This thesis addresses the problem of setting up a surface mount placement machine for production. The objective is to minimize the number of machine changeovers made during a production run consisting of a number of circuit cards. The solution to the problem involves two separate decisions. The first decision considers determining how to combine feeders together in "bays" or groups of feeders, and how to assign the bays to the circuit cards. The second decision considers the circuit card production sequence. A mathematical programming formulation is given, however, its solution is very difficult for problems of a realistic size. Several heuristic approaches are suggested and used to solve actual and test problems. The heuristic for bay design uses clustering techniques used in Group Technology while the sequencing problem is solved using heuristics based on solution techniques for the Traveling Salesman problem.

As is evident from the title of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), the protagonist of the play, the salesman Willy Loman, will die. This essay will investigate what role Ben, Willy’s deceased brother, plays in Willy’s suicide. The thesis is that Willy needs Ben’s support in order to commit suicide and therefore needs to bring Ben’s values, at the possible expense of his wife Linda’s, into his superego. Ben is, to Willy, a true example of the American Dream, as he was a very successful businessman. Willy’s ego (or rational mind) seems to realize that his superego (or conscience) needs to replace the humane values of Linda with the economic values of Ben, in order to justify his motivation of an “economically beneficial” suicide. When Willy arrives at his final conclusion of how his favorite son Biff would financially benefit from his “accidental” suicide and thereby being able to attain Willy’s version of the American Dream, the evidence brought forth may suggest that Willy, at that point, allows Ben full access into his mind.        Willy’s mind will be investigated via Freud’s triple model of the psyche; the id, the ego and the superego.

Minimal length of a travelling salesman's problem had been studied in this diploma these. Travelling salesman must come trough each place just once and then go back to the starting place. This problem can be illustrated as a problem of graph theory, such that places are the vertices, roads are the edges, distances of roads are the lengths of edges. The optimal travelling salesman's problem tour is the shortest Hamiltionian cycle in the graph. It is a classical NP-complete problem. There is no algorithm that solves this problem in polynomial time. This problem can be solved by using various approximation algorithms, they offer less time consumption and lowest quality than optimization. This diploma these had been dedicated to approximation algorithms, for example: nearest neighbor method, minimal spanning tree method, Christofide's method, 2-opt., genetic algorithm, etc.

This essay will analyze the protagonist of Arthur Miller’s, Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman, from a psychoanalytical perspective. The purpose is to establish the reason for his suicide. The thesis is that Willy Loman seems to have developed a narcissistic and borderline personality disorder and as a consequence his mentality was affected and that led him to commit suicide. Willy Loman is a self-centered man who has an obsession with success both as a salesman but also as a husband and a father, in such a way that his mental health is questioned. This suggests that his final decision to commit suicide has been affected by some type of mental disorder that derives from his neuroses. Therefore, Willy Loman’s behavior will be investigated by using Freud’s psychoanalytical theory of neuroses and mental disorders.

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A very wide-ranging subgroup of vehicle routing problems from the graph theory is a common and frequent problem handled daily by transport companies, airline businesses, hi-tech companies with planning drilling of printed circuits boards or other companies from different industries. During numerous previous researches of these problems a lot of analyses were made and many solutions proposed -- of which an outline is in this paper. Some of them giving better or worse results in longer or shorter computing time. In spite of the fact that the processors and new technologies performance is increasing, with some algorithms we cannon compute the result in a reasonable time. That is why this paper is asking a question, if there can be found a fitting algorithm which could be applied on different and faster processing unit structures so it could be ensured a multiple computing speed increase so far. The analysis was carried out using computer experiments on a new build and implemented branch and bound algorithm with a matrix rate reduction.

In this research, we investigate and propose new operators to improve Genetic Algorithm’s performance to solve the multi-stop routing problem. In a multi-stop route, a user starts at point x, visits all destinations exactly once, and then return to the same starting point. In this thesis, we are interested in two types of this problem. The first type is when the distance among destinations is fixed. In this case, it is called static traveling salesman problem. The second type is when the cost among destinations is affected by traffic congestion. Thus, the time among destinations changes during the day. In this case, it is called time-dependent traveling salesman problem. This research proposes new improvements on genetic algorithm to solve each of these two optimization problems. First, the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) is one of the most important and attractive combinatorial optimization problems. There are many meta-heuristic algorithms that can solve this problem. In this paper, we use a Genetic Algorithm (GA) to solve it. GA uses different operators: selection, crossover, and mutation. Sequential Constructive Crossover (SCX) and Bidirectional Circular Constructive Crossover (BCSCX) are efficient to solve TSP. Here, we propose a modification to these crossovers. The experimental results show that our proposed adjustment is superior to SCX and BCSCX as well as to other conventional crossovers (e.g. Order Crossover (OX), Cycle Crossover (CX), and Partially Mapped Crossover (PMX)) in term of solution quality and convergence speed. Furthermore, the GA solver, that is improved by applying inexpensive local search operators, can produce solutions that have much better quality within reasonable computational time. Second, the Time-Dependent Traveling Salesman Problem (TDTSP) is an interesting problem and has an impact on real-life applications such as a delivery system. In this problem, time among destinations fluctuates during the day due to traffic, weather, accidents, or other events. Thus, it is important to recommend a tour that can save driver’s time and resources. In this research, we propose a Multi-Population Genetic Algorithm (MGA) where each population has different crossovers. We compare the proposed MG against Single-Population Genetic Algorithm (SGA) in terms of tour time solution quality. Our finding is that MGA outperforms SGA. Our method is tested against real-world traffic data [1] where there are 200 different instances with different numbers of destinations. For all tested instances, MGA is superior on average by at least 10% (for instances with size less than 50) and 20% (for instances of size 50) better tour time solution compared to SGA with OX and SGA with PMX operators, and at least 4% better tour time compared toga with SCX operator.

與過去相比，年輕世代在優渥的環境中成長，使社會大眾對他們產生抗壓性不足的刻板印象。近年來隨著全球化的發展，人們在工作中面對的競爭將更加激烈。為了能脫穎而出，對於年輕族群而言找出持續投入工作的關鍵因素便顯得相當重要。本研究採取心理傳記學法，針對2007年商業周刊壽險業務員金獎得主黃志明的生命經驗作深度的檢視與詮釋，企圖找出能在高挑戰的工作環境中持續投入的關鍵因素。研究結果發現，促使黃志明樂在工作的關鍵因素為自豪。自豪激發了黃志明的高成就動機，也使他堅守父親所教導的誠信與勤奮處世原則，幫助他在遇到挫折時能夠抱持正向的態度，不斷地目標邁進。黃志明的自豪來自對家庭的重視與對家人的愛，希望工作有所成就使父母與家人以自己為榮，也因此盡到照顧家人的責任，進而對自己感到自豪，促進持續投入工作的行為。黃志明的行為受到華人文化中重視家庭觀念的深度影響，為了成就家庭才積極地追求成功而非單純地追求主流價值觀認可。本研究結果突顯進行心理學研究時，應將不同文化背景納入考量的必要性，據以發展合適的本土心理學理論，並對於學術研究有所貢獻。本文最後提出研究者對於研究的自我省思以及對於未來相關研究的建議。 / In comparison with the old one, new generation is grown up in an rich environment, that is why people always think young people can barely overcome frustration. However, with globalization, it is getting more and more important for young people to discover how to work hard over a long period of time in such a competitive work environment. The present study take psychobiography as method, and take the winner of insurance golden trophy salesman held by Business Week in 2007, Alex Huang, as study subject, try to find out the key factor for working persistently in a competitive environment. According to the study result, the key factor for Alex Huang working persistently is pride. Pride could induce high motivation in pursuing success and make him obey the rule given by his father. Pride even could help him face frustration positively and keep on working hard. The pride of Alex Huang comes from his love to family. He wants his family to be proud of his achievement so as to take care of his family. After attending his goals he would work harder through the pride. The behavior of Alex Huang was deeply affected by Chinese culture, he devote himself to pursuing success for his family but not just attain recognized accomplishment. The present study reveals the necessity to develop local psychology theory to contribute to academic study. In the last chapter, suggestions for future academic study and reflection of researcher are proposed.

As a whole, this work serves to illuminate the tragic as a fundamental human phenomenon and an objective fact that is distinct not only from comedy and irony but from other forms of calamity and modes of failure. I consider three distinct sources of philosophical knowledge on tragedy. The first is tragic drama and literature, the second is the theory of the tragic and the third source consists of the employment of the concept of tragedy to discuss events or characters that one encounters in life. I carefully draw upon the first two sources to thicken the elaborations of four different facets of the third. In this process, I extrapolate Szondi’s notion that tragedy is a specific dialectic in a specific space. In the course of this work, I place a greater emphasis upon this general concept of the tragic as opposed to a poetics of tragedy. The dissertation bears out, however, that it is ultimately poetics - and not the dialectic as general concept - that provide us with the richer insights into tragedy as it unravels in life. The specific dialectic of tragedy unravels so as to cause the irreplaceable loss of something of great value. This provides me with a structuring element that ties the four central chapters together. In terms of content, I emphasize also upon the tragic flaw as a set of character traits (manifested by an individual or some form of collective) which keep tragedy in place. The consideration of the figure of Willy Loman allows me to examine the tragedy of failure of expectations which is a distinct category of the tragic and yet it oscillates such that ties together the other themes. A central idea that emerges from an analysis of the overlapping themes is that prior to tragedy is the investment of the deepest inner resources into a process. This investment gives rise to identity and to expectations. As a tragedy unfolds, the source of the identity or of expectation becomes also the birth place or the generator of all threats to this identity and the collapse of long nurtured expectations.

Constructing the genomic median of several given genomes is crucial in developing evolutionary trees, since the genomic median provides an estimate for the ordering of the genes in a common ancestor of the given genomes. This is due to the fact that the content of DNA molecules is often similar, but the difference is mainly in the order in which the genes appear in various genomes. The mutations that affect this ordering are called genome rearrangements, and many structural differences between genomes can be studied using genome rearrangements. In this thesis our main focus is on applying combinatorial optimization techniques to genomic median problems, with particular emphasis on the breakpoint distance as a measure of the difference between two genomes. We will study different variations of the breakpoint median problem from signed to unsigned, unichromosomal to multichromosomal, and linear to circular to mixed. We show how these median problems can be formulated in terms of problems in combinatorial optimization, and take advantage of well-known combinatorial optimization techniques and apply these powerful methods to study various median problems. Some of these median problems are polynomial and many are NP-hard. We find efficient algorithms and approximation methods for median problems based on well-known combinatorial optimization structures. The focus is on algorithmic and combinatorial aspects of genomic medians, and how they can be utilized to obtain optimal median solutions.