Point-to-point vs hub-and-spoke. Questions of network design are real and involve many billions of dollars. Yet little is known about optimising design - nearly all work concerns optimising flow assuming a given design. This foundational book tackles optimisation of network structure itself, deriving comprehensible and realistic design principles. With fixed material cost rates, a natural class of models implies the optimality of direct source-destination connections, but considerations of variable load and environmental intrusion then enforce trunking in the optimal design, producing an arterial or hierarchical net. Its determination requires a continuum formulation, which can however be simplified once a discrete structure begins to emerge. Connections are made with the masterly work of Bendsoe and Sigmund on optimal mechanical structures and also with neural, processing and communication networks, including those of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Technical appendices are provided on random graphs and polymer models and on the Klimov index.

This edited volume is an introduction to diverse methods and applications in operations research focused on local populations and community-based organizations that have the potential to improve the lives of individuals and communities in tangible ways. The book's themes include: space, place and community; disadvantaged, underrepresented or underserved populations; international and transnational applications; multimethod, cross-disciplinary and comparative approaches and appropriate technology; and analytics. The book is comprised of eleven original submissions, a re-print of a 2007 article by Johnson and Smilowitz that introduces CBOR, and an introductory chapter that provides policy motivation, antecedents to CBOR in OR/MS, a theory of CBOR and a comprehensive review of the chapters. It is hoped that this book will provide a resource to academics and practitioners who seek to develop methods and applications that bridge the divide between traditional OR/MS rooted in mathematical models and newer streams in 'soft OR' that emphasize problem structuring methods, critical approaches to OR/MS and community engagement and capacity-building.

Reinhard Selten, to date the only German Nobel Prize laureate in economics, celebrates his 80th birthday in 2010. While his contributions to game theory are well-known, the behavioral side of his scientific work has received less public exposure, even though he has been committed to experimental research during his entire career, publishing more experimental than theoretical papers in top-tier journals. This Festschrift is dedicated to Reinhard Selten's exceptional influence on behavioral and experimental economics. In this collection of academic highlight papers, a number of his students are joined by leading scholars in experimental research to document the historical role of the "Meister" in the development of the research methodology and of several sub-fields of behavioral economics. Next to the academic insight in these highly active fields of experimental research, the papers also provide a glance at Reinhard Selten's academic and personal interaction with his students and peers.

This book provides a complete and comprehensive reference/guide to Pyomo (Python Optimization Modeling Objects) for both beginning and advanced modelers, including students at the undergraduate and graduate levels, academic researchers, and practitioners. The text illustrates the breadth of the modeling and analysis capabilities that are supported by the software and support of complex real-world applications. Pyomo is an open source software package for formulating and solving large-scale optimization and operations research problems. The text begins with a tutorial on simple linear and integer programming models. A detailed reference of Pyomo's modeling components is illustrated with extensive examples, including a discussion of how to load data from data sources like spreadsheets and databases. Chapters describing advanced modeling capabilities for nonlinear and stochastic optimization are also included. The Pyomo software provides familiar modeling features within Python, a powerful dynamic programming language that has a very clear, readable syntax and intuitive object orientation. Pyomo includes Python classes for defining sparse sets, parameters, and variables, which can be used to formulate algebraic expressions that define objectives and constraints. Moreover, Pyomo can be used from a command-line interface and within Python's interactive command environment, which makes it easy to create Pyomo models, apply a variety of optimizers, and examine solutions. The software supports a different modeling approach than commercial AML (Algebraic Modeling Languages) tools, and is designed for flexibility, extensibility, portability, and maintainability but also maintains the central ideas in modern AMLs.

Broad and diverse ranges of activities are conducted within and by organized groups of individuals, including political, economic and social activities. These activities have become a subject of intense interest in economics and game theory. Some of the topics investigated in this collection are models of networks of power and privilege, trade networks, co-authorship networks, buyer-seller networks with differentiated products, and networks of medical innovation and the adaptation of new information. Other topics are social norms on punctuality, clubs and the provision of club goods and public goods, research and development and collusive alliances among corporations, and international alliances and trading agreements. While relatively recent, the literature on game theoretic studies of group formation in economics is already vast. This volume provides an introduction to this important literature on game-theoretic treatments of situations with networks, clubs, and coalitions, including some applications.

This book presents a mathematically-based introduction into the fascinating topic of Fuzzy Sets and Fuzzy Logic and might be used as textbook at both undergraduate and graduate levels and also as reference guide for mathematician, scientists or engineers who would like to get an insight into Fuzzy Logic. Fuzzy Sets have been introduced by Lotfi Zadeh in 1965 and since then, they have been used in many applications. As a consequence, there is a vast literature on the practical applications of fuzzy sets, while theory has a more modest coverage. The main purpose of the present book is to reduce this gap by providing a theoretical introduction into Fuzzy Sets based on Mathematical Analysis and Approximation Theory. Well-known applications, as for example fuzzy control, are also discussed in this book and placed on new ground, a theoretical foundation. Moreover, a few advanced chapters and several new results are included. These comprise, among others, a new systematic and constructive approach for fuzzy inference systems of Mamdani and Takagi-Sugeno types, that investigates their approximation capability by providing new error estimates.

The Mathematics of Finance has been a hot topic ever since the discovery of the Black-Scholes option pricing formulas in 1973. Unfortunately, there are very few undergraduate textbooks in this area. This book is specifically written for advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate students in mathematics, finance or economics. This book concentrates on discrete derivative pricing models, culminating in a careful and complete derivation of the Black-Scholes option pricing formulas as a limiting case of the Cox-Ross-Rubinstein discrete model.

This second edition is a complete rewrite of the first edition with significant changes to the topic organization, thus making the book flow much more smoothly. Several topics have been expanded such as the discussions of options, including the history of options, and pricing nonattainable alternatives. In this edition the material on probability has been condensed into fewer chapters, and the material on the capital asset pricing model has been removed.

The mathematics is not watered down, but it is appropriate for the intended audience. Previous knowledge of measure theory is not needed and only a small amount of linear algebra is required. All necessary probability theory is developed throughout the book on a "need-to-know" basis. No background in finance is required, since the book contains a chapter on options. "

ECMI, the European Consortium for Mathematics in Industry, is the European brand associated with applied mathematics for industry and organizes highly successful biannual conferences. In this series, the ECMI 2010, the 16th European Conference on Mathematics for Industry, was held in the historic city hall of Wuppertal in Germany. It covered the mathematics of a wide range of applications and methods, from circuit and electromagnetic device simulation to model order reduction for chip design, uncertainties and stochastics, production, fluids, life and environmental sciences, and dedicated and versatile methods.

These proceedings of ECMI 2010 emphasize mathematics as an innovation enabler for industry and business, and as an absolutely essential pre-requiste for Europe on its way to becoming the leading knowledge-based economy in the world.

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.

This book presents the application of someAI relatedoptimization techniques in the operation and control of electric power systems. With practical applications and examples theuse offunctional analysis, simulated annealing, Tabu-search, Genetic algorithms and fuzzy systems for the optimization of power systems is discussed in detail. Preliminary mathematical concepts are presented before moving to more advanced material.

Researchers and graduate students will benefit from this book. Engineers working in utility companies, operations and control, and resource management will also find this book useful. "

Numerical methods in finance have emerged as a vital field at the crossroads of probability theory, finance and numerical analysis. Based on presentations given at the workshop Numerical Methods in Finance held at the INRIA Bordeaux (France) on June 1-2, 2010, this book provides an overview of the major new advances in the numerical treatment of instruments with American exercises. Naturally it covers the most recent research on the mathematical theory and the practical applications of optimal stopping problems as they relate to financial applications. By extension, it also provides an original treatment of Monte Carlo methods for the recursive computation of conditional expectations and solutions of BSDEs and generalized multiple optimal stopping problems and their applications to the valuation of energy derivatives and assets. The articles were carefully written in a pedagogical style and a reasonably self-contained manner. The book is geared toward quantitative analysts, probabilists, and applied mathematicians interested in financial applications.

Semidefinite programs constitute one of the largest classes of optimization problems that can be solved with reasonable efficiency - both in theory and practice. They play a key role in a variety of research areas, such as combinatorial optimization, approximation algorithms, computational complexity, graph theory, geometry, real algebraic geometry and quantum computing. This book is an introduction to selected aspects of semidefinite programming and its use in approximation algorithms. It covers the basics but also a significant amount of recent and more advanced material.

There are many computational problems, such as MAXCUT, for which one cannot reasonably expect to obtain an exact solution efficiently, and in such case, one has to settle for approximate solutions. For MAXCUT and its relatives, exciting recent results suggest that semidefinite programming is probably the ultimate tool. Indeed, assuming the Unique Games Conjecture, a plausible but as yet unproven hypothesis, it was shown that for these problems, known algorithms based on semidefinite programming deliver the best possible approximation ratios among all polynomial-time algorithms.

This book follows the "semidefinite side" of these developments, presenting some of the main ideas behind approximation algorithms based on semidefinite programming. It develops the basic theory of semidefinite programming, presents one of the known efficient algorithms in detail, and describes the principles of some others. It also includes applications, focusing on approximation algorithms."

Drawing on a wealth of new archival material, including personal correspondence and diaries, Robert Leonard tells the fascinating story of the creation of game theory by Hungarian Jewish mathematician John von Neumann and Austrian economist Oskar Morgenstern. Game theory first emerged amid discussions of the psychology and mathematics of chess in Germany and fin-de-siecle Austro-Hungary. In the 1930s, on the cusp of anti-Semitism and political upheaval, it was developed by von Neumann into an ambitious theory of social organization. It was shaped still further by its use in combat analysis in World War II and during the Cold War. Interweaving accounts of the period s economics, science, and mathematics, and drawing sensitively on the private lives of von Neumann and Morgenstern, Robert Leonard provides a detailed reconstruction of a complex historical drama.

This book demonstrates the use of the optimization techniques that are becoming essential to meet the increasing stringency and variety of requirements for automotive systems. It shows the reader how to move away from earlierapproaches, based on some degree of heuristics, to the use ofmore and more common systematic methods. Even systematic methods can be developed and applied in a large number of forms so the text collects contributions from across the theory, methods and real-world automotive applications of optimization.

Greater fuel economy, significant reductions in permissible emissions, new drivability requirements and the generally increasing complexity of automotive systems are among the criteria that the contributing authors set themselves to meet. In many cases multiple and often conflicting requirements give rise to multi-objective constrained optimization problems which are also considered. Some of these problems fall into the domain of the traditional multi-disciplinary optimization applied to system, sub-system or component design parameters and is performed based on system models; others require applications of optimization directly to experimental systems to determine either optimal calibration or the optimal control trajectory/control law.

"Optimization and Optimal Control in Automotive Systems "reflects the state-of-the-art in and promotes a comprehensive approach to optimization in automotive systems by addressing its different facets, by discussing basic methods and showing practical approaches and specific applications of optimization to design and control problems for automotive systems. The book will be of interest both to academic researchers, either studying optimization or who have links with the automotive industry and to industrially-based engineers and automotive designers."

This book offers a first course in analysis for scientists and engineers. It can be used at the advanced undergraduate level or as part of the curriculum in a graduate program. The book is built around metric spaces. In the first three chapters, the authors lay the foundational material and cover the all-important "four-C's": convergence, completeness, compactness, and continuity. In subsequent chapters, the basic tools of analysis are used to give brief introductions to differential and integral equations, convex analysis, and measure theory. The treatment is modern and aesthetically pleasing. It lays the groundwork for the needs of classical fields as well as the important new fields of optimization and probability theory.

The study of M-matrices, their inverses and discrete potential theory is now a well-established part of linear algebra and the theory of Markov chains. The main focus of this monograph is the so-called inverse M-matrix problem, which asks for a characterization of nonnegative matrices whose inverses are M-matrices. We present an answer in terms of discrete potential theory based on the Choquet-Deny Theorem. A distinguished subclass of inverse M-matrices is ultrametric matrices, which are important in applications such as taxonomy. Ultrametricity is revealed to be a relevant concept in linear algebra and discrete potential theory because of its relation with trees in graph theory and mean expected value matrices in probability theory. Remarkable properties of Hadamard functions and products for the class of inverse M-matrices are developed and probabilistic insights are provided throughout the monograph.

Search games and rendezvous problems have received growing attention in computer science within the past few years. Rendezvous problems emerge naturally, for instance, to optimize performance and convergence of mobile robots. This gives a new algorithmic point of view to the theory. Furthermore, modern topics such as the spreading of gossip or disease in social networks have lead to new challenging problems in search and rendezvous. Search Theory: A Game Theoretic Perspective introduces the first integrated approach to Search and Rendezvous from the perspectives of biologists, computer scientists and mathematicians. This contributed volume covers a wide range of topics including rendezvous problems and solutions, rendezvous on graphs, search games on biology, mobility in governed social networks, search and security, and more. Most chapters also include case studies or a survey, in addition to a chapter on the future direction of Search and Rendezvous research. This book targets researchers and practitioners working in computer science, mathematics and biology as a reference book. Advanced level students focused on these fields will also find this book valuable as a secondary text book or reference.

This book develops a whole strategy for decision-making, with the full participation of the decision-maker and utilizing continuous feedback. It introduces the use of the very well-known and proven methodology, linear programming, but specially adapted for this purpose. For this, it incorporates a method to include subjective concepts, as well as the possibility of working with many different and even contradictory objectives. The book is liberally populated with diverse case studies to illustrate the concepts. This practical guide will be of interest to anyone undertaking analysis and decision-making, on both simple and complex projects, and who is looking for a strategy to organize, classify, and evaluate the large amount of information required to make an informed decision. The strategy includes methods to analyze the results and extract conclusions from them.

Whether different types of costs are to be reduced, benefits to be maximized or scarce resources to be managed, scheduling theory provides intelligent methods for practitioners and scientists. The just-in-time (JIT) production philosophy has enriched the classical scheduling theory with models that consider characteristics such as inventory costs, set-up times, lot sizing, or maintenance. This edited volume considers the specifics of just-in-time systems. It provides knowledge and insights on recent advances in scheduling theory where just-in-time aspects are considered. Contributions on models, theory, algorithms, and applications, that bring the theory up-to-date on the state-of-the-art of JIT systems are presented. Professionals, researchers and graduate students will find this book useful.

The projectors are considered as simple but important type of matrices and operators. Their basic theory can be found in many books, among which Hal mas [177], [178] are of particular significance. The projectors or projections became an active research area in the last two decades due to ideas generated from linear algebra, statistics and various areas of algorithmic mathematics. There has also grown up a great and increasing number of projection meth ods for different purposes. The aim of this book is to give a unified survey on projectors and projection methods including the most recent results. The words projector, projection and idempotent are used as synonyms, although the word projection is more common. We assume that the reader is familiar with linear algebra and mathemati cal analysis at a bachelor level. The first chapter includes supplements from linear algebra and matrix analysis that are not incorporated in the standard courses. The second and the last chapter include the theory of projectors. Four chapters are devoted to projection methods for solving linear and non linear systems of algebraic equations and convex optimization problems.

The results presented in this book are a product of research conducted by the author independently and in collaboration with other researchers in the field. In this light, this work encompasses the most recent collection of various concepts of regularity and nonsmooth analysis into one monograph. The first part of the book attempts to present an accessible and thorough introduction to nonsmooth analysis theory. Main concepts and some useful results are stated and illustrated through examples and exercises. The second part gathers the most prominent and recent results of various regularity concepts of sets, functions, and set-valued mappings in nonsmooth analysis. The third and final section contains six different application, with comments in relation to the existing literature.

One of the core building blocks of traditional economic theory is the concept of equilibrium, a state of the world in which economic forces are balanced and in the absence of external influences the values of economic variables remain static. Many traditional equilibrium models, or equilibria, are established based on the rational behavior of individuals within financial markets, such as traders, market analysts, and investing firms, and their ability to maximize profits, no matter the cost. Yet what happens when these market participants behave in an irrational manner, and how does this impact economic equilibria? Contemporary economists have agreed that a process similar to Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection takes over, whereby equilibria are shaped not by the behavior of individual participants but by an environment outside its control (i.e., an environment with little concern for maximizing profits). It is an environment in which those "selected" produce positive financial gains, but have no regard for how it was obtained or underlying motivations-and those participants suffering losses disappear altogether. Evolutionary Foundations of Equilibria in Irrational Markets proves traditional economic equilibria continue to occur despite natural selection in irrational markets. It covers a wide sampling of equilibria under various scenarios, and each chapter addresses the results of these models at an aggregate level. The text is supplemented with charts and figures to drive home key findings and proofs, making it of interest to students and researchers in the areas of economics and behavioral finance.

Organisations face many challenges, which induce them to perform better, and thus to establish mature (or excellent) business processes. As they now face globalisation, higher competitiveness, demanding customers, growing IT possibilities, compliancy rules etc., business process maturity models (BPMMs) have been introduced to help organisations gradually assess and improve their business processes (e.g. CMMI or OMG-BPMM). In fact, there are now so many BPMMs to choose from that organisations risk selecting one that does not fit their needs or one of substandard quality. This book presents a study that distinguishes process management from process orientation so as to arrive at a common understanding. It also includes a classification study to identify the capability areas and maturity types of 69 existing BPMMs, in order to strengthen the basis of available BPMMs. Lastly it presents a selection study to identify criteria for choosing one BPMM from the broad selection, which produced a free online selection tool, BPMM Smart-Selector.

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Energy issues feature frequently in the economic and financial press. Specific examples of topical energy issues come from around the globe and often concern economics and finance. The importance of energy production, consumption and trade raises fundamental economic issues that impact the global economy and financial markets. This volume presents research on energy economics and financial markets related to the themes of supply and demand, environmental impact and renewables, energy derivatives trading, and finance and energy. The contributions by experts in their fields take a global perspective, as well as presenting cases from various countries and continents.