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Continual rising fuel costs and rapidly increasing vehicle costs have generated management awareness of the costs incurred in physical distribution. Inevitably, management attention on the distribution function is drawn towards potential cost savings and increases in efficiency. Where transport costs represent a significant part of the total distibution costs, then one area which determines the efficiency of all others is the vehicle routing and scheduling activity which could collectively be known as load planning.

The purpose of this paper is to explore operation influencing factors of mining. To collect gaps of study and to form a thematic representation of principal influencing factors and their unique influencing factors.

Articles were collected from different sources from 1974 to 2019 consisting of research articles, technical papers, expert blogs, working papers and conference papers covering various disciplines from psychology, human resource, finance and economics to mining engineering. Mining operation influencing factors were noted down. Four massively deposed mines were visited to observe the sequence of mining process. The field experts were also consulted to identify factors influencing their respected industry. Gaps were observed while comparing with the reviewed articles and opinions of field experts. Finally, senior experts were consulted to identify unique factors from the final list prepared and a framework of seven thematic categories consisting of unique factors was formulated.

A total of 197 sub-factors were collected from literature review and 2 sub-factors from Indian Mining experts during field study. These 199 sub-factors were initially categorised as 48 factors and one more factor was collected from Indian field experts. Finally, these 49 factors were thematically represented as principal factors and termed as operation, marketing and management, human resource, finance, resource and utility, corporate affairs and corporate social responsibility and environment.

This study can be very helpful in the direction of different qualitative and quantitative studies, as the factors and sub-factors groups are identified.

The paper fulfils an identified need to provide a holistic review for understanding and documenting principal factors, unique factors and sub-factors those influence mining operation, profitability or sustainability issues of mines.

We study the distortions that downward nominal and real wage rigidity would induce to a flexible form of a notional, rigidity-free, distribution of wage change using the histogram-location approach. We examine alternative methods of generating the histograms that support the econometric search for rigidity distortions and implement our approach to inflation sub-periods that should be characterised by different patterns of nominal and real rigidities. We establish the general applicability of the approach to these sub-periods and find results consistent with expectations.

The purpose of this chapter is to optimize multi-criteria formulation for green vehicle routing problems by mixed integer programming. This research is about the road freight transportation of a Spanish company of groceries. This company has more power in the north of Spain and hence it was founded there. The data used for the computational experiments are focused in the northern region of Spain. The data have been used to decide the best route in order to obtain a minimization of costs for the company. The problem focused on the distance traveled and the altitude difference; by studying these parameters, the best solution of route transportation has been made. The software used to solve this model is CPLEX solver with AMPL programming language. This has been helpful to obtain the results for the research and some conclusions have been obtained from them.

Scheduling is defined by Baker as, “the allocation of resources over time to perform a collection of tasks”. The term facilities is often used instead of resources and the tasks to be performed may involve a variety of different operations.

Medians of a graph have many applications in engineering. Optimal locations for facility centers, distribution of centers and domain decomposition for parallel computation are a few examples of such applications. In this paper, a new ant system (AS) algorithm based on the idea of using two sets of ants, named active and passive ants is proposed for the problem of finding k‐medians of a weighted graph or the facility location problem on a network.

The structure of the algorithm is derived from two known heuristics; namely, rank‐based AS and max‐min ant system with some adjustments in pheromone updating and locating the ants on the graph nodes. The algorithms are designed with and without a local search.

An efficient algorithm for location finding, and the novel application of an ant colony system can be considered as the main contribution of this paper.

Combining two different tools; namely, graph theory and AS algorithm results in an efficient and accurate method for location finding. The results are compared to those of another algorithm based on the theory of graphs.

The purpose of this chapter is to solve multi-objective formulation for traveling salesman and transportation problems. Computations are based on real data for the road freight transportation of a Spanish company. The company was selected because of its importance in Spanish economy and market. This company is important in the whole country; however, it has its higher importance in the northern part of Spain. The requirements for these models are the minimization of total distance and the CO₂ emissions. To achieve this, it is required to know and carry out the minimization of the total distance traveled by the trucks during the deliveries. The deliveries are going to be executed between the different locations, nodes, in the region, and Elorrio, where the depot is situated. The data have been used to decide the best route in order to obtain a minimization of cost for the company. As it was mentioned earlier, the problems are focused on the reduction of the amount of CO₂ emissions and minimization of total distance; by studying different parameters, the best solutions of route transportation have been obtained. The software used to solve these models is CPLEX solver with AMPL programming language.

The choice of what services to provide to customers is a problem of strategic significance to most companies, yet this is a decision which is often taken in an arbitrary fashion for purely qualitative and subjective reasons. The decision made here can have serious repercussions in many areas of company operations and especially in the design and operation of the distribution system. For example, a decision to deliver to all customers within twenty‐four hours of receipt of an order can lead to a distribution system involving a large number of small, expensive depots and an underutilised delivery fleet. On the other hand an unreliable service, with many partially filled orders or frequently damaged articles for example can mean a loss of sales as customers go elsewhere.

Recently Foster and Ryan developed a new method for the vehicle scheduling problem (VSP). This article applies their method to a practical VSP involving the delivery of pressurised fluids, and demonstrates its effectiveness.