The growth of large enterprises in the manufacturing market commonly depends on good New Product Development (NPD) projects; these projects represent a strategy to overcome competitors inside a competitive environment. The management of such projects is usually complex and involves risk due to the changing and conflicting environment. The approaches that tackle the problem lack an explicit consideration of the DM’s attitude facing uncertainty and imprecision related to the risk and particularly in the presence of time‐interdependencies. This paper proposes a model of the time‐related effects, under imperfect knowledge, and their influence in choosing optimal NPD portfolios. The proposed approach is an interval‐based method to solve NPD portfolio optimization problems under different forms of imperfect knowledge. This approach has the advantage of a unified and simple way to model the different sources of imprecision, vagueness, uncertainty, and arbitrariness. The attitude of the DM facing the imperfect knowledge is adjusted by using some meaningful parameters. The research focuses particularly in creating a method useful for risk‐averse DMs. The proposal was tested through an experimental design that compared the results achieved by the new method against the expected value in portfolios. The results revealed that high levels of conservatism might prevent wasting resources in failed projects.

Recent disruptions have led to a growing interest in studying the social dimension of sustainability and its relationship to resilience within supply chains. Social sustainability is characterized as complex, often offering anomalous data and confounding variables that are impossible to categorically define as true or false axioms. This work starts from an epistemological premise, in which non-parametric statistical methodologies and mathematical analytics are complementary perspectives to comprehensively understand the same social phenomenon. Second-generation predictive statistics, such as the PLS-SEM algorithm, have demonstrated robustness in treating multivariate social information, making it feasible to prepare data for knowledge transfer with mathematical techniques specialized for fuzzy data. This research aimed to analyze evolutionary fuzzy knowledge transfer pre-, during-, and post-pandemic COVID-19, and its effect on the relationship between social sustainability and supply chain resilience in representative cases from Mexico. Based on empirical data collected from supply chain managers in 2019 (n = 153), 2021 (n = 159), and 2023 (n = 119), the methodological technique involved three phases: (1) PLS-SEM modeling, (2) fuzzy-evolutionary predictive evaluation based on knowledge transfer between latent data, and (3) comparative analysis of the predictive effects of social attributes (labor rights, health and safety, inclusion, and social responsibility) on supply chain resilience. The results found a moderate significant variance in the pre-in-post-COVID-19 effect of social dimensions on supply chain resilience. Social and management implications are presented.

In this work, we investigate the variant of the Internet Shopping Optimization Problem (ISHOP) that considers different item units. This variant is more challenging than the original problem. The original ISHOP is already known as a combinatorial NP-hard problem. In this work, we present a formal proof that the ISHOP variant considering different item units belongs to the NP-Hard complexity class. The abovementioned variant is familiar to companies and consumers who need to purchase more than one unit of a specific product to satisfy their requirements. For example, companies buy different quantities of construction materials, medical equipment, office supplies, or chemical components. We propose two new evolutionary operators (crossover and mutation) and an unfeasible solution repair method for the studied ISHOP variant. Furthermore, we produce a new benchmark of 15 synthetic instances where item prices follow a random uniform distribution. Finally, to assess our evolutionary operators, we implemented two Evolutionary Algorithms, a Genetic Algorithm (GA) and a Cellular Genetic Algorithm (CGA), and an experimental evaluation against a Water Cycle Algorithm (WCA) from the state-of-the-art. Experimental results show that our proposed GA performs well with statistical significance.

The use of parallel applications in High-Performance Computing (HPC) demands high computing times and energy resources. Inadequate scheduling produces longer computing times which, in turn, increases energy consumption and monetary cost. Task scheduling is an NP-Hard problem; thus, several heuristics methods appear in the literature. The main approaches can be grouped into the following categories: fast heuristics, metaheuristics, and local search. Fast heuristics and metaheuristics are used when pre-scheduling times are short and long, respectively. The third is commonly used when pre-scheduling time is limited by CPU seconds or by objective function evaluations. This paper focuses on optimizing the scheduling of parallel applications, considering the energy consumption during the idle time while no tasks are executing. Additionally, we detail a comparative literature study of the performance of lexicographic variants with local searches adapted to be stochastic and aware of idle energy consumption.