International Journal of Industrial Engineering & Production Research

---

Considering the high costs of the implementation and maintenance of gas distribution networks in urban areas, optimal design of such networks is vital. Today, urban gas networks are implemented within a tree structure. These networks receive gas from City Gate Stations (CGS) and deliver it to the consumers. This study presents a comprehensive model based on Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming (MINLP) for the design of urban gas networks taking into account topological limitations, gas pressure and velocity limitations and environmental limitations. An Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm is presented for solving the problem and the results obtained by an implementation of ACO algorithm are compared with the ones obtained through an iterative method to demonstrate the efficiency of ACO algorithm. A case study of a real situation (gas distribution in Kelardasht, Iran) affirms the efficacy of the proposed approach.
 

---

This work used two methods for Monitoring and control of autocorrelated processes based on time series modeling. The first method was the simultaneous monitoring of common and assignable causes. This method included applying five steps of data gathering, normality test, autocorrelation test, model selection and control chart selection on all non-stationary process observations. The second method was a novel one for the separate monitoring and control of common and assignable causes. In this method, the process was divided into the parts with and without assignable causes.
The first method was greatly non-stationary due to not separating common and assignable causes. This method also implied that the common causes were hidden in the process. The novel method for the separate monitoring of common and assignable causes could turn the process into a stationary one, leading to identifying, monitoring, and controlling common causes without any interference from the assignable causes. The results showed that, unlike the first method, the second method could be very sensitive to the common causes; it could, therefore, suitably monitor, identify and control both assignable and common causes.
The current work was aimed to use control charts to monitor and control the bootomhole pressure during the drilling operation.
 

---

In this paper, a novel data driven approach for improving the performance of wastewater management and pumping system is proposed, which is getting knowledge from data mining methods as the input parameters of optimization problem to be solved in nonlinear programming environment. As the first step, we used CART classifier decision tree to classify the operation mode -number of active pumps- based on the historical data of the Austin-Texas infrastructure. Then SOM is applied for clustering customers and selecting the most important features that might have effect on consumption pattern. Furthermore, the extracted features will be fed to Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) neural network which will predict the required outflow rate of the period for each operation mode, classified by CART. The result show that F-measure of the prediction is 90%, 88%, 84% for each operation mode 1,2,3, respectively. Finally, the nonlinear optimization problem is developed based on the data and features extracted from previous steps, and it is solved by artificial immune algorithm. We have compared the result of the optimization model with observed data, and it shows that our model can save up to 2%-8% of outflow rate and wastewater, which is significant improvement in the performance of pumping system.

---