Connection designs are established to ensure the stability of joined cut sections, the joints so designed should be based on the optimal performance as per the requirements. The connection joints so established should not be based on just strength but reliability and durability as well. This study focuses on tackling one of the major issues faced when using Glass Fibre Reinforced Polymers (GFRPs) as construction materials, which is based on the abrupt failure of the material under critical or maximum loading. Connection designs are established in GFRP short column H-sections based on Bolted Splicing connections by Eurocode 3 for steel splicing connections. A total of seven Connection designs are established using bearing and non-bearing splicing connections. A total of five models for each connection is established for manual testing and Finite Element Analysis (FEA) is used to simulate and analyze these connection designs. Parameters such as ultimate load, displacement at ultimate load, stiffness, compressive strength, failure mode, load versus displacement behavior graph, and percentage compressive strength compared to the un-cut section are provided in this study. The strongest specimen in this study displaced 128% and 127.7% compressive strength compared to an un-cut GFRP H-section when tested using manual testing and FEA accordingly.

Vehicle routing problems (VRPs) have usually been studied with a single objective function defined by the distances associated with the routing of vehicles. The central problem is to design a set of routes to meet the demands of customers at minimum cost. However, in real life, it is necessary to take into account other objective functions, such as social functions, which consider, for example, the drivers' workload balance. This has led to growth in both the formulation of multiobjective models and exact and approximate solution techniques. In this article, to verify the quality of the results, first, a mathematical model is proposed that takes into account both economic and work balance objectives simultaneously and is solved using an exact method based on the decomposition approach. This method is used to compare the accuracy of the proposed approximate method in test cases of medium mathematical complexity. Second, an approximate method based on the Iterated Local Search (ILS) metaheuristic and Decomposition (ILS/D) is proposed to solve the biobjective Capacitated VRP (bi-CVRP) using test cases of medium and high mathematical complexity. Finally, the nondominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) approximate method is implemented to compare both medium- and high-complexity test cases with a benchmark. The obtained results show that ILS/D is a promising technique for solving VRPs with a multiobjective approach.

Beam-column joints play an important role in the overall resistance of reinforced concrete frames during seismic events. The Earthquakes of Al Asnam on October 10, 1980, and Boumerdes on May 21, 2003 in Algeria, have highlighted the failure of beam-column joints as a cause of building collapse. 3D nonlinear finite element analysis with ANSYS software has been used in order to examine exterior RC beam-column joints under monotonic loading. The research has investigated the influence of the value of the column-to-beam strength ratio (CBSR) of these joints on shear strength and seismic performance of concrete structures by changing the height and longitudinal reinforcement of the beam while keeping column dimensions constant. It has been shown that the beam-column depth ratio and the beam longitudinal reinforcement ratio have a significant effect on the shear capacity and seismic behaviour of exterior beam-column joints. An appropriate value of the flexural strength ratio between the column and beam is crucial in order to establish a "strong column-weak beam" mechanism in reinforced concrete frames, because inadequate values can lead to premature failure or reduced shear capacity at the junction. The Algerian seismic code – RPA99/version2003 suggests a minimum value of column-to-beam strength ratio equal to 1.25 at joints for seismic design when building codes in other countries call for higher ratios. Nevertheless, this approach might not accurately represent the actual behaviour and could constrain the optimal performance of structures.

This research proposes a heuristic to solve the problem of the location selection of incinerators and the vehicle routing of infectious waste collection for hospitals in the Northeast of Thailand. The developed heuristic is called the Greedy Randomized Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search Procedure (GRALNSP)and applies the principles of the Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) and Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search (ALNS) in the local search. The results from GRALNSP are compared with those from the exact method processed by the A Mathematical Programming Language (AMPL) program. For small-sized problems, experiments showed that both methods provided no different results with the global optimal solution, but GRALNSP required less computational time. When the problems were larger-scale and more complicated, AMPL could not find the optimal solution within the limited period of computational time while GRALNSP provided better results with much less computational time. In solving the case study with GRALNSP, the result shows that the suitable locations for opening infectious waste incinerators are the locations of Pathum Ratwongsa district, Amnat Charoen province and Nam Phong district, Khonkaen province. An incinerator with a burning capacity of 600 kilogram/hour is used at both locations. The monthly total distances for infectious waste collection are 24,055.24 and 38,401.88 kilometers, respectively, and the lowest total cost is 6,268,970.40 baht per month.

For several offshore installations, especially those for exploration of offshore resources, such as Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO), the stability of subsea pipelines and exploration risers are closely related to the mooring system. High performance polymeric fibers have been used in recent decades for offshore mooring, more recently polyester has been challenged by advancement in ultra-deep waters due to its considerable elongation. A candidate fiber for lower elongation mooring systems is high modulus polyethylene (HMPE). The work describes mechanical characterization procedures in high modulus polyethylene fibers envisioning the possibility of offshore mooring systems made entirely with HMPE, which allow deeper water depths, as well as stability to the pipelines. As a result, the fiber is suitable for mechanical strength and linear tenacity. It still shows good performance in abrasion resistance, and loss of inelastic portions in cyclic loads. However, the behavior in creep, due to its slightly high strain rates, restricts its use, but recent fibers known as "Low creep" can be studied, allowing complete mooring systems made with HMPE.

This paper deals with the problem of scheduling jobs in a parallel flow shop environment without buffers between machines and with sequence-dependent setup times in order to minimize the maximum completion time of jobs. The blocking constraint normally leads to an increase in the maximum completion time of jobs due to the blockage of machines, which can increase even more so when setup times are considerable. Hence, the heuristic to solve this problem must take into account these specificities in order to minimize the timeout of machines. Because the procedures designed to solve the parallel flow shop scheduling problem must deal not only with the sequencing of jobs but also with their allocation to the flow shops, 36 heuristics have been tested in this paper, of which 35 combine sequencing rules with allocation methods while the last one takes a different approach that is more related to the nature of this problem. The computational evaluation of the implemented heuristics showed good performance of the heuristic designed especially for the problem (RCP0) when the setup times are considerable. Furthermore, the evaluation has also allowed us to propose a combined heuristic that leads to good solutions in a short CPU time.

Injection moulding (IM) is a processing technique produced from polymeric products. Warpage defect (WD) is the defect that generally occurs during the IM process due to the inappropriate processing parameters of the melt temperature, mould surface temperature, packing pressure, injection pressure, and packing pressure time. This paper investigates the IM parameters that influence product warpage by combining the simulation, analysis of variance, signal-to-noise analysis, and Taguchi method. The simulation process was performed by Moldflow software. The product material is high-density polyethylene. The WD has been predicted and optimized to enhance product quality. Melt temperature and packing pressure time are the factors that acrimoniously influenced the warpage of the product. The results show that the packing pressure time and melt temperature have the highest effects on the WD by the contributions of 48.94% and 37.48%, respectively. The optimal IM parameters are scanned again with the WD abated at about 1.2%. The mathematical formula has been constructed to predict the WD with the reflection of acceptable values of 86.29%. The research hopes that the results have been applied to designing and fabricating the plastic product in the near future.

This article presents a metaheuristic algorithm to solve the pallet-building problem and the loading of these in trucks. This approach is used to solve a real application of a Colombian logistics company. Several practical requirements of goods loading and unloading operations were modeled, such as the boxes’ orientation, weight support limits associated with boxes, pallets and vehicles, and static stability constraints. The optimization algorithm consists of a two-phase approach, the first is responsible for the construction of pallets, and the second considers the optimal location of the pallets into the selected vehicles. Both phases present a search strategy type of GRASP. The proposed methodology was validated through the comparison of the performance of the solutions obtained for deliveries of the logistics company with the solutions obtained using a highly accepted commercial packing tool that uses two different algorithms. The proposed methodology was compared in similar conditions with the previous works that considered the same constraints of the entire problem or at least one of the phases separately. We used the sets of instances published in the literature for each of the previous works. The results allow concluding that the proposed algorithm has a better performance than the most known commercial tool for real cases. The proposed algorithm managed to match most of the test instances and outperformed some previous works that only involve decisions of one of the two problems. As future work, it is proposed to adapt this work to the legal restrictions of the European community.

Recently, there has been an increase in the use of laser beam welding of mild steel in various industries, including petroleum refineries, power plants, pharmaceuticals, and even residential areas. This research paper focuses on studying the effects of laser welding process parameters, such as laser power and welding speed, on the tensile strength of welds. To do this, three types of laser beam oscillations (sinusoidal path, triangular path, and square path) were performed to weld 125mm x 60 and 1.8 thick sheets of ASTM A36 mild steel alloy. The researchers used statistical tools such as ANOVA to generate mathematical models and experimental designs using the Taguchi method. The results indicate that the optimal welded joint has good mechanical properties after laser welding. For ASTM A36 mild steel, the optimal parameters for laser welding are a laser power of 1800 W, a welding speed of 50 mm/s, and triangular welding mode.

In multisite production environments, the appropriate management of production resources is an activity of fundamental relevance to optimally respond to market demands. In particular, each production facility can operate with different policies according to its objectives, prioritizing the quality and standardization of the product, customer service, or the overall efficiency of the system; goals which must be taken into account when planning the production of the entire complex. At the operational level, in order to achieve an efficient operation of the production system, the integrated problem of batching and scheduling must be solved over all facilities, instead of doing it for each plant separately, as has been usual so far. Then, this paper proposes a mixed-integer linear programming model for the multisite batching and scheduling problems, where different operational policies are considered for multiple batch plants. Through two examples, the impact of policies on the decision-making process is shown.