International Journal of Industrial Engineering & Production Research

Abstract: Innovations, commercialized by new or old established firms, located at the core of industrial renewal process. The innovation concept has suffered transformations, along with the evolution of the models that try to explain and understand the innovation process. The innovative process corresponds to all activities that generate technological changes and the dynamic interaction between them, not necessarily being novelties. Linier model, Chain-Linked Model and National Innovation Systems (NIS) Approach, are three models that have developed for innovation process. Innovation process can be viewed as evolutionary process. One can recognize some mechanism for innovation evolution. These are grouped into two classes those that increase configurations variation and those that decrease it. Emergence of knowledge, knowledge flow and recombination are the mechanism to increase variation of configuration. Internal and external selections are the mechanism to selecting. Innovation operators are evolutionary operators that create new combinations of configuration and increase variation. This paper develops an evolutionary cycle in innovation process and extends evolutionary mechanisms of innovation.

Innovations, commercialized by new or old established firms, located at the core of industrial renewal process. The innovation concept has suffered transformations, along with the evolution of the models that try to explain and understand the innovation process. The innovative process corresponds to all activities that generate technological changes and the dynamic interaction between them, not necessarily being novelties. Linier model, Chain-Linked Model and National Innovation Systems (NIS) Approach, are three models that have developed for innovation process. Innovation process can be viewed as evolutionary process. One can recognize some mechanism for innovation evolution. These are grouped into two classes those that increase configurations variation and those that decrease it. Emergence of knowledge, knowledge flow and recombination are the mechanism to increase variation of configuration. Internal and external selections are the mechanism to selecting. Innovation operators are evolutionary operators that create new combinations of configuration and increase variation. This paper develops an evolutionary cycle in innovation process and extends evolutionary mechanisms of innovation.

Assembly lines are special kinds of production systems which are of great importance in the industrial production of high quantity commodities. In many practical manufacturing systems, configuration of assembly lines is fixed and designing a new line may be incurred huge amount of costs and thereby it is not desirable for practitioners. When some changes related to market demand occur, it is worthwhile to re-balance an existing line rather than balancing a new one. Hence, in this paper we suggest a re-balancing model of an existing assembly line in which a new demand related cycle time (CT) is embedded to the traditional assembly line balancing problem (ALBP) as a new parameter. It does not focus on balancing a new line instead it considers a more realistic problem which is re-balancing an existing line. The objective is to re-schedule the tasks in order to reduce the current CT to the new required one such that two criteria are optimized: (i) minimization of the incurred costs and (ii) minimization of non-smoothing of reconfigured line. To solve the considered problem, an effective differential evolution algorithm is developed. Furthermore, to enhance the performance of algorithm, its parameters are optimized by the use of Taguchi method which is a conventional statistical technique for parameter design. The obtained results from computational experiments on benchmark instances show the effectiveness of suggested algorithm against other methods.

The blood supply chain network is an especial case of the general supply chain network, which starts with the blood donating and ends with patients. Disasters such as earthquakes, floods, storms, and accidents usually event suddenly. Therefore, designing an efficient network for the blood supply chain network at emergencies is one of the most important challenging decisions for related managers. This paper aims to introduce a new blood supply chain network in disasters using the hub location approach. After introducing the last studies in blood supply chain and hub location separately, a new mixed-integer linear programming model based on hub location is presented for intercity transportation. Due to the complexity of this problem, two new methods are developed based on Particle Swarm Optimization and Differential Evolution algorithms to solve practical-sized problems. Real data related to a case study is used to test the developed mathematical model and to investigate the performance of the proposed algorithms. The result approves the accuracy of the new mathematical model and also the good performance of the proposed algorithms in solving the considered problem in real-sized dimensions. The proposed model is applicable considering new variables and operational constraints to more compatibility with reality. However, we considered the maximum possible demand for blood products in the proposed approach and so, lack of investigation of uncertainty conditions in key parameters is one of the most important limitations of this research.