International Journal of Industrial Engineering & Production Research

There are many real problems in which multiple responses should be optimized simultaneously by setting of process variables. One of the common approaches for optimization of multi-response problems is desirability function. In most real cases, there is a correlation structure between responses so ignoring the correlation may lead to mistake results. Hence, in this paper a robust approach based on desirability function is extended to optimize multiple correlated responses. Main contribution of the current study is the synthesis of ideas considering correlation structure in robust optimization through defining joint confidence interval and desirability function method. A genetic algorithm was employed to solve the introduced problem. Effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated through some computational examples and some comparisons with previous methods were performed to show applicability of the proposed approach. Also, a sensitivity analysis was provided to show relationship of correlation and robustness in these approaches.

Abstract One of the basic assumptions in hub covering problems is considering the covering radius as an exogenous parameter which cannot be controlled by the decision maker. Practically and in many real world cases with a negligible increase in costs, to increase the covering radii, it is possible to save the costs of establishing additional hub nodes. Change in problem parameters during the planning horizon is one of the key factors causing the results of theoretical models to be impractical in real world situations. To dissolve this problem in this paper a mathematical model for dynamic single allocation hub covering problem is proposed in which the covering radius of hub nodes is one of the decision variables. Also Due to NP-Hardness of the problem and huge computational time required to solve the problem optimally an effective genetic algorithm with dynamic operators is proposed afterwards. Computational results show the satisfying performance of the proposed genetic algorithm in achieving satisfactory results in a reasonable time. Keywords: hub location problem, dynamic hub covering problem, flexible covering radius, dynamic genetic algorithm.

In this paper, we propose a vibration damping optimization algorithm to solve a fuzzy mathematical model for the single-item capacitated lot-sizing problem. At first, a fuzzy mathematical model for the single-item capacitated lot-sizing problem is presented. The possibility approach is chosen to convert the fuzzy mathematical model to crisp mathematical model. The obtained crisp model is in the form of mixed integer linear programming (MILP) which can be solved by existing solver in crisp environment to find optimal solution. Due to the complexity and NP-hardness of the problem, a vibration damping optimization (VDO) is used to solve the model for large-scale problems.  To verify the performance of the proposed algorithm, we computationally compared the results obtained by the VDO algorithm with the results of the branch-and-bound method and two other well-known meta-heuristic algorithms namely simulated annealing (SA) and genetic algorithm (GA). Additionally, Taguchi method is used to calibrate the parameters of the meta-heuristic algorithms. Computational results on a set of randomly generated instances show that the VDO algorithm compared with the other algorithms can obtain appropriate solutions.