We consider several models of complex systems with active elements and show that the auction mechanism appears very natural in attaining proper equilibrium states, even in comparison with game theory ones. In particular, network equilibria are treated as implementation of the auction principle. An additional example of resource allocation in wireless communication networks is also … Read more
We study a number of variants of an abstract scheduling problem inspired by the scheduling of reclaimers in the stockyard of a coal export terminal. We analyze the complexity of each of the variants, providing complexity proofs for some and polynomial algorithms for others. For one, especially interesting variant, we also develop a constant factor … Read more
This study develops a data-driven group variable selection method for data envelopment analysis (DEA), a non-parametric linear programming approach to the estimation of production frontiers. The proposed method extends the group Lasso (least absolute shrinkage and selection operator) designed for variable selection on (often predefined) groups of variables in linear regression models to DEA models. … Read more
Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) is steadily becoming a common mode for commercializing natural gas. In this paper, we develop methods for improving both lower and upper bounds for a previously stated form of an LNG inventory routing problem. A Dantzig-Wolfe-based decomposition approach is developed for LNG inventory routing problem (LNG-IRP) attempting to overcome poor lower … Read more
We study a daily mine planning problem where, given a set of blocks we wish to mine, our task is to generate a mining sequence for the excavators such that blending resource constraints are met at various stages of the sequence. Such time-oriented resource constraints are not traditionally handled well by automated planners. On the … Read more
We introduce a practically important and theoretically challenging problem: finding the minimum cost path for PHEVs in a road network with refueling and charging stations. We show that this problem is NP-complete and present a mixed integer quadratically constrained formulation, a discrete approximation dynamic programming heuristic, and a shortest path heuristic as solution methodologies. Practical … Read more
We study common properties of retail pricing models in a general framework of calculus of variations. In particular, we observe that for any demand model, optimal de-seasoned revenue rate divided by price elasticity is time invariant. We also obtain a generalization of a well known inverse relationship between price elasticity of demand and Lerner index. … Read more
We address a class of deterministic scheduling problems in which two agents compete for the usage of a single machine. The agents have their own objective functions and submit in each round an arbitrary, unprocessed task from their buffer for possible selection. In each round the smaller of the two submitted tasks is chosen and … Read more
We propose a constraint programming approach for the optimization of inventory routing in the liquefied natural gas industry. We present two constraint programming models that rely on a disjunctive scheduling representation of the problem. We also propose an iterative search heuristic to generate good feasible solutions for these models. Computational results on a set of … Read more
In this paper, we develop optimal electricity storage control policies to manage charging and discharging activities for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles for the benefit of an energy market participant. We first develop models for both risk-neutral and risk-averse aggregators to participate only in a real-time market. The proposed models capture the impact of the charging … Read more