This book gathers a selection of peer-reviewed papers presented at the International Conference on Operations Research (OR 2018), which was held at the Free University of Brussels, Belgium on September 12 - 14, 2018, and was jointly organized by the German Operations Research Society (GOR) and the Belgian Operational Research Society (ORBEL). 575 scientists, practitioners and students from mathematics, computer science, business/economics and related fields attended the conference and presented more than 400 papers in parallel topic streams, as well as special award sessions. The respective papers discuss classical mathematical optimization, statistics and simulation techniques. These are complemented by computer science methods, and by tools for processing data, designing and implementing information systems. The book also examines recent advances in information technology, which allow big data volumes to be processed and enable real-time predictive and prescriptive business analytics to drive decisions and actions. Lastly, it includes problems modeled and treated while taking into account uncertainty, risk management, behavioral issues, etc.

This book focuses on the game-theoretical semantics and epistemic logic of Jaakko Hintikka. Hintikka was a prodigious and esteemed philosopher and logician, and his death in August 2015 was a huge loss to the philosophical community. This book, whose chapters have been in preparation for several years, is dedicated to the work of Jaako Hintikka, and to his memory. This edited volume consists of 23 contributions from leading logicians and philosophers, who discuss themes that span across the entire range of Hintikka's career. Semantic Representationalism, Logical Dialogues, Knowledge and Epistemic logic are among some of the topics covered in this book's chapters. The book should appeal to students, scholars and teachers who wish to explore the philosophy of Jaako Hintikka.

This proceedings book presents selected contributions from the XVIII Congress of APDIO (the Portuguese Association of Operational Research) held in Valenca on June 28-30, 2017. Prepared by leading Portuguese and international researchers in the field of operations research, it covers a wide range of complex real-world applications of operations research methods using recent theoretical techniques, in order to narrow the gap between academic research and practical applications. Of particular interest are the applications of, nonlinear and mixed-integer programming, data envelopment analysis, clustering techniques, hybrid heuristics, supply chain management, and lot sizing and job scheduling problems. In most chapters, the problems, methods and methodologies described are complemented by supporting figures, tables and algorithms. The XVIII Congress of APDIO marked the 18th installment of the regular biannual meetings of APDIO - the Portuguese Association of Operational Research. The meetings bring together researchers, scholars and practitioners, as well as MSc and PhD students, working in the field of operations research to present and discuss their latest works. The main theme of the latest meeting was Operational Research Pro Bono. Given the breadth of topics covered, the book offers a valuable resource for all researchers, students and practitioners interested in the latest trends in this field.

This book is a compilation of recent research on distributed optimization algorithms for the integral load management of plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) fleets and their potential services to the electricity system. It also includes detailed developed Matlab scripts. These algorithms can be implemented and extended to diverse applications where energy management is required (smart buildings, railways systems, task sharing in micro-grids, etc.). The proposed methodologies optimally manage PEV fleets' charge and discharge schedules by applying classical optimization, game theory, and evolutionary game theory techniques. Taking owner's requirements into consideration, these approaches provide services like load shifting, load balancing among phases of the system, reactive power supply, and task sharing among PEVs. The book is intended for use in graduate optimization and energy management courses, and readers are encouraged to test and adapt the scripts to their specific applications.

This textbook gives a comprehensive introduction to stochastic processes and calculus in the fields of finance and economics, more specifically mathematical finance and time series econometrics. Over the past decades stochastic calculus and processes have gained great importance, because they play a decisive role in the modeling of financial markets and as a basis for modern time series econometrics. Mathematical theory is applied to solve stochastic differential equations and to derive limiting results for statistical inference on nonstationary processes. This introduction is elementary and rigorous at the same time. On the one hand it gives a basic and illustrative presentation of the relevant topics without using many technical derivations. On the other hand many of the procedures are presented at a technically advanced level: for a thorough understanding, they are to be proven. In order to meet both requirements jointly, the present book is equipped with a lot of challenging problems at the end of each chapter as well as with the corresponding detailed solutions. Thus the virtual text - augmented with more than 60 basic examples and 40 illustrative figures - is rather easy to read while a part of the technical arguments is transferred to the exercise problems and their solutions.

The satellite range scheduling (SRS) problem, an important operations research problem in the aerospace industry consisting of allocating tasks among satellites and Earth-bound objects, is examined in this book. SRS principles and solutions are applicable to many areas, including: Satellite communications, where tasks are communication intervals between sets of satellites and ground stations Earth observation, where tasks are observations of spots on the Earth by satellites Sensor scheduling, where tasks are observations of satellites by sensors on the Earth. This self-contained monograph begins with a structured compendium of the problem and moves on to explain the optimal approach to the solution, which includes aspects from graph theory, set theory, game theory and belief networks. This book is accessible to students, professionals and researchers in a variety of fields, including: operations research, optimization, scheduling theory, dynamic programming and game theory. Taking account of the distributed, stochastic and dynamic variants of the problem, this book presents the optimal solution to the fixed interval SRS problem and how to migrate results into more complex cases. Reference algorithms and traditional algorithms for solving the scheduling problems are provided and compared with examples and simulations in practical scenarios.

This book features selected papers from The Seventh International Conference on Research and Education in Mathematics that was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia from 25 - 27th August 2015. With chapters devoted to the most recent discoveries in mathematics and statistics and serve as a platform for knowledge and information exchange between experts from academic and industrial sectors, it covers a wide range of topics, including numerical analysis, fluid mechanics, operation research, optimization, statistics and game theory. It is a valuable resource for pure and applied mathematicians, statisticians, engineers and scientists, and provides an excellent overview of the latest research in mathematical sciences.

This book presents a systematic overview on partition function form games: a game form in cooperative game theory to integrate externalities for various applications. Cooperative game theory has been immensely useful to study a wide range of issues, but the standard approaches ignore the side effects of cooperation. Recently interest shifted to problems where externalities play the main roles such as models of cooperation in market competition or the shared use of public resources. Such problems require richer models that can explicitly evaluate the side-effects of cooperation. In partition function form games the value of cooperation depends on the outsiders' actions. A recent surge of interest driven by applications has made results very fragmented. This book offers an accessible, yet comprehensive and systematic study of properties, solutions and applications of partition function games surveying both theoretical results and their applications. It assembles a survey of existing research and smaller original results as well as original interpretations and comparisons. The book is self-contained and accessible for readers with little or no knowledge of cooperative game theory.

This book develops the central aspect of fixed point theory - the topological fixed point index - to maximal generality, emphasizing correspondences and other aspects of the theory that are of special interest to economics. Numerous topological consequences are presented, along with important implications for dynamical systems. The book assumes the reader has no mathematical knowledge beyond that which is familiar to all theoretical economists. In addition to making the material available to a broad audience, avoiding algebraic topology results in more geometric and intuitive proofs. Graduate students and researchers in economics, and related fields in mathematics and computer science, will benefit from this book, both as a useful reference and as a well-written rigorous exposition of foundational mathematics. Numerous problems sketch key results from a wide variety of topics in theoretical economics, making the book an outstanding text for advanced graduate courses in economics and related disciplines.

Born of a belief that economic insights should not require much mathematical sophistication, this book proposes novel and parsimonious methods to incorporate ignorance and uncertainty into economic modeling, without complex mathematics. Economics has made great strides over the past several decades in modeling agents' decisions when they are incompletely informed, but many economists believe that there are aspects of these models that are less than satisfactory. Among the concerns are that ignorance is not captured well in most models, that agents' presumed cognitive ability is implausible, and that derived optimal behavior is sometimes driven by the fine details of the model rather than the underlying economics. Compte and Postlewaite lay out a tractable way to address these concerns, and to incorporate plausible limitations on agents' sophistication. A central aspect of the proposed methodology is to restrict the strategies assumed available to agents.

This book is an authoritative collection of contributions in the field of soft-computing. Based on selected works presented at the 6th World Conference on Soft Computing, held on May 22-25, 2016, in Berkeley, USA, it describes new theoretical advances, as well as cutting-edge methods and applications. Theories cover a wealth of topics, such as fuzzy logic, cognitive modeling, Bayesian and probabilistic methods, multi-criteria decision making, utility theory, approximate reasoning, human-centric computing and many others. Applications concerns a number of fields, such as internet and semantic web, social networks and trust, control and robotics, computer vision, medicine and bioinformatics, as well as finance, security and e-Commerce, among others. Dedicated to the 50th Anniversary of Fuzzy Logic and to the 95th Birthday Anniversary of Lotfi A. Zadeh, the book not only offers a timely view on the field, yet it also discusses thought-provoking developments and challenges, thus fostering new research directions in the diverse areas of soft computing.

This book reports on advanced concepts in fuzzy graph theory, showing a set of tools that can be successfully applied to understanding and modeling illegal human trafficking. Building on the previous book on fuzzy graph by the same authors, which set the fundamentals for readers to understand this developing field of research, this second book gives a special emphasis to applications of the theory. For this, authors introduce new concepts, such as intuitionistic fuzzy graphs, the concept of independence and domination in fuzzy graphs, as well as directed fuzzy networks, incidence graphs and many more.

This book outlines the latest trends in the use of multicriteria analysis in agriculture by highlighting recent applications for modeling agricultural decision-making. It introduces specific case studies using multicriteria analysis as a method for selecting multiattribute discrete alternatives or solving multiobjective planning problems. The book is intended for a broad readership, including agricultural and environmental economists, engineers and all scientists whose work involves the management of agricultural resources and decision-making in agriculture. The methods and applications presented in this book cover decision-making processes in agricultural and environmental contexts. The methodologies described consider multiple criteria simultaneously in a wide range of complex decision-making contexts by taking into account multiple, conflicting criteria. Given the wide range of case studies covered, the book offers a comprehensive guide to decision-making in the agricultural context and beyond.

This book covers microeconomic theory at the Master's and Ph.D levels for students in business schools and economics departments. It concisely covers major mainstream microeconomic theories today, including neoclassical microeconomics, game theory, information economics, and contract theory. The revamped, 3rd edition of "Microeconomic Theory" offers faculty, graduate and upper undergraduate students with a comprehensive curriculum solution.

This book contains thirty-five selected papers presented at the International Conference on Evolutionary and Deterministic Methods for Design, Optimization and Control with Applications to Industrial and Societal Problems (EUROGEN 2017). This was one of the Thematic Conferences of the European Community on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences (ECCOMAS). Topics treated in the various chapters reflect the state of the art in theoretical and numerical methods and tools for optimization, and engineering design and societal applications. The volume focuses particularly on intelligent systems for multidisciplinary design optimization (mdo) problems based on multi-hybridized software, adjoint-based and one-shot methods, uncertainty quantification and optimization, multidisciplinary design optimization, applications of game theory to industrial optimization problems, applications in structural and civil engineering optimum design and surrogate models based optimization methods in aerodynamic design.

This book systematically studies how game theory can be used to improve security in chemical industrial areas, capturing the intelligent interactions between security managers and potential adversaries. The recent unfortunate terrorist attacks on critical infrastructures show that adversaries are intelligent and strategic. Game theoretic models have been extensively used in some domains to model these strategic adversaries. However, there is a lack of such advanced models to be employed by chemical security managers. In this book, game theoretic models for protecting chemical plants as well as clusters are proposed. Different equilibrium concepts are explored, with user-friendly explanation of how to reflect them to realistic cases. Based on efficient analysis of the properties of security issues in chemical plants/clusters, models in this book are capable to support resources allocations, cost-effectiveness analysis, cooperation incentives and alike.

This book covers some important topics in the construction of computable general equilibrium (CGE) models and examines use of these models for the analysis of economic policies, their properties, and their implications. Readers will find explanation and discussion of the theoretical structure and practical application of several model typologies, including dynamic, stochastic, micro-macro, and simulation models, as well as different closure rules and policy experiments. The presentation of applications to various country and problem-specific case studies serves to provide an informed and clearly articulated summary of the state of the art and the most important methodological advancements in the field of policy modeling within the framework of general equilibrium analysis. The book is an outcome of a recent workshop of the Italian Development Economists Association attended by a group of leading practitioners involved in the generation of CGE models and research on modeling the economy and policy making. It will be of interest to researchers, professional economists, graduate students, and knowledgeable policy makers.

This volume collects contributions from the talks given at the Game Theory and Management Conference held in St. Petersburg, Russia, in June 2017. It covers a wide spectrum of topics, among which are: game theory and management applications in fields such as: strategic management, industrial organization, marketing, operations and supply chain management, public management, financial management, human resources, energy and resource management, and others; cooperative games; dynamic games; evolutionary games; stochastic games.

This book provides recent results of game theory for networking applications. The contributors address the major opportunities and challenges in applying traditional game theory as well as intelligent game theory to the understanding and designing of modern network systems, with emphasis on both new analytical techniques and novel application scenarios. After an overview of game theory for networks, the book narrows in on game theory in communications, game theory in wireless networks, and game theory applications. The book features contributions from researchers and professionals around the world. Presents a variety of perspectives on game theory for networking applications; Shows how game theory can apply to the study of data traffic, new generation networks, and smartgrid; Includes recent results of applied game theory for networks, providing some technical progresses in GAMENETS.

Game theory is central to understanding human behavior and relevant to all of the behavioral sciences--from biology and economics, to anthropology and political science. However, as "The Bounds of Reason" demonstrates, game theory alone cannot fully explain human behavior and should instead complement other key concepts championed by the behavioral disciplines. Herbert Gintis shows that just as game theory without broader social theory is merely technical bravado, so social theory without game theory is a handicapped enterprise. This edition has been thoroughly revised and updated.

Reinvigorating game theory, "The Bounds of Reason" offers innovative thinking for the behavioral sciences.

The series is designed to bring together those mathematicians who are seriously interested in getting new challenging stimuli from economic theories with those economists who are seeking effective mathematical tools for their research. A lot of economic problems can be formulated as constrained optimizations and equilibration of their solutions. Various mathematical theories have been supplying economists with indispensable machineries for these problems arising in economic theory. Conversely, mathematicians have been stimulated by various mathematical difficulties raised by economic theories.

This book presents a variety of advanced research papers in optimization and dynamics written by internationally recognized researchers in these fields. As an example of applying optimization in sport, it introduces a new method for finding the optimal bat sizes in baseball and softball. The book is divided into three parts: operations research, dynamics, and applications. The operations research section deals with the convergence of Newton-type iterations for solving nonlinear equations and optimum problems, the limiting properties of the Nash bargaining solution, the utilization of public goods, and optimizing lot sizes in the automobile industry. The topics in dynamics include special linear approximations of nonlinear systems, the dynamic behavior of industrial clusters, adaptive learning in oligopolies, periodicity in duopolies resulting from production constraints, and dynamic models of love affairs. The third part presents applications in the fields of reverse logistic network design for end-of-life wind turbines, fuzzy optimization of the structure of agricultural products, water resources management in the restoration plans for a lake and also in groundwater supplies. In addition it discusses applications in reliability engineering to find the optimal preventive replacement times of deteriorating equipment and using bargaining theory to determine the best maintenance contract. The diversity of the application areas clearly illustrates the usefulness of the theory and methodology of optimization and dynamics in solving practical problems.

This book presents and uses a major, new database of the most serious forms of internal resistance to the Nazi state to study empirically the whole phenomenon of resistance to an authoritarian regime. By studying serious political resistance from a quantitative historical perspective, the book opens up a new avenue of research for economic history. The database underpinning the book was painstakingly compiled from official state records of treason and/or high treason tried before the German People's Court (Volksgerichtshof) between 1933 and 1945. It brings together material on resistance groups stored in the archives of the Federal Republic of Germany and Austria with previously inaccessible files from the former German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia and Soviet Union. Through searching these records, the authors have been able to reconstruct in hitherto unattainable detail the economic, social, political, ethnic and familial profiles, backgroun ds, and influences of all 4,378 civilians of the Third Reich active in Germany, Austria and the outside territories for whom there are complete records. The findings of their research afford fresh, new interdisciplinary insights and perspectives, not only on the configuration, timing, impact and profile of resistance to the Nazi state, but also on a range of real-world behaviours common within authoritarian states, such as defection, reward and punishment, and commitment to group identities. The book's statistical analysis reveals precisely the who, how, where and when of serious resistance. In so doing, it advances significantly our understanding of the overall pattern and nature of serious resistance within Nazi Germany.

This book reports on the implementation of evolutionary-game theory in the design of distributed optimization-based controllers. First, it discusses how the classical population-game approach can contribute to and complement the design of optimization-based controllers. It shows how the features of this approach can be exploited to extend their capabilities in the solution of distributed optimization problems, and examines density games in order to consider multiple coupled constraints and preserve the non-centralized information requirements. Furthermore, it establishes a close relationship between the possible interactions among agents in a population with constrained information sharing among different local controllers. It also discusses coalitional games, focusing on the Shapley power index and proposes an alternative method of computing the latter, which reduces computational time, as well as a different way of finding it using distributed communication structures. All the proposed strategies are then tested on various control problems, such as those related to the Barcelona water supply network, multiple continuous stirred tank reactors, various unmanned aerial vehicle systems, and a water distribution system. This thesis, examined at the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya and Universidad de los Andes in 2017, received the award for best thesis in control from the control group of the Spanish Committee of Automatic Control (CEA) in the same year.

This volume contains the proceedings of the XII Symposium of Probability and Stochastic Processes which took place at Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan in Merida, Mexico, on November 16-20, 2015. This meeting was the twelfth meeting in a series of ongoing biannual meetings aimed at showcasing the research of Mexican probabilists as well as promote new collaborations between the participants. The book features articles drawn from different research areas in probability and stochastic processes, such as: risk theory, limit theorems, stochastic partial differential equations, random trees, stochastic differential games, stochastic control, and coalescence. Two of the main manuscripts survey recent developments on stochastic control and scaling limits of Markov-branching trees, written by Kazutoshi Yamasaki and Benedicte Haas, respectively. The research-oriented manuscripts provide new advances in active research fields in Mexico. The wide selection of topics makes the book accessible to advanced graduate students and researchers in probability and stochastic processes.