The emphasis of Master Production Scheduling (MPS) or tactic planning is on time and spatial disintegration of the cumulative planning targets and forecasts, along with the provision and forecast of the required resources. This procedure eventually becomes considerably difficult and slow as the number of resources, products and periods considered increases. A number of studies have been carried out to understand these impediments and formulate algorithms to optimise the production planning problem, or more specifically the master production scheduling (MPS) problem. These algorithms include an Evolutionary Algorithm called Genetic Algorithm, a Swarm Intelligence methodology called Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA), Bat Algorithm (BAT), T

The control of prostheses and their complexities is one of the greatest challenges limiting wide amputees’ use of upper limb prostheses. The main challenges include the difficulty of extracting signals for controlling the prostheses, limited number of degrees of freedom (DoF), and cost-prohibitive for complex controlling systems. In this study, a real-time hybrid control system, based on electromyography (EMG) and voice commands (VC) is designed to render the prosthesis more dexterous with the ability to accomplish amputee’s daily activities proficiently. The voice and EMG systems were combined in three proposed hybrid strategies, each strategy had different number of movements depending on the combination protocol between voic

A hybrid particulate swarm optimization (hybrid) combination of an optimization algorithm of the particle swarm and a variable neighborhood search algorithm is proposed for the multi-objective permutation flow shop scheduling problem (PFSP) with the smallest cumulative completion time and the smallest total flow time. Algorithm for hybrid particulate swarm optimization (HPSO) is applied to maintain a fair combination of centralized search with decentralized search. The Nawaz-Enscore-Ham )NEH) heuristic algorithm in this hybrid algorithm is used to initialize populations in order to improve the efficiency of the initial solution. The method design is based on ascending order (ranked-order-value, ROV), applying the continuous PSO algorithm

Catalytic reduction is considered an effective approach for the reduction of toxic organic pollutants from the environment, but finding an active catalyst is still a big challenge. Herein, Ag decorated CeO2 catalyst was synthesized through polyol reduction method and applied for catalytic reduction (conversion) of 4-nitrophenol (4-NP) to 4-aminophenol (4-AP). The Ag decorated CeO2 catalyst displayed an outstanding reduction activity with 99% conversion of 4-NP in 5 min with a 0.61 min−1 reaction rate (k). A number of structural characterization techniques were executed to investigate the influence of Ag on CeO2 and its effect on the catalytic conversion of 4-NP. The outstanding catalytic performances of the Ag-CeO2 catalyst can be assigne

In the present work, an image compression method have been modified by combining The Absolute Moment Block Truncation Coding algorithm (AMBTC) with a VQ-based image coding. At the beginning, the AMBTC algorithm based on Weber's law condition have been used to distinguish low and high detail blocks in the original image. The coder will transmit only mean of low detailed block (i.e. uniform blocks like background) on the channel instate of transmit the two reconstruction mean values and bit map for this block. While the high detail block is coded by the proposed fast encoding algorithm for vector quantized method based on the Triangular Inequality Theorem (TIE), then the coder will transmit the two reconstruction mean values (i.e. H&L)

Chacha 20 is a stream cypher that is used as lightweight on many CPUs that ‎do not have dedicated AES instructions. As stated by Google, that is the reason why they use it on many ‎devices, such as mobile devices, for authentication in TLS protocol. This paper ‎proposes an improvement of chaha20 stream cypher algorithm based on tent and ‎Chebyshev functions (IChacha20). The main objectives of the proposed IChacha20 ‎algorithm are increasing security layer, designing a robust structure of the IChacha20 ‎to be enabled to resist various types of attacks, implementing the proposed ‎algorithm for encryption of colour images, and transiting it in a secure manner. The ‎ test results proved that the MSE, PSNR, UQI and NCC metrics

One of the most difficult issues in the history of communication technology is the transmission of secure images. On the internet, photos are used and shared by millions of individuals for both private and business reasons. Utilizing encryption methods to change the original image into an unintelligible or scrambled version is one way to achieve safe image transfer over the network. Cryptographic approaches based on chaotic logistic theory provide several new and promising options for developing secure Image encryption methods. The main aim of this paper is to build a secure system for encrypting gray and color images. The proposed system consists of two stages, the first stage is the encryption process, in which the keys are genera