Two-Dimensional Loading in Vehicle Routing Problem With Release and Due Dates

In this paper, we study a two-dimensional vehicle loading and routing problem, in which customer orders with deadlines become available for dispatch as per their release dates. The objective is to minimize the sum of transportation, inventory, and tardiness costs, while respecting various loading and routing constraints. This scenario allows us to study various tradeoffs that tend to arise due to temporal order aggregation across release dates. We thereby propose an integrated mathematical formulation to simultaneously model both the routing and loading requirements of the problem at hand. Specifically, as the problem is NP-hard, we propose a scatter search based heuristic approach to solve large-size instances. Further, its performance is enhanced using problem-specific procedures and strategic oscillation approaches. Additionally, the numerical experiments illustrate the influence of cost structures on both the optimal loading configurations along with the optimal routes. Importantly, our experiments also suggest that the proposed scatter search method can produce good quality solutions in less time.

A Hybrid Strategic Oscillation with Path Relinking Algorithm for the Multiobjective k-Balanced Center Location Problem

This paper presents a hybridization of Strategic Oscillation with Path Relinking to provide a set of high-quality nondominated solutions for the Multiobjective k-Balanced Center Location problem. The considered location problem seeks to locate k out of m facilities in order to serve n demand points, minimizing the maximum distance between any demand point and its closest facility while balancing the workload among the facilities. An extensive computational experimentation is carried out to compare the performance of our proposal, including the best method found in the state-of-the-art as well as traditional multiobjective evolutionary algorithms.

Tuning a hybrid SA based algorithm applied to Optimal Sensor Network Design

Sensor network design problem (SNDP) in process plants includes the determination of which process variables should be measured to achieve a required degree of knowledge about the plant. We propose to solve the SNDP problem in plants of increasing size and complexity using a hybrid algorithm based on Simulated Annealing (HSA) as main metaheuristic and Tabu Search embedded with Strategic Oscillation (SOTS) as a subordinate metaheuristic. We are researching on the adjustments of its control parameters to obtain the best HSA performance. Experimental results indicate that a high-quality solution in reasonable computational times can be found by HSA effectively. Moreover, HSA shows good features solving SNDP compared with proposals from the literature.

Explanation and Understanding in Animal Narratives

With chapter 6 having described the way norms for mental-state ascriptions operate in a top-down manner in discourse domains, chapter 7 explores how individual narratives can in turn have a bottom-up impact on the ascriptive norms circulating within particular domains. To this end, the chapter discusses how Thalia Field’s 2010 experimental narrative Bird Lovers, Backyard employs a strategic oscillation between two nomenclatures that can be used to profile nonhuman as well as human behaviors: (1) the register of action, which characterizes behavior in terms of motivations, goals, and projects; and (2) the register of events, which characterizes behavior in terms of caused movements that have duration in time and direction in space. In braiding together these two registers, Field’s text suggests not only how discourse practices can be repatterned, but also how such repatterning enables broader paradigm shifts—in this case shifts in ways of understanding cross-species encounters and entanglements.