‘Pro-poor’ humanitarian logistics: Prioritizing the vulnerable in allocating relief aid

This paper builds on the premise that the most vulnerable areas or groups of people should be protected from disasters by being given priority in humanitarian operations, particularly when there are limited resources available for disaster management. The basis and the development of the paper are strongly aligned with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals … Read more

Revisiting the Hamiltonian p-median problem: a new formulation on directed graphs and a branch-and-cut algorithm

This paper studies the Hamiltonian p-median problem defined on a directed graph, which consists of finding p mutually disjoint circuits of minimum total cost, such that each node of the graph is included in one of the circuits. Earlier formulations are based on viewing the problem as one resulting from the intersection of two subproblems. … Read more

Disjunctive Programming for Multiobjective Discrete Optimisation

In this paper, I view and present the multiobjective discrete optimisation problem as a particular case of disjunctive programming where one seeks to identify efficient solutions from within a disjunction formed by a set of systems. The proposed approach lends itself to a simple yet effective iterative algorithm that is able to yield the set … Read more

Combinatorial Benders Cuts for Assembly Line Balancing Problems with Setups

The classical assembly line balancing problem consists of assigning assembly work to workstations. In the presence of setup times that depend on the sequence of tasks assigned to each workstation, the problem becomes more complicated given that two interdependent problems, namely assignment and sequencing, must be solved simultaneously. The hierarchical nature of these two problems … Read more

A Lagrangean Relaxation and Decomposition Algorithm for the Video Placement and Routing Problem

Video on Demand (VoD) is a technology used to provide a number of programs to a number of users on request. In developing a VoD system, a fundamental problem is load balancing, which is further characterized by optimally placing videos to a number of predefined servers and routing the user program requests to available resources. … Read more

On separating cover inequalities for the multidimensional knapsack problem

We propose a simple and sufficiently fast separation procedure to identify cover inequalities for the multidimensional knapsack problem. It is based on the solution of a conventional integer programming model. Solving this kind of integer programs are usually considered expensive and the proposed method may have been overlooked because of this assumption. The results of … Read more