As optimization researchers tackle larger and larger problems, scale interactions play an increasingly important role. One general strategy for dealing with a large or difficult problem is to partition it into smaller ones, which are hopefully much easier to solve, and then work backwards towards the solution of original problem, using a solution from a previous level as a starting guess at the next level. This volume contains 22 chapters highlighting some recent research. The topics of the chapters selected for this volume are focused on the development of new solution methodologies, including general multilevel solution techniques, for tackling difficult, large-scale optimization problems that arise in science and industry. Applications presented in the book include but are not limited to the circuit placement problem in VLSI design, a wireless sensor location problem, optimal dosages in the treatment of cancer by radiation therapy, and facility location.

V-INVEX FUNCTIONS AND VECTOR OPTIMIZATION summarizes and synthesizes an aspect of research work that has been done in the area of Generalized Convexity over the past several decades. Specifically, the book focuses on V-invex functions in vector optimization that have grown out of the work of Jeyakumar and Mond in the 1990?s. V-invex functions are areas in which there has been much interest because it allows researchers and practitioners to address and provide better solutions to problems that are nonlinear, multi-objective, fractional, and continuous in nature. Hence, V-invex functions have permitted work on a whole new class of vector optimization applications. There has been considerable work on vector optimization by some highly distinguished researchers including Kuhn, Tucker, Geoffrion, Mangasarian, Von Neuman, Schaiible, Ziemba, etc. The authors have integrated this related research into their book and demonstrate the wide context from which the area has grown and continues to grow. The result is a well-synthesized, accessible, and usable treatment for students, researchers, and practitioners in the areas of OR, optimization, applied mathematics, engineering, and their work relating to a wide range of problems which include financial institutions, logistics, transportation, traffic management, etc.

This book aims to present, in a unified approach, a series of mathematical results con cerning triangular norm-based measures and a class of cooperative games with Juzzy coalitions. Our approach intends to emphasize that triangular norm-based measures are powerful tools in exploring the coalitional behaviour in 'such games. They not and simplify some technical aspects of the already classical axiomatic the only unify ory of Aumann-Shapley values, but also provide new perspectives and insights into these results. Moreover, this machinery allows us to obtain, in the game theoretical context, new and heuristically meaningful information, which has a significant impact on balancedness and equilibria analysis in a cooperative environment. From a formal point of view, triangular norm-based measures are valuations on subsets of a unit cube [0, 1]X which preserve dual binary operations induced by trian gular norms on the unit interval [0, 1]. Triangular norms (and their dual conorms) are algebraic operations on [0,1] which were suggested by MENGER [1942] and which proved to be useful in the theory of probabilistic metric spaces (see also [WALD 1943]). The idea of a triangular norm-based measure was implicitly used under various names: vector integrals [DVORETZKY, WALD & WOLFOWITZ 1951], prob abilities oj Juzzy events [ZADEH 1968], and measures on ideal sets [AUMANN & SHAPLEY 1974, p. 152].

This book collects the latest theoretical and technological concepts in the design and control of various linear machines and drive systems. Discussing advances in the new linear machine topologies, integrated modeling, multi-objective optimization techniques, and high-performance control strategies, it focuses on emerging applications of linear machines in transportation and energy systems. The book presents both theoretical and practical/experimental results, providing a consistent compilation of fundamental theories, a compendium of current research and development activities as well as new directions to overcome critical limitations.

In cooperative games, one generally assumes that the agents know exactly the joint (monetary) gains that can be achieved by any possible coalition of cooperating agents. In reality, however, only little is known with certainty. This does not necessarily imply that traditional cooperative game theory cannot be applied in practical situations, for in various cases knowledge of the expected gains suffices. In many other cases, however, it is just the sharing of risk that is beneficial. Joint ventures, for instance, exist since cooperation reduces the risk of the investment for the individual parties. Since the existing models fail to incorporate such risks, they are not suitable for analyzing cooperative decision-making under risk. This book aims to rectify this deficiency by discussing a model of cooperative games with random payoffs.

In operations research and computer science it is common practice to evaluate the performance of optimization algorithms on the basis of computational results, and the experimental approach should follow accepted principles that guarantee the reliability and reproducibility of results. However, computational experiments differ from those in other sciences, and the last decade has seen considerable methodological research devoted to understanding the particular features of such experiments and assessing the related statistical methods.

This book consists of methodological contributions on different scenarios of experimental analysis. The first part overviews the main issues in the experimental analysis of algorithms, and discusses the experimental cycle of algorithm development; the second part treats the characterization by means of statistical distributions of algorithm performance in terms of solution quality, runtime and other measures; and the third part collects advanced methods from experimental design for configuring and tuning algorithms on a specific class of instances with the goal of using the least amount of experimentation. The contributor list includes leading scientists in algorithm design, statistical design, optimization and heuristics, and most chapters provide theoretical background and are enriched with case studies.

This book is written for researchers and practitioners in operations research and computer science who wish to improve the experimental assessment of optimization algorithms and, consequently, their design.

Bestselling author and worst-drawing artist Ben Orlin expands his oeuvre with this interactive collection of mathematical games. With 70-plus games, each taking a minute to learn and a lifetime to master, this treasure trove will delight, educate, and entertain. From beloved math popularizer Ben Orlin comes a masterfully compiled collection of dozens of playable mathematical games. This ultimate game chest draws on mathematical curios, childhood classics, and soon-to-be classics, each hand-chosen to be (1) fun, (2) thought-provoking, and (3) easy to play. With just paper, pens, and the occasional handful of coins, you and a partner can enjoy hours of fun-and hours of challenge. Orlin's sly humor, expansive knowledge, and so-bad-they're-good drawings show us how simple rules summon our best thinking. Games include: * Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe * Sprouts * Battleship * Quantum Go Fish * Dots and Boxes * Black Hole * Order and Chaos * Sequencium * Paper Boxing * Prophecies * Arpeggios * Banker * Francoprussian Labyrinth * Cats and Dogs * And many more.

Line and hyperplane location problems play an important role not only in operations research and location theory, but also in computational geometry and robust statistics. This book provides a survey on line and hyperplane location combining analytical and geometrical methods. The major portion of the text presents new results on this topic, including the extension of some special cases to all distances derived from norms and a discussion of restricted problems in the plane. Almost all results are proven in the text and most of them are illustrated by examples. Furthermore, relations to classical facility location and to problems in computational geometry are pointed out. Audience: The book is suitable for researchers, lecturers, and graduate students working in the fields of location theory or computational geometry.

These proceedings consist of 30 selected research papers based on results presented at the 10th Balkan Conference & 1st International Symposium on Operational Research (BALCOR 2011) held in Thessaloniki, Greece, September 22-24, 2011. BALCOR is an established biennial conference attended by a large number of faculty, researchers and students from the Balkan countries but also from other European and Mediterranean countries as well. Over the past decade, the BALCOR conference has facilitated the exchange of scientific and technical information on the subject of Operations Research and related fields such as Mathematical Programming, Game Theory, Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis, Information Systems, Data Mining and more, in order to promote international scientific cooperation. The carefully selected and refereed papers present important recent developments and modern applications and will serve as excellent reference for students, researchers and practitioners in these disciplines. "

This book systematically presents the main solutions of cooperative games: the core, bargaining set, kernel, nucleolus, and the Shapley value of TU games as well as the core, the Shapley value, and the ordinal bargaining set of NTU games. The authors devote a separate chapter to each solution, wherein they study its properties in full detail. In addition, important variants are defined or even intensively analyzed.

This book considers problems of optimization arising in the design of electromagnetic radiators and receivers. The authors develop a systematic general theory that can be applied to a wide class of structures. The theory is illustrated with familiar, simple examples and indications of how the results can be applied to more complicated structures. The final chapter introduces techniques from multicriteria optimization in antenna design. The material is intended for a dual audience of mathematicians and mathematically-sophisticated engineers. References to both the mathematics and engineering literature help guide the reader through the necessary mathematical background.

Evolutionary computation techniques have attracted increasing att- tions in recent years for solving complex optimization problems. They are more robust than traditional methods based on formal logics or mathematical programming for many real world OR/MS problems. E- lutionary computation techniques can deal with complex optimization problems better than traditional optimization techniques. However, most papers on the application of evolutionary computation techniques to Operations Research /Management Science (OR/MS) problems have scattered around in different journals and conference proceedings. They also tend to focus on a very special and narrow topic. It is the right time that an archival book series publishes a special volume which - cludes critical reviews of the state-of-art of those evolutionary com- tation techniques which have been found particularly useful for OR/MS problems, and a collection of papers which represent the latest devel- ment in tackling various OR/MS problems by evolutionary computation techniques. This special volume of the book series on Evolutionary - timization aims at filling in this gap in the current literature. The special volume consists of invited papers written by leading - searchers in the field. All papers were peer reviewed by at least two recognised reviewers. The book covers the foundation as well as the practical side of evolutionary optimization.

The financial crisis prompted financial supervisors to take a critical look at their own performance.The "toolkit" available to supervisors is considerably more varied than it was a few years ago. Supervision has become more forward-looking, taking into account also soft controls, such as conduct and culture, corporate governance, and business models of financial institutions.This collection of essays discusses several significant changes in supervision methods and supervisory organisations and examines what methods contribute to good supervision and what can reasonably be expected of supervisors. The authors are experts in the field and most of them are affiliated to organisations responsible for financial supervision.

Building on the pioneering work by the Nobel Memorial Laureate, John Nash, Professor Thomson has brought together a broad selection of seminal articles which analyse and discuss bargaining and the theory of cooperative games. Beginning with a distinguished collection of papers discussing the origins of game theory, this volume systematically explores its development as a tool to illuminate economic behaviour. It includes the work of highly accomplished academics whose discoveries over the years have shaped the direction of this subject. With his insightful introduction, the editor has ensured that this indispensable book is suitable for anyone with an interest in cooperative gaming.

This book continues the biannual series of conference proceedings, which has become a classical reference resource in traffic and granular research alike, and addresses the latest developments at the intersection of physics, engineering and computational science. These involve complex systems, in which multiple simple agents, be they vehicles or particles, give rise to surprising and fascinating phenomena. The contributions collected in these proceedings cover several research fields, all of which deal with transport. Topics include highway, pedestrian and internet traffic; granular matter; biological transport; transport networks; data acquisition; data analysis and technological applications. Different perspectives, i.e., modeling, simulations, experiments, and phenomenological observations are considered.

The aim of this volume is to show how Fuzzy Sets and Systems can help to provide robust and adaptive heuristic optimization algorithms in a variety of situations. The book presents the state of the art and gives a broad overview on the real practical applications that Fuzzy Sets, based on heuristic algorithms, have.

In 2008, November 23-28, the workshop of "Classical Problems on Planar Polynomial Vector Fields " was held in the Banff International Research Station, Canada. Called "classical problems", it was concerned with the following: (1) Problems on integrability of planar polynomial vector fields. (2) The problem of the center stated by Poincare for real polynomial differential systems, which asks us to recognize when a planar vector field defined by polynomials of degree at most n possesses a singularity which is a center. (3) Global geometry of specific classes of planar polynomial vector fields. (4) Hilbert's 16th problem. These problems had been posed more than 110 years ago. Therefore, they are called "classical problems" in the studies of the theory of dynamical systems. The qualitative theory and stability theory of differential equations, created by Poincare and Lyapunov at the end of the 19th century, had major developments as two branches of the theory of dynamical systems during the 20th century. As a part of the basic theory of nonlinear science, it is one of the very active areas in the new millennium. This book presents in an elementary way the recent significant developments in the qualitative theory of planar dynamical systems. The subjects are covered as follows: the studies of center and isochronous center problems, multiple Hopf bifurcations and local and global bifurcations of the equivariant planar vector fields which concern with Hilbert's 16th problem. The book is intended for graduate students, post-doctors and researchers in dynamical systems. For all engineers who are interested in the theory of dynamical systems, it is also a reasonable reference. It requires a minimum background of a one-year course on nonlinear differential equations.

The customer orientation philosophy of modern business organizations and the implementation of the main principles of continuous improvement, justifies the importance of evaluating and analyzing cust omer satisfaction. In fact, customer satisfaction isconsidere d today as a baseline standard of performance and a possi ble standardo f excellence forany business organization. Extensive research has defined several alternative approaches, which examine the customer satisfaction evaluation prob lem from very different perspectives. These approaches include simple quantitative tools, statistical and data analysis techniques, consumer behavioral models, etc. and adopt the following main prin ciples: * The data of the problem are based on th e customers' judgments and are directly collected from them. * This is a multivariate evaluation problem given that customer's overall satisfac tion depends on a setof variables representing product/service characteristic dimensions. * Usually, an additive formula is used in order to aggregate partial evaluations in ano verall satisfaction measure. Many of the aforementioned approaches don ot consider the qualitative form of customers' judgments, although this information constitutes the main satisfaction input data. Furthermore, insev eral cases , the measurements are not sufficient enough to analyze in detail customer sa tisfaction because models' results are mainly focused on a simple descriptive analysis.

Optimization in Computational Chemistry and Molecular Biology: Local and Global Approaches covers recent developments in optimization techniques for addressing several computational chemistry and biology problems. A tantalizing problem that cuts across the fields of computational chemistry, biology, medicine, engineering and applied mathematics is how proteins fold. Global and local optimization provide a systematic framework of conformational searches for the prediction of three-dimensional protein structures that represent the global minimum free energy, as well as low-energy biomolecular conformations. Each contribution in the book is essentially expository in nature, but of scholarly treatment. The topics covered include advances in local and global optimization approaches for molecular dynamics and modeling, distance geometry, protein folding, molecular structure refinement, protein and drug design, and molecular and peptide docking. Audience: The book is addressed not only to researchers in mathematical programming, but to all scientists in various disciplines who use optimization methods in solving problems in computational chemistry and biology.

This special volume is dedicated to Boris M. Mordukhovich, on the occasion of his 60th birthday, and aims to celebrate his fundamental contributionsto variational analysis, generalizeddifferentiationand their applications.A main exampleof these contributions is Boris' recent opus magnus "Variational Analysis and Generalized Differentiation"(vols. I and II) [2,3]. A detailed explanationand careful description of Boris' research and achievements can be found in [1]. Boris' active work and jovial attitude have constantly inspired researchers of several generations, with whom he has generously shared his knowledgeand ent- siasm, along with his well-known warmth and human touch. Variationalanalysis is a rapidlygrowing?eld within pure and applied mathem- ics, with numerous applications to optimization, control theory, economics, en- neering, and other disciplines. Each of the 12 chapters of this volume is a carefully reviewed paper in the ?eld of variational analysis and related topics. Many chapters of this volume were presented at the International Symposium on Variational Analysis and Optimization (ISVAO), held in the Department of Applied Mathematics, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, from November 28 to November 30, 2008. The symposium was organized in honour of Boris' 60thbirthday.It broughttogetherBorisandotherresearchersto discusssta- of-the-art results in variational analysis and its applications, with emphasis on op- mization and control. We thank the organizers and participants of the symposium, who made the symposium a highly bene?cial and enjoyable event. We are also grateful to all the authors of this special volume, who have taken the opportunityto celebrate Boris' birthdayand his decadesof contributionsto the area.

The aim of stochastic programming is to find optimal decisions in problems which involve uncertain data. This field is currently developing rapidly with contributions from many disciplines including operations research, mathematics, and probability. At the same time, it is now being applied in a wide variety of subjects ranging from agriculture to financial planning and from industrial engineering to computer networks. This textbook provides a first course in stochastic programming suitable for students with a basic knowledge of linear programming, elementary analysis, and probability. The authors aim to present a broad overview of the main themes and methods of the subject. Its prime goal is to help students develop an intuition on how to model uncertainty into mathematical problems, what uncertainty changes bring to the decision process, and what techniques help to manage uncertainty in solving the problems.
In this extensively updated new edition there is more material on methods and examples including several new approaches for discrete variables, new results on risk measures in modeling and Monte Carlo sampling methods, a new chapter on relationships to other methods including approximate dynamic programming, robust optimization and online methods.

The book is highly illustrated with chapter summaries and many examples and exercises. Students, researchers and practitioners in operations research and the optimization area will find it particularly of interest.

Review of First Edition:

"The discussion on modeling issues, the large number of examples used to illustrate the material, and the breadth of the coverage make'Introduction to Stochastic Programming' an ideal textbook for the area." (Interfaces, 1998)

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This original new book offers a comprehensive and engaging perspective on the theory of vertical differentiation. It enables the reader to grasp the key concepts and effects that product quality has both on firms' behaviour and market structure, and the ways in which this relationship has evolved. With contributions from prominent figures in the field, the book investigates a number of important topics, such as the choice of the optimal product range, profit sharing, the existence of equilibrium in duopoly games, positional effects attached to status goods, international trade, collusion, advertising and the dynamics of capital accumulation for quality improvement and product innovation. Using both static and dynamic approaches, these aspects are assessed in relation to the manifold issues of regulation, competition policy and trade policy. Product differentiation and its influence on consumer behaviour and the performance of firms is a core topic in the existing literature in the fields of industrial organization, international trade and economic growth. This book will be an essential read for researchers, students and professional scholars working in these areas, especially those with an interest in antitrust regulation.

Symmetry and Economic Invariance (second enhanced edition) explores how the symmetry and invariance of economic models can provide insights into their properties. Although the professional economist of today is adept at many of the mathematical techniques used in static and dynamic optimization models, group theory is still not among his or her repertoire of tools. The authors aim to show that group theoretic methods form a natural extension of the techniques commonly used in economics and that they can be easily mastered. Part I provides an introduction that minimizes prerequisites including prior knowledge of group theory. Part II discusses recent developments in the field.

This volume covers some of the topics that are related to the rapidly growing field of biomedical informatics. In June 11-12, 2010 a workshop entitled 'Optimization and Data Analysis in Biomedical Informatics' was organized at The Fields Institute. Following this event invited contributions were gathered based on the talks presented at the workshop, and additional invited chapters were chosen from world's leading experts. In this publication, the authors share their expertise in the form of state-of-the-art research and review chapters, bringing together researchers from different disciplines and emphasizing the value of mathematical methods in the areas of clinical sciences. This work is targeted to applied mathematicians, computer scientists, industrial engineers, and clinical scientists who are interested in exploring emerging and fascinating interdisciplinary topics of research. It is designed to further stimulate and enhance fruitful collaborations between scientists from different disciplines.