This paper examines a parallel machine scheduling problem in which jobs can be processed either in multiple parts or in a complete form and the number of possible job splitting alternatives of jobs is more than one. T...
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This paper examines a parallel machine scheduling problem in which jobs can be processed either in multiple parts or in a complete form and the number of possible job splitting alternatives of jobs is more than one. There are sequence-dependent setup times between different jobs (or parts), and the objective is to minimise makespan by choosing an appropriate processing alternative for each job, assigning parts (or jobs) to machines, and determining the sequence of parts on the machines. This work is motivated from a 3D printer-based manufacturing system that produces customised products for individuals or start-up companies. When 3D printers are used as processing machines, a product can be printed in diverse forms composed of different parts. To address the problem, we first propose a mixed integer programmingmodel and then develop a hybrid genetic algorithm which is combined with a travelling salesman problem-based heuristic algorithm. The experimental results show that the average gap between a solution from the proposed algorithm and an optimal one solved with CPLEX or a lower bound is very small. The paired t-test shows that there is a significant improvement for processing jobs with multiple alternatives.
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to evaluate project activities' efficiency in different execution modes for the optimization of time-cost-quality and environmental impacts trade-off problem. Design/methodolog...
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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to evaluate project activities' efficiency in different execution modes for the optimization of time-cost-quality and environmental impacts trade-off problem. Design/methodology/approach This paper presents a parallel Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method for evaluation of project activities with different execution modes to select the best execution mode and find a trade-off between objectives. Also, according to the nature of the project activities, outputs are categorized into desirable (quality) and undesirable (time, cost and environmental impacts) and analyzed based on the DEA model. In order to rank efficient execution modes, the ideal and anti-ideal virtual units method is used. The proposed model is implemented on a real case of a rural water supply construction project to demonstrate its validity. Findings The findings show that the use of the efficient execution mode in each activity leads to an optimal trade-off between the four project objectives (time, cost, quality and environmental impacts). Practical implications This study help project managers and practitioners with choosing the most efficient execution modes of project activities taking time-cost-quality-environmental impacts into account. Originality/value In this paper, in addition to time and cost optimization of construction projects, quality factors and environmental impacts are considered. Further to the authors' knowledge, there is no method for evaluating project activities' efficiency. The efficiency of different activity modes is also evaluated for the first time to select the most efficient modes. This research can assist project managers with choosing the most appropriate execution modes for the activities to ultimately accomplish the project with the lowest time, cost and environmental impacts along with the highest quality.
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to test the impact of the soybean rejuvenation plan and the subsidy on farmers' land allocation decisions, which may reference policy adjustment from a micro perspective. Desig...
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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to test the impact of the soybean rejuvenation plan and the subsidy on farmers' land allocation decisions, which may reference policy adjustment from a micro perspective. Design/methodology/approach The paper develops a multi-objective optimized programmingmodel on farm-level, which simulated the land-use changes, as well as the resulting changes in benefits of the rational "typical farm". The simulation scenarios include changes in subsidy policy and production efficiency, and the baseline scenario was the production status in 2018. Findings The results show that an increase in soybean producer subsidy will encourage farmers to allocate more land for soybean planting, which can be considered as a policy tool in promoting soybean production in China. Besides, the effect of subsidy in adjusting soybean acreage for farms is further affected by external conditions such as production technology (such as breeding technology, pesticide and fertilizer application efficiency). Meanwhile, large-scale farms show more significant land adjustments when facing changes in policies and external conditions. Originality/value The value of this paper is to simulate the effects of soybean policy and subsidy change on farmers' land-allocation decisions through a multi-objective farmer decision-making model, which provides a micro perspective to understand the implementation effect of the soybean revitalization plan.
The demand for home care (HC) services has steadily been growing for two main types of services: healthcare and social care. If, for the former, caregivers' skills are of utter importance, in the latter caregivers...
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The demand for home care (HC) services has steadily been growing for two main types of services: healthcare and social care. If, for the former, caregivers' skills are of utter importance, in the latter caregivers are not distinguishable in terms of skills. This work focuses social care and models caregivers' synchronization as a means of improving human resources management. Moreover, in social care services, several visits need to be performed in the same day since patients are frequently alone and need assistance throughout the day. Depending on the patient's autonomy, some tasks have to be performed by two caregivers (e.g. assist bedridden patients). Therefore, adequate decision support tools are crucial for assisting managers (often social workers) when designing operational plans and to efficiently assign caregivers to tasks. This paper advances the literature by 1) considering teams of one caregiver that can synchronize to perform tasks requiring two caregivers (instead of having teams of two caregivers), 2) simultaneously modelling daily continuity of care and teams' synchro-nization, and 3) associating dynamic time windows to teams' synchronizations introducing scheduling flexibility while minimize service and travel times. These concepts are embedded into a daily routing and scheduling MIP model, deciding on the number of caregivers and on the number and type of teams to serve all patient tasks. The main HC features of the problem, synchronization and continuity of care, are evaluated by comparing the proposed planning with the current situation of a home social care service provider in Portugal. The results show that synchronization is the feature that most increases efficiency with respect to the current situation. It evi-dences a surplus in working time capacity by proposing plans where all requests can be served with a smaller number of caregivers. Consequently, new patients from long waiting lists can now be served by the "available" caregivers.
Soil organic carbon sequestration measures entail costs to farmers with different individual characteristics and located in different areas. A cost-effective analysis taking into account these heterogeneities is cruci...
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Soil organic carbon sequestration measures entail costs to farmers with different individual characteristics and located in different areas. A cost-effective analysis taking into account these heterogeneities is crucial for developing effective public policy aimed at increasing carbon sequestration. We undertake such an analysis focusing on three soil organic carbon sequestration measures: no-till, extension of temporary grasslands, and hedgerows. Through an optimization model applied to France, our results show that only extension of temporary grasslands can store carbon at low cost, though their potential for carbon sequestration is also low. For an ambitious carbon sequestration target, no-till and hedgerows are needed. Because of heterogeneities among farmers, we show that economic incentives are more cost effective than command and control measures. Furthermore, we highlight that the carbon sequestration policy tested here is unable to totally neutralize agricultural greenhouse gas emissions and that a combination of agricultural and environmental policies is essential for tackling climate change.
The paper aims to assess the short-term effects of climate change on economic and social performance of selected farming systems in Tunisia. The purpose is to analyze the evolution of land use and water allocation und...
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The paper aims to assess the short-term effects of climate change on economic and social performance of selected farming systems in Tunisia. The purpose is to analyze the evolution of land use and water allocation under different climate change scenarios at regional and local levels. In order to achieve the objective, a regional mathematical programming model was developed considering 2 regions and 7 farming production systems. Results showed that farming systems are affected differently by climate change. Large farming whose profitability is confirmed at the current state, their sustainability is not strongly threatened in the case of the climate change scenario. The subsistence and the small farming systems which are in difficulty because of their modest productive resources, their technological backwardness, and their structural constraints. Water availability will have modest welfare impacts, with an average decrease of 16 %. Despite the small aggregated effects, it is expected that climate change will have uneven consequences across regional income. For instance, even though the Medium farming system in Tell inferior showed the smallest income changes 1 % (average), the impacts within the others systems (large farm system, subsistence system and small farm system) range from 2 % to 16 % decrease in agricultural income. This situation suggests large distributional consequences of climate change for the Tunisian agricultural sector.
This study focuses on the links between food production and greenhouse gas emissions in the European Union. The analysis relies on two sets of simulations of AROPAj, a supply-side model of EU agriculture: (i) a carbon...
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This study focuses on the links between food production and greenhouse gas emissions in the European Union. The analysis relies on two sets of simulations of AROPAj, a supply-side model of EU agriculture: (i) a carbon price affecting agricultural GHG emissions (from 0 to 200 EUR/tCO(2)eq), and (ii) a lower limit on the net quantity of food calories provided by EU agriculture (200 to 450 Mt soft wheat equivalent). The model is calibrated on six annual datasets 2007-2012. The results show that a moderate increase in the price of carbon would lead to an increase in total areas and outputs of crops. Animal production decreases over the explored range of carbon price. At 200 EUR/tCO(2)eq, the reduction in GHG emissions ranges from 25 to 35% depending on the year of calibration. The results also show that current net calorie production from food can be more than doubled, while simultaneously reducing GHG emissions by 10-15%. The compatibility between a reduction in GHG emissions and an increase in food calorie production relies on substantial changes in animal production and feed, which implies significant variations in grassland and fallow land. These effects are contrasted between the regions of the EU.
The lack of proper management of medical waste leads to environmental pollution and threatens the lives of communities. Good medical waste management means appropriate planning and monitoring at all stages, including ...
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The lack of proper management of medical waste leads to environmental pollution and threatens the lives of communities. Good medical waste management means appropriate planning and monitoring at all stages, including collection, separation, treatment, recycling, and disposal which promotes a circular approach. This paper presents a multi-item, multi-period, and bi-objective mixed-integer linear programming circular economy transition model for medical waste management considering the uncertainty in the amount of waste generated to design a green reverse network. In this paper, for the first time, the concept of queuing theory is applied to manage the waiting time of trucks carrying infectious waste in treatment centers. In addition, the proposed model simultaneously addresses the centers' location and heterogeneous vehicles routing, and uses a stochastic scenario-based approach to deal with uncertainty of the waste generated. The purpose of the proposed model is to minimize total cost and population risk, and for this end, to employ an improved augmented epsilon-constraint method (AUGMECON2). Finally, the efficiency of the proposed model and solution approach is examined using the data of a case study in Alborz province that includes six hospitals, three potential collection centers, three potential treatment centers, four potential recycling centers, and three potential disposal centers.
Community detection is one of the most well-known and emerging research topics in the area of social network analysis. There are a wide variety of approaches to find communities in the literature, each with its own ad...
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Community detection is one of the most well-known and emerging research topics in the area of social network analysis. There are a wide variety of approaches to find communities in the literature, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. A majority of these approaches tend to detect communities by only using the network topology. However, the distribution of the node attributes is correlated with the community structure in many real networks. Therefore, the quality of the discovered partitions can be enhanced by considering node attributes. In this study, two novel mathematicalprogramming approaches are proposed to integrate the topological structure and node similarities, in which first the primary attributed network is converted into a secondary non-attributed network. Then, a mathematicalmodel will be developed to find communities in the secondary network. Thanks to the fact that the objective function and constraints of the proposed model are defined linear, the global optimality of the obtained solutions is guaranteed. In order to validate the proposed approaches, they are applied to both real-world and benchmark networks. Computational results of two well-known evaluation measures including Rand index and normalized mutual information demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approaches in discovering better partitions.
Hoisting operations are an essential part of petrochemical plant construction. The pre-layout planning of hoisting facilities, including hoisted objects and cranes, is the key to ensuring the success of the entire con...
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Hoisting operations are an essential part of petrochemical plant construction. The pre-layout planning of hoisting facilities, including hoisted objects and cranes, is the key to ensuring the success of the entire construction. However, most current site layout planning methods optimize construction facilities from the 2D plane space, which makes the safety of large-scale hoisting difficult to guarantee. This work proposes an unmanned-aerial-vehicle-based 3D reconstruction for hoist site mapping and layout planning. The core of this study is to utilize real-time 3D spatial information as a constraint for hoisting facility layout planning. Improved image-based modeling techniques are used to reconstruct the 3D construction site model in real-time. The geometric parameters extracted by the site model support the mathematical programming model presented in this work for a safe and efficient rapid layout planning. The C101 tower hoisting in the construction of the Wuhan Petrochemical Plant is used to verify the effectiveness of the method. Calculation results show that the method can push the position and save planning time intelligently. Furthermore, this method can provide a new solution to hoisting safety and efficiency.
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