International Journal of Industrial Engineering and Productional Research
Volume:23 Issue: 4, Dec 2012

Image segmentation is an essential issue in image description and classification. Currently, in many real applications, segmentation is still mainly manual or strongly supervised by a human expert, which makes it irreproducible and deteriorating. Moreover, there are many uncertainties and vagueness in images, which crisp clustering and even Type-1 fuzzy clustering could not handle. Hence, Type-2 fuzzy clustering is the most preferred method. In recent years, neurology and neuroscience have been significantly advanced by imaging tools, which typically involve vast amount of data and many uncertainties. Therefore, Type-2 fuzzy clustering methods could process these images more efficient and could provide better performance. The focus of this paper is to segment the brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) in to essential clusters based on Type-2 Possibilistic C-Mean (PCM) method. The results show that using Type-2 PCM method provides better results.

One of the most important issues in urban planning is developing sustainable public transportation. The basic condition for this purpose is analyzing current condition especially based on data. Data mining is a set of new techniques that are beyond statistical data analyzing. Clustering techniques is a subset of it that one of it’s techniques used for analyzing passengers’ trip. The result of this research shows relations and similarities in different segments that its usage is from strategic to tactical and operational areas. The approach in transportation is completely novel in the part of trip patterns and a novel process is proposed that can be implemented in highway analysis. Also this method can be applied in traffic and vehicle treats that need automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) for data gathering. A real case study has been studied here by developed process.

In recent years, various time series models have been proposed for financial markets forecasting. In each case, the accuracy of time series forecasting models are fundamental to make decision and hence the research for improving the effectiveness of forecasting models have been curried on. Many researchers have compared different time series models together in order to determine more efficient once in financial markets. In this paper, the performance of four interval time series models including autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), fuzzy autoregressive integrated moving average (FARIMA), hybrid ANNs and fuzzy (FANN) and Improved FARIMA models are compared together. Empirical results of exchange rate forecasting indicate that the FANN model is more satisfactory than other those models. Therefore, it can be a suitable alternative model for interval forecasting of financial time series.

Fuzzy time series have been developed during the last decade to improve the forecast accuracy. Many algorithms have been applied in this approach of forecasting such as high order time invariant fuzzy time series. In this paper, we present a hybrid algorithm to deal with the forecasting problem based on time variant fuzzy time series and particle swarm optimization algorithm, as a highly efficient and a new evolutionary computation technique inspired by birds’ flight and communication behaviors. The proposed algorithm determines the length of each interval in the universe of discourse and degree of membership values, simultaneously. Two numerical data sets are selected to illustrate the proposed method and compare the forecasting accuracy with four fuzzy time series methods. The results indicate that the proposed algorithm satisfactorily competes well with similar approaches.

This paper presents a new formulation for warehouse inventory management in a stochastic situation. The primary source of this formulation is derived from FP model, which has been proposed by Fletcher and Ponnambalam for reservoir management. The new proposed mathematical model is based on the first and the second moments of storage as a stochastic variable. Using this model, the expected value of storage, the variance of storage, and the optimal ordering policies are determined. Moreover, the probability of within containment, surplus, and shortage are computable without adding any new variables. To validate the optimization model, a Monte Carlo simulation is used. Furthermore, to evaluate the performance of the optimal FP policy, It is compared to (s*,S*) policy, as a very popular policy used in the literature, in terms of the expected total annual cost and the service level. It is also demonstrated that the FP policy has a superior performances than (s*,S*) policy.

In this paper, the cost function for a three-echelon inventory system with two warehouses is derived. Transportation times are constant and retailers face independent Poisson demand. Replenishments are one-for-one. The lead time of a retailer is determined not only by the constant transportation time but also by the random delay incurred due to the availability of stock at the warehouses. We consider two warehouses in the second echelon which may leads to having more delays which were incurred in the warehouses and facing different behaviors of independent Poisson demands. Because the replenishment policy is base stock, the obtained function can also be used in different ordering policies to compute the inventory holding and shortage costs.

In many industrial and non-industrial applications the quality of a process or product is characterized by a relationship between a response variable and one or more explanatory variables. This relationship is referred to as profile. In the past decade, profile monitoring has been extensively studied under the normal response variable, but it has paid a little attention to the profile with the non-normal response variable. In this paper, the focus is especially on the binary response followed by the bernoulli distribution due to its application in many fields of science and engineering. Some methods have been suggested to monitor such profiles in phase I, the modeling phase; however, no method has been proposed for monitoring them in phase II, the detecting phase. In this paper, two methods are proposed for phase II logistic profile monitoring. The first method is a combination of two exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) control charts for mean and variance monitoring of the residuals defined in logistic regression models and the second method is a multivariate T2 chart to monitor model parameters. The simulation study is done to investigate the performance of the methods.

In this paper, we propose an iterated greedy algorithm for solving the blocking flow shop scheduling problem with total flow time minimization objective. The steps of this algorithm are designed very efficient. For generating an initial solution, we develop an efficient constructive heuristic by modifying the best known NEH algorithm. Effectiveness of the proposed iterated greedy algorithm is tested on the Taillard''s instances. Computational results show the high efficiency of this algorithm with comparison state-of-the-art algorithms. We report new best solutions for 88 instances of 120 Taillard''s instances.

The analytic center cutting plane method (ACCPM) is one of successful methods to solve nondifferentiable optimization problems. In this paper ACCPM is used for the first time in the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) to accelerate lagrangian relaxation procedure for the problem. At first the basic cutting plane algorithm and its relationship with column generation method is clarified then the new method based on ACCPM is proposed as a stabilization technique of column generation (lagrangian relaxation). Both approaches are tested on a benchmark instance to demonstrate the advantages of proposed method in terms of computational time and lower bounds quality.