Motivation Stochastic Linear Programming with recourse represents one of the more widely applicable models for incorporating uncertainty within in which the SLP optimization models. There are several arenas model is appropriate, and such models have found applications in air line yield management, capacity planning, electric power generation planning, financial planning, logistics, telecommunications network planning, and many more. In some of these applications, modelers represent uncertainty in terms of only a few seenarios and formulate a large scale linear program which is then solved using LP software. However, there are many applications, such as the telecommunications planning problem discussed in this book, where a handful of seenarios do not capture variability well enough to provide a reasonable model of the actual decision-making problem. Problems of this type easily exceed the capabilities of LP software by several orders of magnitude. Their solution requires the use of algorithmic methods that exploit the structure of the SLP model in a manner that will accommodate large scale applications."

This book includes a self-contained theory of inequality problems and their applications to unilateral mechanics. Fundamental theoretical results and related methods of analysis are discussed on various examples and applications in mechanics. The work can be seen as a book of applied nonlinear analysis entirely devoted to the study of inequality problems, i.e. variational inequalities and hemivariational inequalities in mathematical models and their corresponding applications to unilateral mechanics. It contains a systematic investigation of the interplay between theoretical results and concrete problems in mechanics. It is the first textbook including a comprehensive and systematic study of both elliptic, parabolic and hyperbolic inequality models, dynamical unilateral systems and unilateral eigenvalues problems. The book is self-contained and it offers, for the first time, the possibility to learn about inequality models and to acquire the essence of the theory in a relatively short time.

Since the volume may be of interest to a broad variety of people, it is arranged in parts that require different levels of mathematical background. Part I is written in a simple form and can be assessed by any computer-literate person interested in the application of visualization methods in decision making. This part will be of interest to specialists and students in various fields related to decision making including environmental studies, management, business, engineering, etc. In Part II computational methods are introduced in a relatively simple form. This part will be of interest to specialists and students in the field of applied optimization, operations research and computer science. Part III is written for specialists and students in applied mathematics interested in the theoretical basis of modern optimization. Due to this structure, the parts can be read independently. For example, students interested in environmental applications could restrict themselves to Part I and the Epilogue. In contrast, those who are interested in computational methods can skip Part I and read Part II only. Finally, specialists, who are interested in the theory of approximation of multi-dimensional convex sets or in estimation of disturbances of polyhedral sets, can read the corresponding chapters of Part III.

Optimal Control and Optimization of Stochastic Supply Chain Systems examines its subject the context of the presence of a variety of uncertainties. Numerous examples with intuitive illustrations and tables are provided, to demonstrate the structural characteristics of the optimal control policies in various stochastic supply chains and to show how to make use of these characteristics to construct easy-to-operate sub-optimal policies. In Part I, a general introduction to stochastic supply chain systems is provided. Analytical models for various stochastic supply chain systems are formulated and analysed in Part II. In Part III the structural knowledge of the optimal control policies obtained in Part II is utilized to construct easy-to-operate sub-optimal control policies for various stochastic supply chain systems accordingly. Finally, Part IV discusses the optimisation of threshold-type control policies and their robustness. A key feature of the book is its tying together of the complex analytical models produced by the requirements of operational practice, and the simple solutions needed for implementation. The analytical models and theoretical analysis propounded in this monograph will be of benefit to academic researchers and graduate students looking at logistics and supply chain management from standpoints in operations research or industrial, manufacturing, or control engineering. The practical tools and solutions and the qualitative insights into the ideas underlying functional supply chain systems will be of similar use to readers from more industrially-based backgrounds.

There are many methods of stable controller design for nonlinear systems. In seeking to go beyond the minimum requirement of stability, Adaptive Dynamic Programming in Discrete Time approaches the challenging topic of optimal control for nonlinear systems using the tools of adaptive dynamic programming (ADP). The range of systems treated is extensive; affine, switched, singularly perturbed and time-delay nonlinear systems are discussed as are the uses of neural networks and techniques of value and policy iteration. The text features three main aspects of ADP in which the methods proposed for stabilization and for tracking and games benefit from the incorporation of optimal control methods: * infinite-horizon control for which the difficulty of solving partial differential Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equations directly is overcome, and proof provided that the iterative value function updating sequence converges to the infimum of all the value functions obtained by admissible control law sequences; * finite-horizon control, implemented in discrete-time nonlinear systems showing the reader how to obtain suboptimal control solutions within a fixed number of control steps and with results more easily applied in real systems than those usually gained from infinite-horizon control; * nonlinear games for which a pair of mixed optimal policies are derived for solving games both when the saddle point does not exist, and, when it does, avoiding the existence conditions of the saddle point. Non-zero-sum games are studied in the context of a single network scheme in which policies are obtained guaranteeing system stability and minimizing the individual performance function yielding a Nash equilibrium. In order to make the coverage suitable for the student as well as for the expert reader, Adaptive Dynamic Programming in Discrete Time: * establishes the fundamental theory involved clearly with each chapter devoted to a clearly identifiable control paradigm; * demonstrates convergence proofs of the ADP algorithms to deepen understanding of the derivation of stability and convergence with the iterative computational methods used; and * shows how ADP methods can be put to use both in simulation and in real applications. This text will be of considerable interest to researchers interested in optimal control and its applications in operations research, applied mathematics computational intelligence and engineering. Graduate students working in control and operations research will also find the ideas presented here to be a source of powerful methods for furthering their study.

This volume presents a selection of survey and research articles based on invited lectures and contributed talks presented at the Workshop on Fluid Dynamics in Porous Media that was held in Coimbra, Portugal, in September 12-14, 2011. The contributions are devoted to mathematical modeling, numerical simulation and their applications, providing the readers a state-of-the-art overview on the latest findings and new challenges on the topic. The book includes research work of worldwide recognized leaders in their respective fields and presents advances in both theory and applications, making it appealing to a vast range of audience, in particular mathematicians, engineers and physicists.

Complex Social Networks is a newly emerging (hot) topic with applications in a variety of domains, such as communication networks, engineering networks, social networks, and biological networks. In the last decade, there has been an explosive growth of research on complex real-world networks, a theme that is becoming pervasive in many disciplines, ranging from mathematics and computer science to the social and biological sciences. Optimization of complex communication networks requires a deep understanding of the interplay between the dynamics of the physical network and the information dynamics within the network. Although there are a few books addressing social networks or complex networks, none of them has specially focused on the optimization perspective of studying these networks. This book provides the basic theory of complex networks with several new mathematical approaches and optimization techniques to design and analyze dynamic complex networks. A wide range of applications and optimization problems derived from research areas such as cellular and molecular chemistry, operations research, brain physiology, epidemiology, and ecology.

Contemporary design in engineering and industry relies heavily on computer simulation and efficient algorithms to reduce the cost and to maximize the performance and sustainability as well as profits and energy efficiency. Solving an optimization problem correctly and efficiently requires not only the right choice of optimization algorithms and simulation methods, but also the proper implementation and insight into the problem of interest. This book consists of ten self-contained, detailed case studies of real-world optimization problems, selected from a wide range of applications and contributed from worldwide experts who are working in these exciting areas.

Optimization topics and applications include gas and water supply networks, oil field production optimization, microwave engineering, aerodynamic shape design, environmental emergence modelling, structural engineering, waveform design for radar and communication systems, parameter estimation in laser experiment and measurement, engineering materials and network scheduling. These case studies have been solved using a wide range of optimization techniques, including particle swarm optimization, genetic algorithms, artificial bee colony, harmony search, adaptive error control, derivative-free pattern search, surrogate-based optimization, variable-fidelity modelling, as well as various other methods and approaches. This book is a practical guide to help graduates and researchers to carry out optimization for real-world applications. More advanced readers will also find it a helpful reference and aide memoire.

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This book serves as an introductory text to optimization theory in normed spaces and covers all areas of nonlinear optimization. It presents fundamentals with particular emphasis on the application to problems in the calculus of variations, approximation and optimal control theory. The reader is expected to have a basic knowledge of linear functional analysis.

Shimon Even's Graph Algorithms, published in 1979, was a seminal introductory book on algorithms read by everyone engaged in the field. This thoroughly revised second edition, with a foreword by Richard M. Karp and notes by Andrew V. Goldberg, continues the exceptional presentation from the first edition and explains algorithms in a formal but simple language with a direct and intuitive presentation. The book begins by covering basic material, including graphs and shortest paths, trees, depth-first-search and breadth-first search. The main part of the book is devoted to network flows and applications of network flows, and it ends with chapters on planar graphs and testing graph planarity.

This research monograph summarizes a line of research that maps certain classical problems of discrete mathematics and operations research - such as the Hamiltonian Cycle and the Travelling Salesman Problems - into convex domains where continuum analysis can be carried out. Arguably, the inherent difficulty of these, now classical, problems stems precisely from the discrete nature of domains in which these problems are posed. The convexification of domains underpinning these results is achieved by assigning probabilistic interpretation to key elements of the original deterministic problems. In particular, the approaches summarized here build on a technique that embeds Hamiltonian Cycle and Travelling Salesman Problems in a structured singularly perturbed Markov decision process. The unifying idea is to interpret subgraphs traced out by deterministic policies (including Hamiltonian cycles, if any) as extreme points of a convex polyhedron in a space filled with randomized policies. The above innovative approach has now evolved to the point where there are many, both theoretical and algorithmic, results that exploit the nexus between graph theoretic structures and both probabilistic and algebraic entities of related Markov chains. The latter include moments of first return times, limiting frequencies of visits to nodes, or the spectra of certain matrices traditionally associated with the analysis of Markov chains. However, these results and algorithms are dispersed over many research papers appearing in journals catering to disparate audiences. As a result, the published manuscripts are often written in a very terse manner and use disparate notation, thereby making it difficult for new researchers to make use of the many reported advances. Hence the main purpose of this book is to present a concise and yet easily accessible synthesis of the majority of the theoretical and algorithmic results obtained so far. In addition, the book discusses numerous open questions and problems that arise from this body of work and which are yet to be fully solved. The approach casts the Hamiltonian Cycle Problem in a mathematical framework that permits analytical concepts and techniques, not used hitherto in this context, to be brought to bear to further clarify both the underlying difficulty of NP-completeness of this problem and the relative exceptionality of truly difficult instances. Finally, the material is arranged in such a manner that the introductory chapters require very little mathematical background and discuss instances of graphs with interesting structures that motivated a lot of the research in this topic. More difficult results are introduced later and are illustrated with numerous examples.

The contributions appearing in this volume are a snapshot of the different topics that were discussed during the Second Conference "Mathematics and Image Processing" held at the University of Orleans in 2010. They mainly concern, image reconstruction, texture extraction and image classification and involve a variety of different methods and applications. Therefore it was impossible to split the papers into generic groups which is why they are presented in alphabetic order. However they mainly concern: texture analysis (5 papers) with different techniques (variational analysis, wavelet and morphological component analysis, fractional Brownian fields), geometrical methods (2 papers ) for restoration and invariant feature detection, classification (with multifractal analysis), neurosciences imaging and analysis of Multi-Valued Images.

Nonconvex Optimization is a multi-disciplinary research field that deals with the characterization and computation of local/global minima/maxima of nonlinear, nonconvex, nonsmooth, discrete and continuous functions. Nonconvex optimization problems are frequently encountered in modeling real world systems for a very broad range of applications including engineering, mathematical economics, management science, financial engineering, and social science. This contributed volume consists of selected contributions from the Advanced Training Programme on Nonconvex Optimization and Its Applications held at Banaras Hindu University in March 2009. It aims to bring together new concepts, theoretical developments, and applications from these researchers. Both theoretical and applied articles are contained in this volume which adds to the state of the art research in this field. Topics in Nonconvex Optimization is suitable for advanced graduate students and researchers in this area.

Shimon Even's Graph Algorithms, published in 1979, was a seminal introductory book on algorithms read by everyone engaged in the field. This thoroughly revised second edition, with a foreword by Richard M. Karp and notes by Andrew V. Goldberg, continues the exceptional presentation from the first edition and explains algorithms in a formal but simple language with a direct and intuitive presentation. The book begins by covering basic material, including graphs and shortest paths, trees, depth-first-search and breadth-first search. The main part of the book is devoted to network flows and applications of network flows, and it ends with chapters on planar graphs and testing graph planarity.

This textbook is a second edition of Evolutionary Algorithms for Solving Multi-Objective Problems, significantly expanded and adapted for the classroom. The various features of multi-objective evolutionary algorithms are presented here in an innovative and student-friendly fashion, incorporating state-of-the-art research. The book disseminates the application of evolutionary algorithm techniques to a variety of practical problems. It contains exhaustive appendices, index and bibliography and links to a complete set of teaching tutorials, exercises and solutions.

A long long time ago, echoing philosophical and aesthetic principles that existed since antiquity, William of Ockham enounced the principle of parsimony, better known today as Ockham's razor: "Entities should not be multiplied without neces sity. " This principle enabled scientists to select the "best" physical laws and theories to explain the workings of the Universe and continued to guide scienti?c research, leadingtobeautifulresultsliketheminimaldescriptionlength approachtostatistical inference and the related Kolmogorov complexity approach to pattern recognition. However, notions of complexity and description length are subjective concepts anddependonthelanguage"spoken"whenpresentingideasandresults. The?eldof sparse representations, that recently underwent a Big Bang like expansion, explic itly deals with the Yin Yang interplay between the parsimony of descriptions and the "language" or "dictionary" used in them, and it became an extremely exciting area of investigation. It already yielded a rich crop of mathematically pleasing, deep and beautiful results that quickly translated into a wealth of practical engineering applications. You are holding in your hands the ?rst guide book to Sparseland, and I am sure you'll ?nd in it both familiar and new landscapes to see and admire, as well as ex cellent pointers that will help you ?nd further valuable treasures. Enjoy the journey to Sparseland! Haifa, Israel, December 2009 Alfred M. Bruckstein vii Preface This book was originally written to serve as the material for an advanced one semester (fourteen 2 hour lectures) graduate course for engineering students at the Technion, Israel.

This book Algebraic Modeling Systems - Modeling and Solving Real World Optimization Problems - deals with the aspects of modeling and solving real-world optimization problems in a unique combination. It treats systematically the major algebraic modeling languages (AMLs) and modeling systems (AMLs) used to solve mathematical optimization problems. AMLs helped significantly to increase the usage of mathematical optimization in industry. Therefore it is logical consequence that the GOR (Gesellschaft fur Operations Research) Working Group Mathematical Optimization in Real Life had a second meeting devoted to AMLs, which, after 7 years, followed the original 71st Meeting of the GOR (Gesellschaft fur Operations Research) Working Group Mathematical Optimization in Real Life which was held under the title Modeling Languages in Mathematical Optimization during April 23-25, 2003 in the German Physics Society Conference Building in Bad Honnef, Germany. While the first meeting resulted in the book Modeling Languages in Mathematical Optimization, this book is an offspring of the 86th Meeting of the GOR working group which was again held in Bad Honnef under the title Modeling Languages in Mathematical Optimization."

Advances in the field of signal processing, nonlinear dynamics, statistics, and optimization theory, combined with marked improvement in instrumenta tion and development of computers systems, have made it possible to apply the power of mathematics to the task of understanding the human brain. This verita ble revolution already has resulted in widespread availability of high resolution neuroimaging devices in clinical as well as research settings. Breakthroughs in functional imaging are not far behind. Mathematical tech niques developed for the study of complex nonlinear systems and chaos already are being used to explore the complex nonlinear dynamics of human brain phys iology. Global optimization is being applied to data mining expeditions in an effort to find knowledge in the vast amount of information being generated by neuroimaging and neurophysiological investigations. These breakthroughs in the ability to obtain, store and analyze large datasets offer, for the first time, exciting opportunities to explore the mechanisms underlying normal brain func tion as well as the affects of diseases such as epilepsy, sleep disorders, movement disorders, and cognitive disorders that affect millions of people every year. Ap plication of these powerful tools to the study of the human brain requires, by necessity, collaboration among scientists, engineers, neurobiologists and clini cians. Each discipline brings to the table unique knowledge, unique approaches to problem solving, and a unique language.

Complex Social Networks is a newly emerging (hot) topic with applications in a variety of domains, such as communication networks, engineering networks, social networks, and biological networks. In the last decade, there has been an explosive growth of research on complex real-world networks, a theme that is becoming pervasive in many disciplines, ranging from mathematics and computer science to the social and biological sciences. Optimization of complex communication networks requires a deep understanding of the interplay between the dynamics of the physical network and the information dynamics within the network. Although there are a few books addressing social networks or complex networks, none of them has specially focused on the optimization perspective of studying these networks. This book provides the basic theory of complex networks with several new mathematical approaches and optimization techniques to design and analyze dynamic complex networks. A wide range of applications and optimization problems derived from research areas such as cellular and molecular chemistry, operations research, brain physiology, epidemiology, and ecology.

Genetic Algorithms: Principles and Perspectives: A Guide to GA Theory is a survey of some important theoretical contributions, many of which have been proposed and developed in the Foundations of Genetic Algorithms series of workshops. However, this theoretical work is still rather fragmented, and the authors believe that it is the right time to provide the field with a systematic presentation of the current state of theory in the form of a set of theoretical perspectives. The authors do this in the interest of providing students and researchers with a balanced foundational survey of some recent research on GAs. The scope of the book includes chapter-length discussions of Basic Principles, Schema Theory, "No Free Lunch", GAs and Markov Processes, Dynamical Systems Model, Statistical Mechanics Approximations, Predicting GA Performance, Landscapes and Test Problems.

This is a book on Linear-Fractional Programming (here and in what follows we will refer to it as "LFP"). The field of LFP, largely developed by Hungarian mathematician B. Martos and his associates in the 1960's, is concerned with problems of op timization. LFP problems deal with determining the best possible allo cation of available resources to meet certain specifications. In particular, they may deal with situations where a number of resources, such as people, materials, machines, and land, are available and are to be combined to yield several products. In linear-fractional programming, the goal is to determine a per missible allocation of resources that will maximize or minimize some specific showing, such as profit gained per unit of cost, or cost of unit of product produced, etc. Strictly speaking, linear-fractional programming is a special case of the broader field of Mathematical Programming. LFP deals with that class of mathematical programming problems in which the relations among the variables are linear: the con straint relations (i.e. the restrictions) must be in linear form and the function to be optimized (i.e. the objective function) must be a ratio of two linear functions.

This volume is a collection of contributions to the subject of multicriteria decision making and differential games, all of which are based wholly or in part on papers that have appeared in the Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications. The authors take this opportunity to revise, update, or enlarge upon their earlier publications. The theory of multicriteria decision making and differential games is concerned with situations in which a single decision maker is faced with a multiplicity of usually incompatible criteria, performance indices or payoffs, or in which a number of decision makers, or players, must take into account criteria each of which depends on the decisions of all the decision makers. The first six chapters are devoted to situations involving a single decision maker, or a number of decision makers in complete collaboration and thus being in effect a single decision maker. Chapters I -IV treat various topics in the theory of domination structures and nondominated decisions. Chapter V presents a discussion of efficient, or Pareto-optimal, decisions. The approach to multicriteria decision making via preference relations is explored in Chapter VI. When there is more than one decision maker, cooperation, as well as noncooperation, is possible. Chapters VII and VIII deal with the topic of coalitions in a dynamic setting, while Chapters IX and X address the situation of two unequal decision makers, a leader and a follower.

Welcome to ANALYZE, designed to provide computer assistance for analyzing linear programs and their solutions. Chapter 1 gives an overview of ANALYZE and how to install it. It also describes how to get started and how to obtain further documentation and help on-line. Chapter 2 reviews the forms of linear programming models and describes the syntax of a model. One of the routine, but important, functions of ANALYZE is to enable convenient access to rows and columns in the matrix by conditional delineation. Chapter 3 illustrates simple queries, like DISPLAY, LIST, and PICTURE. This chapter also introduces the SUBMAT command level to define any submatrix by an arbitrary sequence of additions, deletions and reversals. Syntactic explanations and a schema view are also illustrated. Chapter 4 goes through some elementary exercises to demonstrate computer assisted analysis and introduce additional conventions of the ANALYZE language. Besides simple queries, it demonstrates the INTERPRT command, which automates the analysis process and gives English explanations of results. The last 2 exercises are diagnoses of elementary infeasible instances of a particular model. Chapter 5 progresses to some advanced uses of ANALYZE. The first is blocking to obtain macro views of the model and for finding embedded substructures, like a netform. The second is showing rates of substitution described by the basic equations. Then, the use of the REDUCE and BASIS commands are illustrated for a variety of applications, including solution analysis, infeasibility diagnosis, and redundancy detection.

Sensitivity analysis and optimal shape design are key issues in engineering that have been affected by advances in numerical tools currently available. This book, and its supplementary online files, presents basic optimization techniques that can be used to compute the sensitivity of a given design to local change, or to improve its performance by local optimization of these data. The relevance and scope of these techniques have improved dramatically in recent years because of progress in discretization strategies, optimization algorithms, automatic differentiation, software availability, and the power of personal computers. Numerical Methods in Sensitivity Analysis and Shape Optimization will be of interest to graduate students involved in mathematical modeling and simulation, as well as engineers and researchers in applied mathematics looking for an up-to-date introduction to optimization techniques, sensitivity analysis, and optimal design.

Many decision problems in Operations Research are defined on temporal networks, that is, workflows of time-consuming tasks whose processing order is constrained by precedence relations. For example, temporal networks are used to model projects, computer applications, digital circuits and production processes. Optimization problems arise in temporal networks when a decision maker wishes to determine a temporal arrangement of the tasks and/or a resource assignment that optimizes some network characteristic (e.g. the time required to complete all tasks). The parameters of these optimization problems (e.g. the task durations) are typically unknown at the time the decision problem arises. This monograph investigates solution techniques for optimization problems in temporal networks that explicitly account for this parameter uncertainty. We study several formulations, each of which requires different information about the uncertain problem parameters.