This textbook covers the fundamentals of optimization, including linear, mixed-integer linear, nonlinear, and dynamic optimization techniques, with a clear engineering focus. It carefully describes classical optimization models and algorithms using an engineering problem-solving perspective, and emphasizes modeling issues using many real-world examples related to a variety of application areas. Providing an appropriate blend of practical applications and optimization theory makes the text useful to both practitioners and students, and gives the reader a good sense of the power of optimization and the potential difficulties in applying optimization to modeling real-world systems. The book is intended for undergraduate and graduate-level teaching in industrial engineering and other engineering specialties. It is also of use to industry practitioners, due to the inclusion of real-world applications, opening the door to advanced courses on both modeling and algorithm development within the industrial engineering and operations research fields.

Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs) have been promoted as a potential technology that can reduce vehicles fuel consumption, decreasing emissions related with the transport sector and dependence from oil importations. However emissions and cost impacts of PHEVs are strictly connected with the power mix generation used to produce electricity and when their batteries are recharged. Potential effects of a PHEV fleet on the power grid have been analyzed under different charging strategies, obtaining a quantitative estimation of the additional load affecting the transmission grid. The environmental impact of these vehicles is estimated for the State of Ohio as well as for other different countries showing the great importance that generation technologies have on PHEVs final environmental performances. Cost analysis shows how these vehicles can obtain great operation cost reduction due to the decrease of gasoline consumption, proposing this technology as a possible solution for decrease oil dependency of the transport sector.