E-commerce, as an emerging marketing mode, has attracted more and more attention and gradually changed the way of our life. However, the existing layout of distribution centers can＇t fulfill the storage and picking d...E-commerce, as an emerging marketing mode, has attracted more and more attention and gradually changed the way of our life. However, the existing layout of distribution centers can＇t fulfill the storage and picking demands of e-commerce sufficiently. In this paper, a modified miniload automated storage/retrieval system is designed to fit these new characteristics of e-commerce in logistics. Meanwhile, a matching problem, concerning with the improvement of picking efficiency in new system, is studied in this paper. The problem is how to reduce the travelling distance of totes between aisles and picking stations. A multi-stage heuristic algorithm is proposed based on statement and model of this problem. The main idea of this algorithm is, with some heuristic strategies based on similarity coefficients, minimizing the transportations of items which can not arrive in the destination picking stations just through direct conveyors. The experimental results based on the cases generated by computers show that the average reduced rate of indirect transport times can reach 14.36% with the application of multi-stage heuristic algorithm. For the cases from a real e-commerce distribution center, the order processing time can be reduced from 11.20 h to 10.06 h with the help of the modified system and the proposed algorithm. In summary, this research proposed a modified system and a multi-stage heuristic algorithm that can reduce the travelling distance of totes effectively and improve the whole performance of e-commerce distribution center.展开更多
For the car sequencing（CS） problem, the draw-backs of the ＂sliding windows＂ technique used in the objective function have not been rectified, and no high quality initial solution has been acquired to accelerate th...For the car sequencing（CS） problem, the draw-backs of the ＂sliding windows＂ technique used in the objective function have not been rectified, and no high quality initial solution has been acquired to accelerate the improvement of the solution quality. Firstly, the objective function is improved to solve the double and bias counting of violations broadly discussed. Then, a new method combining heuristic with constraint propagation is proposed which constructs initial solutions under a parallel framework. Based on constraint propagation, three filtering rules are designed to intersecting with three greedy functions, so the variable domain is narrowed in the process of the construction. The parallel framework is served to show its robustness in terms of the quality of the solution since it greatly increases the performance of obtaining the best solution. In the computational experiments, 109 instances of 3 sets from the CSPLib＇ s benchmarks are used to test the performance of the proposed method. Experiment results show that the proposed method outperforms others in acquiring the best-known results for 85 best-known results of 109 are obtained with only one construction. The proposed research provides an avenue to remedy the deficiencies of ＂sliding windows＂ technique and construct high quality initial solutions.展开更多
A new bottleneck-based heuristic for large-scale flow-shop scheduling problems with a bottleneck is proposed, which is simpler but more tailored than the shifting bottleneck （SB） procedure. In this algorithm, a sche...A new bottleneck-based heuristic for large-scale flow-shop scheduling problems with a bottleneck is proposed, which is simpler but more tailored than the shifting bottleneck （SB） procedure. In this algorithm, a schedule for the bottleneck machine is first constructed optimally and then the non-bottleneck machines are scheduled around the bottleneck schedule by some effective dispatching rules. Computational results show that the modified bottleneck-based procedure can achieve a tradeoff between solution quality and computational time comparing with SB procedure for medium-size problems. Furthermore it can obtain a good solution in quite short time for large-scale scheduling problems.展开更多
Previous test sequencing algorithms only consider the execution cost of a test at the application stage. Due to the fact that the placement cost of some tests at the design stage is considerably high compared with the...Previous test sequencing algorithms only consider the execution cost of a test at the application stage. Due to the fact that the placement cost of some tests at the design stage is considerably high compared with the execution cost, the sequential diagnosis strategy obtained by previous methods is actually not optimal from the view of life cycle. In this paper, the test sequencing problem based on life cycle cost is presented. It is formulated as an optimization problem, which is non-deterministic polynomial-time hard （NP-hard）. An algorithm and a strategy to improve its computational efficiency are proposed. The formulation and algorithms are tested on various simulated systems and comparisons are made with the extant test sequencing methods. Application on a pump rotational speed control （PRSC） system of a spacecraft is studied in detail. Both the simulation results and the real-world case application results suggest that the solution proposed in this paper can significantly reduce the life cycle cost of a sequential fault diagnosis strategy.展开更多
文摘E-commerce, as an emerging marketing mode, has attracted more and more attention and gradually changed the way of our life. However, the existing layout of distribution centers can＇t fulfill the storage and picking demands of e-commerce sufficiently. In this paper, a modified miniload automated storage/retrieval system is designed to fit these new characteristics of e-commerce in logistics. Meanwhile, a matching problem, concerning with the improvement of picking efficiency in new system, is studied in this paper. The problem is how to reduce the travelling distance of totes between aisles and picking stations. A multi-stage heuristic algorithm is proposed based on statement and model of this problem. The main idea of this algorithm is, with some heuristic strategies based on similarity coefficients, minimizing the transportations of items which can not arrive in the destination picking stations just through direct conveyors. The experimental results based on the cases generated by computers show that the average reduced rate of indirect transport times can reach 14.36% with the application of multi-stage heuristic algorithm. For the cases from a real e-commerce distribution center, the order processing time can be reduced from 11.20 h to 10.06 h with the help of the modified system and the proposed algorithm. In summary, this research proposed a modified system and a multi-stage heuristic algorithm that can reduce the travelling distance of totes effectively and improve the whole performance of e-commerce distribution center.
基金Supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China(Grant Nos.51435009,71302085)Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China(Grant No.LQ14E080002)K.C.Wong Magna Fund in Ningbo University
文摘For the car sequencing（CS） problem, the draw-backs of the ＂sliding windows＂ technique used in the objective function have not been rectified, and no high quality initial solution has been acquired to accelerate the improvement of the solution quality. Firstly, the objective function is improved to solve the double and bias counting of violations broadly discussed. Then, a new method combining heuristic with constraint propagation is proposed which constructs initial solutions under a parallel framework. Based on constraint propagation, three filtering rules are designed to intersecting with three greedy functions, so the variable domain is narrowed in the process of the construction. The parallel framework is served to show its robustness in terms of the quality of the solution since it greatly increases the performance of obtaining the best solution. In the computational experiments, 109 instances of 3 sets from the CSPLib＇ s benchmarks are used to test the performance of the proposed method. Experiment results show that the proposed method outperforms others in acquiring the best-known results for 85 best-known results of 109 are obtained with only one construction. The proposed research provides an avenue to remedy the deficiencies of ＂sliding windows＂ technique and construct high quality initial solutions.
基金This project is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.60274013, No.60474002)Shanghai City Development Found for Science and Technology, China(No.04DZ11008)
文摘A new bottleneck-based heuristic for large-scale flow-shop scheduling problems with a bottleneck is proposed, which is simpler but more tailored than the shifting bottleneck （SB） procedure. In this algorithm, a schedule for the bottleneck machine is first constructed optimally and then the non-bottleneck machines are scheduled around the bottleneck schedule by some effective dispatching rules. Computational results show that the modified bottleneck-based procedure can achieve a tradeoff between solution quality and computational time comparing with SB procedure for medium-size problems. Furthermore it can obtain a good solution in quite short time for large-scale scheduling problems.
基金supported by China Civil Space Foundation(No.C1320063131)
文摘Previous test sequencing algorithms only consider the execution cost of a test at the application stage. Due to the fact that the placement cost of some tests at the design stage is considerably high compared with the execution cost, the sequential diagnosis strategy obtained by previous methods is actually not optimal from the view of life cycle. In this paper, the test sequencing problem based on life cycle cost is presented. It is formulated as an optimization problem, which is non-deterministic polynomial-time hard （NP-hard）. An algorithm and a strategy to improve its computational efficiency are proposed. The formulation and algorithms are tested on various simulated systems and comparisons are made with the extant test sequencing methods. Application on a pump rotational speed control （PRSC） system of a spacecraft is studied in detail. Both the simulation results and the real-world case application results suggest that the solution proposed in this paper can significantly reduce the life cycle cost of a sequential fault diagnosis strategy.
