This thesis reports on an innovative production-scheduling model for virtual computer-integrated manufacturing (VCIM) systems. It also describes a robust genetic algorithm for production scheduling in VCIM systems. The model, which is the most comprehensive of its kind to date, is not only capable of supporting collaborative shipment scheduling and handling multiple product orders simultaneously, but also helps cope with multiple objective functions under uncertainties. In turn, the genetic algorithm, characterised by an innovative algorithm structure, chromosome encoding, crossover and mutation, is capable of searching for optimal/suboptimal solutions to the complex optimisation problem in the VCIM production- scheduling model described. Lastly, the effectiveness of the proposed approach is verified in a comprehensive case study.

Two large international conferences on Advances in Engineering Sciences were held in Hong Kong, March 16-18, 2016, under the International MultiConference of Engineers and Computer Scientists (IMECS 2016), and in London, UK, 29 June - 1 July, 2016, under the World Congress on Engineering (WCE 2016) respectively. This volume contains 21 revised and extended research articles written by prominent researchers participating in the conferences. Topics covered include engineering mathematics, computer science, electrical engineering, manufacturing engineering, industrial engineering, and industrial applications. The book offers state-of-the-art advances in engineering sciences and also serves as an excellent reference work for researchers and graduate students working with/on engineering sciences.

This is the first book to focus on emerging technologies for distributed intelligent decision-making in process planning and dynamic scheduling. It has two sections: a review of several key areas of research, and an in-depth treatment of particular techniques. Each chapter addresses a specific problem domain and offers practical solutions to solve it. The book provides a better understanding of the present state and future trends of research in this area.

World Class Applications shows what real organisations have done to implement Six Sigma, the methodology used, and the results delivered. The book provides details of how these organisations overcame issues with the statistical tools of Six Sigma and provides valuable lessons by explaining what went wrong when implementation failed. Cases cover topics including: Six Sigma in HR; Implementing Six Sigma in the Dow Chemical company; Six Sigma in IT; and Six Sigma to improve reporting quality.

The book reports on new theories and applications in the field of intelligent systems and computing. It covers computational and artificial intelligence methods, as well as advances in computer vision, current issue in big data and cloud computing, computation linguistics, cyber-physical systems as well as topics in intelligent information management. Written by active researchers, the different chapters are based on contributions presented at the workshop in intelligent systems and computing (ISC), held during CSIT 2016, September 6-9, and jointly organized by the Lviv Polytechnic National University, Ukraine, the Kharkiv National University of Radio Electronics, Ukraine, and the Technical University of Lodz, Poland, under patronage of Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine. All in all, the book provides academics and professionals with extensive information and a timely snapshot of the field of intelligent systems, and it is expected to foster new discussions and collaborations among different groups.

This book introduces social manufacturing, the next generation manufacturing paradigm that covers product life cycle activities that deal with Internet-based organizational and interactive mechanisms under the context of socio-technical systems in the fields of industrial and production engineering. Like its subject, the book's approach is multi-disciplinary, including manufacturing systems, operations management, computational social sciences and information systems applications. It reports on the latest research findings regarding the social manufacturing paradigm, the architecture, configuration and execution of social manufacturing systems and more. Further, it describes the individual technologies enabled by social manufacturing for each topic, supported by case studies. The technologies discussed include manufacturing resource minimalization and their socialized reorganizations, blockchain models in cybersecurity, computing and decision-making, social business relationships and organizational networks, open product design, social sensors and extended cyber-physical systems, and social factory and inter-connections. This book helps engineers and managers in industry to practice social manufacturing, as well as offering a systematic reference resource for researchers in manufacturing. Students also benefit from the detailed discussions of the latest research and technologies that will have been put into practice by the time they graduate.

Presents current developments in the field of evolutionary scheduling and demonstrates the applicability of evolutionary computational techniques to solving scheduling problems This book provides insight into the use of evolutionary computations (EC) in real-world scheduling, showing readers how to choose a specific evolutionary computation and how to validate the results using metrics and statistics. It offers a spectrum of real-world optimization problems, including applications of EC in industry and service organizations such as healthcare scheduling, aircraft industry, school timetabling, manufacturing systems, and transportation scheduling in the supply chain. It also features problems with different degrees of complexity, practical requirements, user constraints, and MOEC solution approaches. Evolutionary Computation in Scheduling starts with a chapter on scientometric analysis to analyze scientific literature in evolutionary computation in scheduling. It then examines the role and impacts of ant colony optimization (ACO) in job shop scheduling problems, before presenting the application of the ACO algorithm in healthcare scheduling. Other chapters explore task scheduling in heterogeneous computing systems and truck scheduling using swarm intelligence, application of sub-population scheduling algorithm in multi-population evolutionary dynamic optimization, task scheduling in cloud environments, scheduling of robotic disassembly in remanufacturing using the bees algorithm, and more. This book: Provides a representative sampling of real-world problems currently being tackled by practitioners Examines a variety of single-, multi-, and many-objective problems that have been solved using evolutionary computations, including evolutionary algorithms and swarm intelligence Consists of four main parts: Introduction to Scheduling Problems, Computational Issues in Scheduling Problems, Evolutionary Computation, and Evolutionary Computations for Scheduling Problems Evolutionary Computation in Scheduling is ideal for engineers in industries, research scholars, advanced undergraduates and graduate students, and faculty teaching and conducting research in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering.