioners in recent years. Proposing practical models that efficiently address different aspects of the supply chain is a difficult challenge. This research investigates an integrated production-distribution supply chain problem. The developed model incorporates parties with a specified number of processes to obtain raw materials from the suppliers in order to convert them to semi and final products. These products are then distributed through warehouses to end-distributors having uncertain demands. This uncertainty is captured as a dynamic stochastic data process during the planning horizon and is modeled into a... 

In this research, a maximal covering location problem (MCLP) with real-world constraints such as multiple types of facilities and vehicles with different setup costs is taken into account. An original mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model is constructed in order to find the optimal solution. Since the problem at hand is shown to be NP-hard, a constructive heuristic method and a meta-heuristic approach based on genetic algorithm (GA) are developed to solve the problem. To find the most effective solution technique, a set of problems of different sizes is randomly generated and solved by the proposed solution methods. Computational results demonstrate that the heuristic method is... 

The redundancy allocation problem (RAP) is a useful method to enhance system reliability. In most works involving RAP, failure rates of the system components are assumed to follow either exponential or k-Erlang distributions. In real world problems however, many systems have components with increasing failure rates. This indicates that as time passes by, the failure rates of the system components increase in comparison to their initial failure rates. In this paper, the redundancy allocation problem of a series-parallel system with components having an increasing failure rate based on Weibull distribution is investigated. An optimization method via simulation is proposed for modeling and a... 

Production systems with scrapped and rework items have recently become an interesting subject of research. While most attempts have been focused on finding the optimal production quantity in a simple production system, little work appears on a joint production environment. In this research, two joint production systems in a form of multiproduct single machine with and without rework are studied where shortage is allowed and backordered. For each system, the optimal cycle length, the backordered and production quantities of each product are determined such that the cost function is minimised. Proof of the convexity of the involved objective functions of each model is provided and numerical... 

Vendor-managed inventory (VMI) is a popular policy in supply chain management (SCM) to decrease bullwhip effect. Since the transportation cost plays an important role in VMI and because the demands are often fuzzy, this paper develops a VMI model in a multi-retailer single-vendor SCM under the consignment stock policy. The aim is to find optimal retailers' order quantities so that the total inventory and transportation cost are minimized while several constraints are satisfied. Because of the NP-hardness of the problem, an algorithm based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) is proposed to find a near optimum solution, where the centroid defuzzification method is employed for... 

In this research, a bi-objective vendor managed inventory model in a supply chain with one vendor (producer) and several retailers is developed, in which determination of the optimal numbers of different machines that work in series to produce a single item is considered. While the demand rates of the retailers are deterministic and known, the constraints are the total budget, required storage space, vendor's total replenishment frequencies, and average inventory. In addition to production and holding costs of the vendor along with the ordering and holding costs of the retailers, the transportation cost of delivering the item to the retailers is also considered in the total chain cost. The... 

Many genetic algorithms (GA) have been applied to solve different NP-complete combinatorial optimization problems so far. The striking point of using GA refers to selecting a combination of appropriate patterns in crossover, mutation, and and so forth and fine tuning of some parameters such as crossover probability, mutation probability, and and so forth. One way to design a robust GA is to select an optimal pattern and then to search for its parameter values using a tuning procedure. This paper addresses a methodology to both optimal pattern selection and the tuning phases by taking advantage of design of experiments and response surface methodology. To show the performances of the proposed... 

Finding a Pareto-optimal frontier is widely favorable among researchers to model existing conflict objectives in an optimization problem. Project scheduling is a well-known problem in which investigating a combination of goals eventuate in a more real situation. Although there are many different types of objectives based on the situation on hand, three basic objectives are the most common in the literature of the project scheduling problem. These objectives are: (i) the minimization of the makespan, (ii) the minimization of the total cost associated with the resources, and (iii) the minimization of the variability in resources usage. In this paper, three genetic-based algorithms are proposed... 

In this paper, a new procedure is developed to monitor a two-stage process with a second stage Poisson quality characteristic. In the proposed method, log and square root link functions are first combined to introduce a new link function that establishes a relationship between the Poisson variable of the second stage and the quality characteristic of the first stage. Then, the standardized residual statistic, which is independent of the quality characteristic in the previous stage and follows approximately standardized normal distribution, is computed based on the proposed link function. Then, Shewhart and exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) cause-selecting charts are utilized to... 

Today's competitive market has witnessed a growing interest in improving the reliability of products in both service and industrial operations. A large number of monitoring schemes have been introduced to effectively control the reliability-related quality characteristics. These methods have focused on single-stage processes or considered quality variables which are independent. However, the main feature of multistage processes is the cascade property which needs to be justified for the sake of optimal process monitoring. The problem becomes complicated when the presence of censored observations is pronounced. Therefore, both the effects of influential covariates and censored data must be... 

In some statistical process control (SPC) applications, quality of a process or product is characterized by contingency table. Contingency tables describe the relation between two or more categorical quality characteristics. In this paper, two new control charts based on the WALD and Stuart score test statistics are designed for monitoring of contingency table-based processes in Phase-II. The performances of the proposed control charts are compared with the generalized linear test (GLT) control chart proposed in the literature. The results show the better performance of the proposed control charts under small and moderate shifts. Moreover, new schemes are proposed to diagnose which cell... 

A novel combination of a multimode project scheduling problem with material ordering, in which material procurements are exposed to the total quantity discount policy is investigated in this paper. The study aims at finding an optimal Pareto frontier for a triple objective model derived for the problem. While the first objective minimizes the makespan of the project, the second objective maximizes the robustness of the project schedule and finally the third objective minimizes the total costs pertaining to renewable and nonrenewable resources involved in a project. Four well-known multi-objective evolutionary algorithms including non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGAII), strength... 

Efficient management of supply chain (SC) requires systematic considerations of miscellaneous issues in its comprehensive version. In this paper, a multi-periodic structure is developed for a supply chain network design (SCND) involving suppliers, factories, distribution centers (DCs), and retailers. The nature of the logistic decisions is tactical that encompasses procurement of raw materials from suppliers, production of finished product at factories, distribution of finished product to retailers via DCs, and the storage of raw materials and end product at factories and DCs. Besides, to make the structure more comprehensive, a flow-shop scheduling model in manufacturing part of the SC is... 

In this study, a bi-objective multi-state redundancy allocation problem of series-parallel systems consisting of some serial subsystems, each with non-repairable components in parallel, is investigated. Furthermore, due to uncertainty involved, both the performance rates and the availabilities of components are considered fuzzy. In addition, two strategies of all-unit and incremental-quantity discounts are used to purchase the components and that the fuzzy universal generating function (FUGF) is employed to evaluate the system availability. The aim is to find the optimal redundancy so as within limited budget and system weight the maximum system availability is obtained while the total cost... 

In this paper, a design of the supply chain distributer-retailer network for a seasonal multiple-product location allocation-inventory control problem in a planning horizon consisting of multiple periods is modeled. The distance between the distributers and retailers are assumed to be Euclidean and square Euclidean while retailers purchase the products from the distributers under all-unit and incremental quantity discount policies. Furthermore, the products are delivered in packets of known size of items and in case of shortage, a fraction of demand is considered backorder and a fraction lost sale. Besides, the distributers store the manufactured products in their warehouses before... 

The facility location problem and its related financial issues have a significant impact on the configuration of a supply chain structure (SCS). Although affording the setup cost of facilities requires a huge financial investment, a meticulous planning to recoup it has been neglected by an overwhelming majority of previous studies. To fill this gap, an economical investment plan of facilities is determined by striking a trade-off between the contribution of the stockholders’ capital and the loan arrangement. In the context of a multiperiod three-echelon SCS, the model also determines the optimum location of plants and the best supply and distribution patterns. The model maximizes the fill...