MIRPLib – A library of maritime inventory routing problem instances: Survey, core model, and benchmark results

This paper presents a detailed description of a particular class of deterministic single product maritime inventory routing problems (MIRPs), which we call deep-sea MIRPs with inventory tracking at every port. This class involves vessel travel times between ports that are significantly longer than the time spent in port and require inventory levels at all ports … Read more

Inventory control for a perishable product with non-stationary demand and service level constraints

We study the practical production planning problem of a food producer facing a non-stationary erratic demand for a perishable product with a fixed life time. In meeting the uncertain demand, the food producer uses a FIFO issuing policy. The food producer aims at meeting a certain service level at lowest cost. Every production run a … Read more

Practical Portfolio Optimization

This paper is on the portfolio optimization problem for which two generic models are presented in the context of a proprietary solver called GENO: the first is a pseudo-dynamic model meant for the single holding-period case; the second is a truly dynamic model that applies to both the single and the multi-period scenario. Both models … Read more

Convergence Analysis of DC Algorithm for DC programming with subanalytic data

DC Programming and DCA have been introduced by Pham Dinh Tao in 1986 and extensively developed by Le Thi Hoai An and Pham Dinh Tao since 1993. These approaches have been successfully applied to solving real life problems in their large scale setting. In this paper, by using the Lojasiewicz inequality for nonsmooth subanalytic functions, … Read more

Scheduling optimization of a real flexible job shop including side constraints regarding maintenance, fixtures, and night shifts

We present a generic iterative scheduling procedure for the scheduling of a real flexible job shop, the so-called multitask cell at GKN Aerospace Engine Systems in Sweden. A time-indexed formulation of the problem is presented including side constraints regarding preventive maintenance, fixture availability, and unmanned night shifts. This paper continues the work in Thörnblad et … Read more

A competitive iterative procedure using a time-indexed model for solving flexible job shop scheduling problems

We investigate the efficiency of a discretization procedure utilizing a time-indexed mathematical optimization model for finding accurate solutions to flexible job shop scheduling problems considering objectives comprising the makespan and the tardiness of jobs, respectively. The time-indexed model is used to find solutions to these problems by iteratively employing time steps of decreasing length. The … Read more

Approximate Dynamic Programming for a Class of Long-Horizon Maritime Inventory Routing Problems

We study a deterministic maritime inventory routing problem with a long planning horizon. For instances with many ports and many vessels, mixed-integer linear programming (MIP) solvers often require hours to produce good solutions even when the planning horizon is 90 or 120 periods. Building on the recent successes of approximate dynamic programming (ADP) for road-based … Read more

A game-theoretic approach to computation offloading in mobile cloud computing

We consider a three-tier architecture for mobile and pervasive computing scenarios, consisting of a local tier of mobile nodes, a middle tier (cloudlets) of nearby computing nodes, typically located at the mobile nodes access points but characterized by a limited amount of resources, and a remote tier of distant cloud servers, which have practically infinite … Read more

Scheduling of Two Agents Task Chains with a Central Selection Mechanism

In this paper we address a deterministic scheduling problem in which two agents compete for the usage of a single machine. Each agent decides on a fixed order to submit its tasks to an external coordination subject, who sequences them according to a known priority rule. We consider the problem from different perspectives. First, we … Read more

A New Framework for Combining Global and Local Methods in Black Box Optimization

We propose a new framework for the optimization of computationally expensive black box problems, where neither closed-form expressions nor derivatives of the objective functions are available. The proposed framework consists of two procedures. The first constructs a global metamodel to approximate the underlying black box function and explores an unvisited area to search for a … Read more