THE DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF EXPERIMENTS. By Oscar Kempthorne. New York, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1952. 631 pp. $8.50. This book by a teacher of statistics (as well as a consultant for \"experimenters\") is a comprehensive study of the philosophical background for the statistical design of experiment. It is necessary to have some facility with algebraic notation and manipulation to be able to use the volume intelligently. The problems are presented from the theoretical point of view, without such practical examples as would be helpful for those not acquainted with mathematics. The mathematical justification for the techniques is given. As a somewhat advanced treatment of the design and analysis of experiments, this volume will be interesting and helpful for many who approach statistics theoretically as well as practically. With emphasis on the \"why,\" and with description given broadly, the author relates the subject matter to the general theory of statistics and to the general problem of experimental inference. MARGARET J. ROBERTSON

The Design and Analysis of Experiments

This article presents an overview of metaheuristics as high-level soft computing strategies for solving optimisation problems. A general view of the field is presented, and a review of the main algorithms within the class of metaheuristics is reviewed, by introducing the main concepts behind their formulations and their application to solve real-world problems from several domains. A review of the main articles published in International Journal of Metaheuristics is also presented. Finally, some of the main current and future research lines in the field are commented as concluding remarks.

An overview of metaheuristics: accurate and efficient methods for optimisation

Facility layout problem (FLP) is defined as the placement of facilities in a plant area, with the aim of determining the most effective arrangement in accordance with some criteria or objectives under certain constraints, such as shape, size, orientation, and pick-up/drop-off point of the facilities. It has been over six decades since Koopmans and Beckmann published their seminal paper on modeling the FLP. Since then, there have been improvements to these researchers’ original quadratic assignment problem. However, research on many aspects of the FLP is still in its initial stage; hence, the issue is an interesting field to work on. Here, a review of literature is made by referring to numerous papers about FLPs. The study is mainly motivated by the current and prospective trends of research on such points as layout evolution, workshop characteristics, problem formulation, and solution methodologies. It points to gaps in the literature and suggests promising directions for future research on FLP.

Classification of facility layout problems: a review study

A survey of scheduling problems with no-wait in process

Lot-streaming flow shops have important applications in different industries including textile, plastic, chemical, semiconductor and many others. This paper considers an n-job m-machine lot-streaming flow shop scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setup times under both the idling and no-idling production cases. The objective is to minimize the maximum completion time or makespan. To solve this important practical problem, a novel estimation of distribution algorithm (EDA) is proposed with a job permutation based representation. In the proposed EDA, an efficient initialization scheme based on the NEH heuristic is presented to construct an initial population with a certain level of quality and diversity. An estimation of a probabilistic model is constructed to direct the algorithm search towards good solutions by taking into account both job permutation and similar blocks of jobs. A simple but effective local search is added to enhance the intensification capability. A diversity controlling mechanism is applied to maintain the diversity of the population. In addition, a speed-up method is presented to reduce the computational effort needed for the local search technique and the NEH-based heuristics. A comparative evaluation is carried out with the best performing algorithms from the literature. The results show that the proposed EDA is very effective in comparison after comprehensive computational and statistical analyses.

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An estimation of distribution algorithm for lot-streaming flow shop problems with setup times

An efficient tabu algorithm for the single row facility layout problem

A particle swarm optimization for the single row facility layout problem

Undesirable delays in construction projects impose excessive costs and precipitate exacerbated durations. Investigating Iran, a developing Middle Eastern country, this paper focuses on the reasons for construction project delays. We conducted several interviews with owners, contractors, consultants, industry experts, and regulatory bodies to accurately ascertain specific delay factors. Based on the results of our industry surveys, a statistical model was developed to quantitatively determine each delay factor’s importance in construction project management. The statistical model categorizes the delay factors under four major classes and determines the most significant delay factors in each class: owner defects; contractor defects; consultant defects; and law, regulation and other general defects. The most significant delay factors in the owner defects category are lack of attention to inflation and inefficient budgeting schedule. In the contractor defects category, the most significant delay factors are inaccurate budgeting and resource planning, weak cash flow, and inaccurate pricing and bidding. As for the consultant defects delay factors such as inaccurate first draft and inaccuracies in technical documents have the most contribution to the defects. On the other hand, outdated standard mandatory items in cost lists, outdated mandatory terms in contracts, and weak governmental budgeting are the most important delay factors in the law, regulation and other general defects.

Studying the reasons for delay and cost overrun in construction projects: the case of iran

Take-back regulation: Remanufacturing or Eco-design?

No-wait flow-shop scheduling problems refer to the set of problems in which a number of jobs are available for processing on a number of machines in a flow-shop context with the added constraint that there should be no waiting time between consecutive operations of the jobs. The problem is strongly NP-hard. In this paper, the considered performance measure is the makespan. In order to explore the feasible region of the problem, a hybrid algorithm of Tabu Search and Particle Swarm Optimisation (PSO) is proposed. In the proposed approach, PSO algorithm is used in order to move from one solution to a neighbourhood solution. We first employ a new coding and decoding technique to efficiently map the discrete feasible space to the set of integer numbers. The proposed PSO will further use this coding technique to explore the solution space and move from one solution to a neighbourhood solution. Afterwards, the algorithm decodes the solutions to its respective feasible solution in the discrete feasible space and ...

Hamed Samarghandi

Papers

An efficient tabu algorithm for the single row facility layout problem

A particle swarm optimization for the single row facility layout problem

Studying the reasons for delay and cost overrun in construction projects: the case of iran

Take-back regulation: Remanufacturing or Eco-design?

A meta-heuristic approach for solving the no-wait flow-shop problem