Investigation on the behaviour of hybrid beams is presented. Hybrid beam stands for an element with hybrid cross sections. This means sections that consist of steel and concrete parts, connected together with composite dowels, and both are considered for shear flow analysis. In practice, a more general solution may be used for bridges in the form of a beam in which the span sections are hybrid and the support sections are concrete. For the first time in the world, it was decided to introduce a girder in bridge construction, in which a concrete web with a thickness of only 20 cm was formed, directly connected to the steel web, so that a hybrid cross-section is created in accordance with the new European design regulations currently being developed (1994-1-102). The solution is new itself and requires also a new approach for internal forces determination. In this paper a parametric analysis of different hybrid beams with span range from 20 to 40 m and with different reinforcment ratio is performed to get knowledge on the influence of (1) concrete cracking and (2) rheology of concrete on the redistribution of internal forces. Results are analysed and conclusions are presented. As a final step, a general method for computer aided modelling of hybrid beams ( hybrid beam concept) is proposed, which is based on the uncracked analysis. Such an analysis is designer-friendly and while appropriate benchmarked (as in this paper) can spare a lot of time needed for detailed iterative cracked analysis.

Permutation flow shop scheduling problem deals with the production planning of a number of jobs processed by a set of machines in the same order. Several metaheuristics have been proposed for minimizing the makespan of this problem. Taking as basis the previous Alternate Two-Phase PSO (ATPPSO) method and the neighborhood concepts of the Cellular PSO algorithm proposed for continuous problems, this paper proposes the improvement of ATPPSO with a simple adaptive local search strategy (called CAPSO-SALS) to enhance its performance. CAPSO-SALS keeps the simplicity of ATPPSO and boosts the local search based on a neighborhood for every solution. Neighbors are produced by interchanges or insertions of jobs which are selected by a linear roulette scheme depending of the makespan of the best personal positions. The performance of CAPSO-SALS is evaluated using the 12 different sets of Taillard’s benchmark problems and then is contrasted with the original and another previous enhancement of the ATPPSO algorithm. Finally, CAPSO-SALS is compared as well with other ten classic and state-of-art metaheuristics, obtaining satisfactory results.