Solution to non-convex economic dispatch problem with valve point effects by incremental artificial bee colony with local search

In literature, economic power dispatch problems are generally categorized as convex and non-convex optimization problems. In this study, incremental artificial bee colony (IABC) and incremental artificial bee colony with local search (IABC-LS) have been used for the solution of the economic dispatch problem with valve point effect. In these kind of problems, fuel cost curve increases as sinusoidal oscillations. In the solution of the problem B loss matrix has been used for the calculation of the line losses. Total fuel cost has been minimized under electrical constraints. IABC and IABC-LS methods have been applied to four different test systems one with 6 buses 3 generators, the other with 14 buses 5 generators (IEEE), the third one with 30 buses 6 generators (IEEE) and the last one is 40-generator system. The obtained best values have been compared with different methods in literature and the results of them have been discussed.     

Location pairs: a test coverage metric for shared-memory concurrent programs

We present a coverage metric targeted at shared-memory concurrent programs: the Location Pairs (LP) coverage metric. The goals of this metric are (i) to measure how thoroughly a program has been tested from a concurrency standpoint, i.e., whether enough qualitatively different thread interleavings have been explored, and (ii) to guide testing towards unexplored concurrency scenarios. This metric was inspired by an access pattern known to lead to high-level concurrency errors in industrial software and in the literature. We built a monitoring tool to measure LP coverage of test programs. We used the LP metric for interactive debugging, and compared LP coverage with other concurrency coverage metrics on Java benchmarks. We demonstrated that LP coverage corresponds better to concurrency errors, is a better measure of how well a program is exercised concurrency-wise by a test set, reaches saturation later than other coverage metrics, and is viable and useful as an interactive testing and debugging tool.     

Modeling and solving assembly line design problems by considering human factors with a real‐life application

Ergonomics has been playing an important role in assembly system design (ASD) that contains not only the main assembly line balancing problem but also the subassembly line balancing and assembly layout problem. The ergonomics in ASD has an impact both on productivity and on workers’ health, especially when frequent changes in the product mix occur. In this study, we propose a systematic approach in order to handle ASD, which consists of three subproblems, while considering ergonomic risk factors. The first two subproblems are solved simultaneously using the proposed rule‐based constructive search algorithm, where ergonomic risks are evaluated by OCRA method. Later, layout problem is solved under transportation constraints using local search methods with various neighborhood structures. To provide the applicability and evaluate the performance of the proposed systematic approach, a real‐life case study in a harness manufacturing company is solved and prototype productions are performed.     

Soft topology

The concept of soft sets is introduced as a general mathematical tool for dealing with uncertainty. In this work, we define the soft topology on a soft set, and present its related properties. We then present the foundations of the theory of soft topological spaces.     

An effective and efficient Web content extractor for optimizing the crawling process

Classical Web crawlers make use of only hyperlink information in the crawling process. However, focused crawlers are intended to download only Web pages that are relevant to a given topic by utilizing word information before downloading the Web page. But, Web pages contain additional information that can be useful for the crawling process. We have developed a crawler, iCrawler (intelligent crawler), the backbone of which is a Web content extractor that automatically pulls content out of seven different blocks: menus, links, main texts, headlines, summaries, additional necessaries, and unnecessary texts from Web pages. The extraction process consists of two steps, which invoke each other to obtain information from the blocks. The first step learns which HTML tags refer to which blocks using the decision tree learning algorithm. Being guided by numerous sources of information, the crawler becomes considerably effective. It achieved a relatively high accuracy of 96.37% in our experiments of block extraction. In the second step, the crawler extracts content from the blocks using string matching functions. These functions along with the mapping between tags and blocks learned in the first step provide iCrawler with considerable time and storage efficiency. More specifically, iCrawler performs 14 times faster in the second step than in the first step. Furthermore, iCrawler significantly decreases storage costs by 57.10% when compared with the texts obtained through classical HTML stripping. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A genetic algorithm based approach to vehicle routing problem with simultaneous pick-up and deliveries

The vehicle routing problem with simultaneous pick-up and deliveries, which considers simultaneous distribution and collection of goods to/from customers, is an extension of the capacitated vehicle routing problem. There are various real cases, where fleet of vehicles originated in a depot serves customers with pick-up and deliveries from/to their locations. Increasing importance of reverse logistics activities make it necessary to determine efficient and effective vehicle routes for simultaneous pick-up and delivery activities. The vehicle routing problem with simultaneous pick-up and deliveries is also NP-hard as a capacitated vehicle routing problem and this study proposes a genetic algorithm based approach to this problem. Computational example is presented with parameter settings in order to illustrate the proposed approach. Moreover, performance of the proposed approach is evaluated by solving several test problems.