Environmental threats of coal usage in the electricity production combined with the consumption of renewable and non-renewable resources had led to worldwide energy challenges. The cost of coal mining and economical and environmentally sustainable usage of mined coal could be optimized by efficient management of coal supply chain. This paper provides a mathematical model for improving coal supply chain sustainability including the cost of exergy destruction (entropy). In the proposed method, exergy analysis is used to formulate the model considering not only economic costs but also destructed exergy cost, while genetic algorithm is applied to efficiently solve the proposed model. In order to validate the proposed methodology, some numerical examples of coal supply chains are presented and discussed to show the usability of the proposed exergetic coal supply chain model and claim its benefits over the existing models. According to the results, the proposed method provides 17.6% saving in the consumed exergy by accepting 2.7% more economic costs. The presented model can be used to improve the sustainability of coal supply chain for either designing new projects or upgrading existing processes.
Green supply chain management (GSCM) has become an emerging concept among the environmental management topics during the last few years. There are some pressures that push industries to adopt GSCM like: governmental regulations, tough market competition for green image, pressure from Non-governmental organizations, media pressures and other pressures for environmental actions. These pressures can be more considerable for special industries like mining and mineral industries, because of their activities which can cause more damages to environment. As it is not possible to respond to all of the pressures at the same time, identifying and ranking the most important pressures can be very useful for managers' decisions. This study aims to identify and evaluate the pressures for GSCM adopting according to Iranian mining experts' opinions by using grey methodology.
In this paper, a new hybrid algorithm based on multi-objective genetic algorithm (MOGA) using simulated annealing (SA) is proposed for scheduling unrelated parallel machines with sequencedependent setup times, varying due dates, ready times and precedence relations among jobs. Our objective is to minimize makespan (Maximum completion time of all machines), number of tardy jobs, total tardiness and total earliness at the same time which can be more advantageous in real environment than considering each of objectives separately. For obtaining an optimal solution, hybrid algorithm based on MOGA and SA has been proposed in order to gain both good global and local search abilities. Simulation results and four well-known multi-objective performance metrics, indicate that the proposed hybrid algorithm outperforms the genetic algorithm (GA) and SA in terms of each objective and significantly in minimizing the total cost of the weighted function.
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