Search

The Heterogeneous Fleet Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows and Three- Dimensional Loading Constraints (3L-HFCVRPTW) combines the aspects of 3D loading, heterogeneous transport with capacity constraints and time windows for deliveries. It is the first formulation that comprises all these aspects and takes its inspiration from a practical problem of distributing daily fibre board deliveries faced by our industry partner. Given the shape of the goods to transport, the delivery vehicles are customised and their loading constraints take a specialised form. This study introduces the problem and its constraints as well as a specialised procedure for loading the boards. The loading module can be called during or after the route optimisation. In this initial work, we apply simple local search procedures to the routing problem to two data sets obtained from our industry partner and subsequently employ the loading module to place the deliveries on the vehicles. Simulated Annealing outperforms Iterated Local Search, suggesting that the routing problem is multimodal, and operators that shift deliveries between routes appear most beneficial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to significant industrial demands toward software systems with increasing complexity and challenging quality requirements, software architecture design has become an important development activity and the research domain is rapidly evolving. In the last decades, software architecture optimization methods, which aim to automate the search for an optimal architecture design with respect to a (set of) quality attribute(s), have proliferated. However, the reported results are fragmented over different research communities, multiple system domains, and multiple quality attributes. To integrate the existing research results, we have performed a systematic literature review and analyzed the results of 188 research papers from the different research communities. Based on this survey, a taxonomy has been created which is used to classify the existing research. Furthermore, the systematic analysis of the research literature provided in this review aims to help the research community in consolidating the existing research efforts and deriving a research agenda for future developments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Software design is a complex cognitive process in which decision making plays a major role, but our understanding of how decisions are made is limited, especially with regards to reasoning with design problems and formulation of design solutions. In this research, we have observed software designers at work and have analysed how they make decisions during design. We report on how factors such as design planning, design context switching, problem-solution co-evolution and the application of reasoning techniques influence software design effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]