In this work we present a new area functional that help us improve the cell area distribution in structured grids over plane irregular regions, which avoids very small and very large cell areas as much as possible. We ...

A new general family of mixed graphs is presented, which generalizes both the pancake graphs and the cycle prefix digraphs. The obtained graphs are vertex transitive and, for some values of the parameters, they constitute ...

We develop a new randomization-based general-purpose method for the computation of the interval availability distribution of systems modeled by continuous-time Markov chains (CTMCs). The basic idea of the new method is ...

A wide range of bulk materials with different physical properties are nowadays handled in the packaging industry using different material conveying techniques. Nevertheless, experimental methodologies to characterise ...

There is a strong trend in the photovoltaic inverter technology to use transformerless topologies in order to acquire higher efficiencies combining with very low ground leakage current. In this paper, a new topology, ...

This paper presents the development of a new high-pressure triaxial apparatus specifically prepared for inducing and tracking the degradation of clayey rocks. Total suction—used to induce the hydraulic degradation—is applied ...

In recent years it has been shown that an intelligent combination of metaheuristics with other optimization techniques can significantly improve over the application of a pure metaheuristic. In this paper, we combine the ...

Integration of various logistical components in supply chain management, such as transportation, inventory control and facility location are becoming common practice to avoid sub-optimization in nowadays’ competitive ...

Genetic Algorithms (GA) are useful optimization methods for exploration of the search space, but they usually have slowness problems to exploit and converge to the minimum. On the other hand, gradient based methods converge ...