In the current context of the electronic governance of society, both administrations and citizens are demanding greater participation of all the actors involved in the decision-making process relative to the governance of society. This book presents collective works published in the recent Special Issue (SI) entitled "Optimization for Decision Making". These works give an appropriate response to the new challenges raised, the decision-making process can be done by applying different methods and tools, as well as using different objectives. In real-life problems, the formulation of decision-making problems and application of optimization techniques to support decisions are particularly complex and a wide range of optimization techniques and methodologies are used to minimize risks, improve quality in making decisions, or, in general, to solve problems. In addition, a sensitivity or robustness analysis should be done to validate/analyze the influence of uncertainty regarding decision-making. This book brings together a collection of inter-/multi-disciplinary works applied to the optimization for decision making in a coherent manner.
Business intelligence is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, providing access to, and analyzing data for the purpose of helping enterprise users make better business decisions. The term implies having a comprehensive knowledge of all factors that affect a business, such as customers, competitors, business partners, economic environment, and internal operations, therefore enabling optimal decisions to be made. Business Intelligence provides readers with an introduction and practical guide to the mathematical models and analysis methodologies vital to business intelligence. This book: Combines detailed coverage with a practical guide to the mathematical models and analysis methodologies of business intelligence. Covers all the hot topics such as data warehousing, data mining and its applications, machine learning, classification, supply optimization models, decision support systems, and analytical methods for performance evaluation. Is made accessible to readers through the careful definition and introduction of each concept, followed by the extensive use of examples and numerous real-life case studies. Explains how to utilise mathematical models and analysis models to make effective and good quality business decisions. This book is aimed at postgraduate students following data analysis and data mining courses. Researchers looking for a systematic and broad coverage of topics in operations research and mathematical models for decision-making will find this an invaluable guide.
Why downsize when you can OPTIMIZE? "At McDonald’s our focus has always been on providing maximum value to customers through ‘optimal’ quality and tight cost management, which is why Optimization has become such a pivotal concept for us. Steve Sashihara’s book brings the concept to life.” —Kenneth M. Koziol, Corp. Senior Vice President, Innovation and Design, McDonald’s Corp. “Steve Sashihara convincingly demonstrates how the application of advanced quantitative techniques can significantly improve day-to-day decision making, which is what we have done at Quad/Graphics.” —Dave Blais, Executive Vice President, Quad/Graphics “The Optimization Edge is a powerful book that will change the way organizations make decisions and manage their assets.” —Frances Hesselbein, President and CEO, Leader to Leader Institute; Recipient, Presidential Medal of Freedom “At UPS, the ‘optimization edge’ has given us a competitive advantage. It enables us to solve problems of great complexity seamlessly and with increased velocity, resulting in smarter decisions and ultimately bringing greater value to our customers.” —Chuck Holland, Vice President of Industrial Engineering, UPS About the Book: In these challenging economic times, more and more companies have turned to “cut-back management” to ensure their survival. But how do some manage to outshine their competitors—and even grow—during downturns? How does Google outsearch the other search engines? How does McDonald’s McClobber the competition? More important, how can you increase your company’s profits without downsizing? The answer is Asset Optimization. This groundbreaking approach to decision making utilizes the latest advances in mathematics and computer software. Optimization expert Steve Sashihara shows you how to squeeze every ounce of value from your company, even under “perfect storm” conditions. You’ll learn how to: Drive up your company’s value—even in a downturn Re-allocate your resources—for maximum performance Streamline your company—and stay ahead of the competition Optimize your assets—for long-term growth A proven, practical, and workable alternative to “corporate anorexia,” Optimization is your best option for dealing head-on with marketplace volatility and resource scarcity. This step-by-step guide offers concrete, ready-to- use tools drawn from decades of superior business practices—the best-kept secrets of global successes such as Amazon, Google, Marriott, McDonald’s, Intel, SAS, and UPS. You’ll learn what Optimization is, what best practices you can immediately put to use, how to use Optimization to speed up and improve decision making, and how to integrate Optimization into your organization’s culture. If you want to thrive in any economy—and grow your company in the future—forget about downsizing. Get The Optimization Edge.
The large and complex challenges the world is facing, the growing prevalence of huge data sets, and the new and developing ways for addressing them (artificial intelligence, data science, machine learning, etc.), means it is increasingly vital that academics and professionals from across disciplines have a basic understanding of the mathematical underpinnings of effective, optimized decision-making. Without it, decision makers risk being overtaken by those who better understand the models and methods, that can best inform strategic and tactical decisions. Introduction to Optimization-Based Decision-Making provides an elementary and self-contained introduction to the basic concepts involved in making decisions in an optimization-based environment. The mathematical level of the text is directed to the post-secondary reader, or university students in the initial years. The prerequisites are therefore minimal, and necessary mathematical tools are provided as needed. This lean approach is complemented with a problem-based orientation and a methodology of generalization/reduction. In this way, the book can be useful for students from STEM fields, economics and enterprise sciences, social sciences and humanities, as well as for the general reader interested in multi/trans-disciplinary approaches. Features Collects and discusses the ideas underpinning decision-making through optimization tools in a simple and straightforward manner Suitable for an undergraduate course in optimization-based decision-making, or as a supplementary resource for courses in operations research and management science Self-contained coverage of traditional and more modern optimization models, while not requiring a previous background in decision theory
The book is a benefit for graduate and postgraduate students in the areas of operations research, decision theory, optimization theory, linear algebra, interval analysis and fuzzy sets. The book will also be useful for the researchers in the respective areas. The first part of the book deals with decision making problems and procedures that have been established to combine opinions about alternatives related to different points of view. Procedures based on pairwise comparisons are thoroughly investigated. In the second part we investigate optimization problems where objective functions and constraints are characterized by extremal operators such as maximum, minimum or various triangular norms (t-norms). Matrices in max-min algebra are useful in applications such as automata theory, design of switching circuits, logic of binary relations, medical diagnosis, Markov chains, social choice, models of organizations, information systems, political systems and clustering. The input data in real problems are usually not exact and can be characterized by interval values.
The availability of today’s online information systems rapidly increases the relevance of dynamic decision making within a large number of operational contexts. Whenever a sequence of interdependent decisions occurs, making a single decision raises the need for anticipation of its future impact on the entire decision process. Anticipatory support is needed for a broad variety of dynamic and stochastic decision problems from different operational contexts such as finance, energy management, manufacturing and transportation. Example problems include asset allocation, feed-in of electricity produced by wind power as well as scheduling and routing. All these problems entail a sequence of decisions contributing to an overall goal and taking place in the course of a certain period of time. Each of the decisions is derived by solution of an optimization problem. As a consequence a stochastic and dynamic decision problem resolves into a series of optimization problems to be formulated and solved by anticipation of the remaining decision process. However, actually solving a dynamic decision problem by means of approximate dynamic programming still is a major scientific challenge. Most of the work done so far is devoted to problems allowing for formulation of the underlying optimization problems as linear programs. Problem domains like scheduling and routing, where linear programming typically does not produce a significant benefit for problem solving, have not been considered so far. Therefore, the industry demand for dynamic scheduling and routing is still predominantly satisfied by purely heuristic approaches to anticipatory decision making. Although this may work well for certain dynamic decision problems, these approaches lack transferability of findings to other, related problems. This book has serves two major purposes: ‐ It provides a comprehensive and unique view of anticipatory optimization for dynamic decision making. It fully integrates Markov decision processes, dynamic programming, data mining and optimization and introduces a new perspective on approximate dynamic programming. Moreover, the book identifies different degrees of anticipation, enabling an assessment of specific approaches to dynamic decision making. ‐ It shows for the first time how to successfully solve a dynamic vehicle routing problem by approximate dynamic programming. It elaborates on every building block required for this kind of approach to dynamic vehicle routing. Thereby the book has a pioneering character and is intended to provide a footing for the dynamic vehicle routing community.
Optimization and decision making are integral parts of any manufacturing process and management system. The objective of this book is to demonstrate the confluence of theory and applications of various types of multi-criteria decision making and optimization techniques with reference to textile manufacturing and management. Divided into twelve chapters, it discusses various multi-criteria decision-making methods such as AHP, TOPSIS, ELECTRE, and optimization techniques like linear programming, fuzzy linear programming, quadratic programming, in textile domain. Multi-objective optimization problems have been dealt with two approaches, namely desirability function and evolutionary algorithm. Key Features Exclusive title covering textiles and soft computing fields including optimization and decision making Discusses concepts of traditional and non-traditional optimization methods with textile examples Explores pertinent single-objective and multi-objective optimizations Provides MATLAB coding in the Appendix to solve various types of multi-criteria decision making and optimization problems Includes examples and case studies related to textile engineering and management
This textbook approaches optimization from a multi-aspect, multi-criteria perspective. By using a Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) approach, it avoids the limits and oversimplifications that can come with optimization models with one criterion. The book is presented in a concise form, addressing how to solve decision problems in sequences of intelligence, modelling, choice and review phases, often iterated, to identify the most preferred decision variant. The approach taken is human-centric, with the user taking the final decision is a sole and sovereign actor in the decision making process. To ensure generality, no assumption about the Decision Maker preferences or behavior is made. The presentation of these concepts is illustrated by numerous examples, figures, and problems to be solved with the help of downloadable spreadsheets. This electronic companion contains models of problems to be solved built in Excel spreadsheet files. Optimization models are too often oversimplifications of decision problems met in practice. For instance, modeling company performance by an optimization model in which the criterion function is short-term profit to be maximized, does not fully reflect the essence of business management. The company’s managing staff is accountable not only for operational decisions, but also for actions which shall result in the company ability to generate a decent profit in the future. This calls for management decisions and actions which ensure short-term profitability, but also maintaining long-term relations with clients, introducing innovative products, financing long-term investments, etc. Each of those additional, though indispensable actions and their effects can be modeled separately, case by case, by an optimization model with a criterion function adequately selected. However, in each case the same set of constraints represents the range of company admissible actions. The aim and the scope of this textbook is to present methodologies and methods enabling modeling of such actions jointly.
The book provides insights in the decision-making for implementing strategies in various spheres of real-world issues. It integrates optimal policies in various decisionmaking problems and serves as a reference for researchers and industrial practitioners. Furthermore, the book provides sound knowledge of modelling of real-world problems and solution procedure using the various optimisation and statistical techniques for making optimal decisions. The book is meant for teachers, students, researchers and industrialists who are working in the field of materials science, especially operations research and applied statistics.
A broad introduction to algorithms for decision making under uncertainty, introducing the underlying mathematical problem formulations and the algorithms for solving them. Automated decision-making systems or decision-support systems—used in applications that range from aircraft collision avoidance to breast cancer screening—must be designed to account for various sources of uncertainty while carefully balancing multiple objectives. This textbook provides a broad introduction to algorithms for decision making under uncertainty, covering the underlying mathematical problem formulations and the algorithms for solving them. The book first addresses the problem of reasoning about uncertainty and objectives in simple decisions at a single point in time, and then turns to sequential decision problems in stochastic environments where the outcomes of our actions are uncertain. It goes on to address model uncertainty, when we do not start with a known model and must learn how to act through interaction with the environment; state uncertainty, in which we do not know the current state of the environment due to imperfect perceptual information; and decision contexts involving multiple agents. The book focuses primarily on planning and reinforcement learning, although some of the techniques presented draw on elements of supervised learning and optimization. Algorithms are implemented in the Julia programming language. Figures, examples, and exercises convey the intuition behind the various approaches presented.
