Search results for "Operations"

Joint Route Planning under Varying Market Conditions

2006

Purpose - To provide empirical evidence on the level of savings that can be attained by joint route planning and how these savings depend on specific market characteristics.Design/methodology/approach - Joint route planning is a measure that companies can take to decrease the costs of their distribution activities. Essentially, this can either be achieved through horizontal cooperation or through outsourcing distribution to a Logistics Service Provider. The synergy value is defined as the difference between distribution costs in the original situation where all entities perform their orders individually, and the costs of a system where all orders are collected and route schemes are set up s…

Prediction of Tool Wear in Machining

2007

Multi-directional vs. mono-directional multi-step strategies for single point incremental forming of non-axisymmetric components

2020

Abstract Multi Stage approach is used in Single Point Incremental Forming (SPIF) to overcome one of the main forming limitations, namely the maximum wall angle, characterizing the single stage process. In this paper, different multi-path strategies for the production of parts with flat edges are considered in order to evaluate the best solution in terms of feasibility and geometrical accuracy of the final part: A) mono-directional incremental draw angle; B) mono-directional incremental draw angle with increasing part side; C) Multi-directional approach with non-horizontal path planes. Strain evaluation by means of CGA (Circular Grid Analysis) and defect analysis have been carried out in ord…

Nash codes for noisy channels

2012

This paper studies the stability of communication protocols that deal with transmission errors. We consider a coordination game between an informed sender and an uninformed decision maker, the receiver, who communicate over a noisy channel. The sender's strategy, called a code, maps states of nature to signals. The receiver's best response is to decode the received channel output as the state with highest expected receiver payoff. Given this decoding, an equilibrium or "Nash code" results if the sender encodes every state as prescribed. We show two theorems that give sufficient conditions for Nash codes. First, a receiver-optimal code defines a Nash code. A second, more surprising observati…

Some complexity and approximation results for coupled-tasks scheduling problem according to topology

2016

International audience; We consider the makespan minimization coupled-tasks problem in presence of compatibility constraints with a specified topology. In particular, we focus on stretched coupled-tasks, i.e. coupled-tasks having the same sub-tasks execution time and idle time duration. We study several problems in framework of classic complexity and approximation for which the compatibility graph is bipartite (star, chain,. . .). In such a context, we design some efficient polynomial-time approximation algorithms for an intractable scheduling problem according to some parameters.

Scalability of using Restricted Boltzmann Machines for Combinatorial Optimization

2014

Abstract Estimation of Distribution Algorithms (EDAs) require flexible probability models that can be efficiently learned and sampled. Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) are generative neural networks with these desired properties. We integrate an RBM into an EDA and evaluate the performance of this system in solving combinatorial optimization problems with a single objective. We assess how the number of fitness evaluations and the CPU time scale with problem size and complexity. The results are compared to the Bayesian Optimization Algorithm (BOA), a state-of-the-art multivariate EDA, and the Dependency Tree Algorithm (DTA), which uses a simpler probability model requiring less computati…

Unbiased Estimators and Multilevel Monte Carlo

2018

Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) and unbiased estimators recently proposed by McLeish (Monte Carlo Methods Appl., 2011) and Rhee and Glynn (Oper. Res., 2015) are closely related. This connection is elaborated by presenting a new general class of unbiased estimators, which admits previous debiasing schemes as special cases. New lower variance estimators are proposed, which are stratified versions of earlier unbiased schemes. Under general conditions, essentially when MLMC admits the canonical square root Monte Carlo error rate, the proposed new schemes are shown to be asymptotically as efficient as MLMC, both in terms of variance and cost. The experiments demonstrate that the variance reduction…

Isotonic regression for metallic microstructure data: estimation and testing under order restrictions

2021

Investigating the main determinants of the mechanical performance of metals is not a simple task. Already known physical inspired qualitative relations between 2D microstructure characteristics and 3D mechanical properties can act as the starting point of the investigation. Isotonic regression allows to take into account ordering relations and leads to more efficient and accurate results when the underlying assumptions actually hold. The main goal in this paper is to test order relations in a model inspired by a materials science application. The statistical estimation procedure is described considering three different scenarios according to the knowledge of the variances: known variance ra…

General framework for testing Poisson-Voronoi assumption for real microstructures

2020

Modeling microstructures is an interesting problem not just in Materials Science but also in Mathematics and Statistics. The most basic model for steel microstructure is the Poisson-Voronoi diagram. It has mathematically attractive properties and it has been used in the approximation of single phase steel microstructures. The aim of this paper is to develop methods that can be used to test whether a real steel microstructure can be approximated by such a model. Therefore, a general framework for testing the Poisson-Voronoi assumption based on images of 2D sections of real metals is set out. Following two different approaches, according to the use or not of periodic boundary conditions, thre…

Defining and measuring the network flexibility of humanitarian supply chains: insights from the 2015 Nepal earthquake

2019

International audience; The efficient and effective response to disasters critically depends on humanitarian supply chains (HSCs). HSCs need to be flexible to adapt to uncertainties in needs, infrastructure conditions, and behavior of other organizations. The concept of ‘network flexibility’ is, however, not clearly defined. The lack of an unanimous definition has led to a lack of consistent understanding and comparisons. This paper makes a threefold contribution: first, it defines the concept of network flexibility for HSC in the context of sudden onset disasters. Second, it proposes a framework to measure network flexibility in HSCs. Third, we apply our framework to the 2015 Nepal earthqu…