There is an acute need to evaluate the energy consumption of buildings in response to climate change. The “occupant” factor has been largely overlooked in building energy analysis. This research aims at investigating occupancy existence in the office environment using a hybrid artificial neural network with metaheuristic algorithms for improved energy management. It proposes and compares three classification models, namely particle swarm optimization (PSO), gravitational search algorithm (GSA), and hybrid PSO-GSA in combination with the feedforward neural network (FFNN). The inputs to these models are data related to temperature, humidity, light, and carbon dioxide emissions. Two data sets are used for testing the models while the office door is open and closed. The capabilities of the optimized models are evaluated using best, average, median, and standard deviation of the mean squared error. Most of the performance metrics indicate that the FFNN-PSO-GSA model exhibits better performance compared to the other models using the two datasets. The proposed model yields a classification accuracy ranging between 98.47-98.73% using one predictor (i.e., temperature). Besides, it yields an accuracy ranging between 85.45-94.03% using temperature and CO2 predictors. It can be concluded that the FFNN combined with PSO and GSA algorithms can be a useful tool for occupancy detection modeling.

Optimization of hole-making operations plays a crucial role in which tool travel and tool switch scheduling are the two major issues. Industrial applications such as moulds, dies, engine block etc. consist of large number of holes having different diameters, depths and surface finish. This results into to a large number of machining operations like drilling, reaming or tapping to achieve the final size of individual hole. Optimal sequence of operations and associated cutting speeds, which reduce the overall processing cost of these hole-making operations are essential to reach desirable products. In order to achieve this, an attempt is made by developing an effective methodology. An example of the injection mould is considered to demonstrate the proposed approach. The optimization of this example is carried out using recently developed particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. The results obtained using PSO are compared with those obtained using tabu search method. It is observed that results obtained using PSO are slightly better than those obtained using tabu search method.

Vendor managed inventory (VMI) is one of the most effective methods for reducing bullwhip effect. This paper presents a mathematical VMI model where there are three levels of central storage, multi distribution centers and various retailors. The problem is formulated as a mixed integer programming by considering uncertainty on different input parameters. To cope with uncertainty, the study uses rectangular fuzzy numbers. We also propose two metaheuristics; namely, genetic algorithm and particle swarm optimization to solve the resulted problems for some large instances. The preliminary results have indicated that genetic algorithm could solve the proposed model faster than particle swarm optimization in terms of CPU time reaching to slightly better objective functions.

Energy supply security is one of the strategic issues of all states. Beside the energy supply management, the section that has received less attention is energy demand management. According to importance of residential and commercial sectors in energy consumption, in the present study energy demand of these sectors is estimated using linear and exponential functions and the coefficients are obtained from PSO algorithms. 72 different scenarios with various inputs are investigated. Data from the years 1968 to 2011 are used to develop the models and select the suitable scenario. Results show that an exponential model developed based on particle swarm optimization algorithm has had the best performance. Based on the best scenario the energy demand of residential and commercial sectors is estimated 1718 Mega barrel of crude oil equivalent up to the year 2032.

Markowitz theorem is one of the most popular techniques for asset management. The method has been widely used to solve many applications, successfully. In this paper, we present a multi objective Markowitz model to determine asset allocation by considering cardinality constraints. The resulted model is an NP-Hard problem and the proposed study uses two metaheuristics, namely genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) to find efficient solutions. The proposed study has been applied on some data collected from Tehran Stock Exchange over the period 2009-2011. The study considers four objectives including cash return, 12-month return, 36-month return and Lower Partial Moment (LPM). The results indicate that there was no statistical difference between the implementation of PSO and GA methods.

In this paper, we present a new Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) to solve a bi-objective unrelated parallel machine scheduling problem where setup times are sequence dependent. The objectives include mean completion time of jobs and mean squares of deviations from machines workload from their averages. The performance of the proposed ICA (PICA) method is examined using some randomly generated data and they are compared with three alternative methods including particle swarm optimization (PSO), original version of imperialist competitive algorithm (OICA) and genetic algorithm (GA) in terms of the objective function values. The preliminary results indicate that the proposed study outperforms other alternative methods. In addition, while OICA performs the worst as alternative solution strategy, PSO and GA seem to perform better.

Use of Automated guided vehicles (AGVs) is highly significant in Flexible Manufacturing Sys-tem (FMS) in which material handling in form of jobs is performed from one work center to an-other work center. A multifold increase in through put of FMS can be observed by application of multi load AGVs. In this paper, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) integrated with Memetic Algorithm (MA) named as Modified Memetic Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm (MMP-SO) is applied to yield initial feasible solutions for scheduling of multi load AGVs for minimum travel and waiting time in the FMS. The proposed MMPSO algorithm exhibits balanced explora-tion and exploitation for global search method of standard Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm and local search method of Memetic Algorithm (MA) which further results into yield of efficient and effective initial feasible solutions for the multi load AGVs scheduling problem.

The permutation method of multiple attribute decision making has two significant deficiencies:
high computational time and wrong priority output in some problem instances. In this paper, a
novel permutation method called adjusted permutation method (APM) is proposed to
compensate deficiencies of conventional permutation method. We propose Tabu search (TS)
and particle swarm optimization (PSO) to find suitable solutions at a reasonable computational
time for large problem instances. The proposed method is examined using some numerical
examples to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The preliminary results show
that both approaches provide competent solutions in relatively reasonable amounts of time
while TS performs better to solve APM.

This paper proposes a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to solve various types of economic dispatch (ED) problems in power systems such as, environmental/economic dispatch (EED) and multi-area environmental/economic dispatch. The proposed model considers the environmental impact to achieve the minimization of fuel costs and pollutant emissions, simultaneously. The EED problem is further extended to dispatch the power among different areas to aid emission allowance trading. The performance of the proposed PSO is compared with conventional method and genetic algorithm. The results clearly show that the proposed algorithms give global optimum solution compared to the other methods. The results obtained also show that the proposed PSO algorithms can provide comparable dispatch solutions with reduced computation time for all types of ED problems.