This book represents the results of cross-fertilization between OR/MS and CS/AI. It is this interface of OR/CS that makes possible advances that could not have been achieved in isolation. Taken collectively, these articles are indicative of the state-of-the-art in the interface between OR/MS and CS/AI and of the high caliber of research being conducted by members of the INFORMS Computing Society.
This book examines the newer and emerging models of telecommunications technology that play instrumental roles in providing international economic and societal interconnectivity. Advancing technology in the field imposes the need to develop new models to solve complex planning and decision making problems. The book explores natural output of the new technical developments and applications with selective chapter treatment on novel business models to fill technical and business needs.
This book is published in conjunction with the 12th Computing Society Conference, held January 9, 2011, in Monterey, California. The themes of the conference and this book are operations research, computing, and homeland defense. The papers cover topics on the theory of computing, mathematical programming, game theory, statistics and more; over half have applications to homeland defense.
Discrete event systems (DES) have become pervasive in our daily lives. Examples include (but are not restricted to) manufacturing and supply chains, transportation, healthcare, call centers, and financial engineering. However, due to their complexities that often involve millions or even billions of events with many variables and constraints, modeling these stochastic simulations has long been a hard nut to crack. The advance in available computer technology, especially of cluster and cloud computing, has paved the way for the realization of a number of stochastic simulation optimization for complex discrete event systems. This book will introduce two important techniques initially proposed and developed by Professor Y C Ho and his team; namely perturbation analysis and ordinal optimization for stochastic simulation optimization, and present the state-of-the-art technology, and their future research directions.
This is the first book devoted entirely to Differential Evolution (DE) for global permutative-based combinatorial optimization. Since its original development, DE has mainly been applied to solving problems characterized by continuous parameters. This means that only a subset of real-world problems could be solved by the original, classical DE algorithm. This book presents in detail the various permutative-based combinatorial DE formulations by their initiators in an easy-to-follow manner, through extensive illustrations and computer code. It is a valuable resource for professionals and students interested in DE in order to have full potentials of DE at their disposal as a proven optimizer. All source programs in C and Mathematica programming languages are downloadable from the website of Springer.
A unified view of metaheuristics This book provides a complete background on metaheuristics and shows readers how to design and implement efficient algorithms to solve complex optimization problems across a diverse range of applications, from networking and bioinformatics to engineering design, routing, and scheduling. It presents the main design questions for all families of metaheuristics and clearly illustrates how to implement the algorithms under a software framework to reuse both the design and code. Throughout the book, the key search components of metaheuristics are considered as a toolbox for: Designing efficient metaheuristics (e.g. local search, tabu search, simulated annealing, evolutionary algorithms, particle swarm optimization, scatter search, ant colonies, bee colonies, artificial immune systems) for optimization problems Designing efficient metaheuristics for multi-objective optimization problems Designing hybrid, parallel, and distributed metaheuristics Implementing metaheuristics on sequential and parallel machines Using many case studies and treating design and implementation independently, this book gives readers the skills necessary to solve large-scale optimization problems quickly and efficiently. It is a valuable reference for practicing engineers and researchers from diverse areas dealing with optimization or machine learning; and graduate students in computer science, operations research, control, engineering, business and management, and applied mathematics.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Hybrid Metaheuristics, HM 2008, held in Malaga, Spain, in October 2008. The 14 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 33 submissions. The papers discuss specific aspects of combinations of metaheuristics and other solving techniques for tackling particular relevant constrained optimization problems, such as fiber optic networks, time tabling and freight train scheduling problems.
The idea behind TSP was conceived by Austrian mathematician Karl Menger in mid 1930s who invited the research community to consider a problem from the everyday life from a mathematical point of view. A traveling salesman has to visit exactly once each one of a list of m cities and then return to the home city. He knows the cost of traveling from any city i to any other city j. Thus, which is the tour of least possible cost the salesman can take? In this book the problem of finding algorithmic technique leading to good/optimal solutions for TSP (or for some other strictly related problems) is considered. TSP is a very attractive problem for the research community because it arises as a natural subproblem in many applications concerning the every day life. Indeed, each application, in which an optimal ordering of a number of items has to be chosen in a way that the total cost of a solution is determined by adding up the costs arising from two successively items, can be modelled as a TSP instance. Thus, studying TSP can never be considered as an abstract research with no real importance.
In a world with highly competitive markets and economic instability due to capitalization, industrial competition has increasingly intensified. In order for many industries to survive and succeed, they need to develop highly effective coordination between supply chain partners, dynamic collaborative and strategic alliance relationships, and efficient logistics and supply chain network designs. Consequently, in the past decade, there has been an explosion of interest among academic researchers and industrial practitioners in innovative supply chain and logistics models, algorithms, and coordination policies. Mathematically distinct from classical supply chain management, this emerging research area has been proven to be useful and applicable to a wide variety of industries. This book brings together recent advances in supply chain and logistics research and computational optimization that apply to a collaborative environment in the enterprise.
This book provides a thorough and up-to-date discussion of arc routing by world-renowned researchers. Organized by problem type, the book offers a rigorous treatment of complexity issues, models, algorithms, and applications. Arc Routing: Problems, Methods, and Applications opens with a historical perspective of the field and is followed by three sections that cover complexity and the Chinese Postman and the Rural Postman problems; the Capacitated Arc Routing Problem and routing problems with min-max and profit maximization objectives; and important applications, including meter reading, snow removal, and waste collection.
