The Transportation Paradox Revisited

The transportation paradox is related to the classical transportation problem. For certain instances of this problem an increase in the amount of goods to be transported may lead to a decrease in the optimal total transportation cost. Even though the paradox has been known since the early days of linear programming, it has got very … Read more

Single-layer Cuts for Multi-layer Network Design Problems

We study a planning problem arising in SDH/WDM multi-layer telecommunication network design. The goal is to find a minimum cost installation of link and node hardware of both network layers such that traffic demands can be realized via grooming and a survivable routing. We present a mixed-integer programming formulation that takes many practical side constraints … Read more

Single Item Lot-Sizing with Nondecreasing Capacities

We consider the single item lot-sizing problem with capacities that are non-decreasing over time. When the cost function is i) non-speculative or Wagner-Whitin (for instance, constant unit production costs and non-negative unit holding costs), and ii) the production set-up costs are non-increasing over time, it is known that the minimum cost lot-sizing problem is polynomially … Read more

SNDlib 1.0–Survivable Network Design Library

We provide information on the Survivable Network Design Library (SNDlib), a data library for fixed telecommunication network design that can be accessed at http://sndlib.zib.de. In version 1.0, the library contains data related to 22 networks which, combined with a set of selected planning parameters, leads to 830 network planning problem instances. In this paper, we … Read more

Operations Risk Management by Planning Optimally the Qualified Workforce Capacity

Operational risks are defined as risks of human origin. Unlike financial risks that can be handled in a financial manner (e.g. insurances, savings, derivatives), the treatment of operational risks calls for a “managerial approach”. Consequently, we propose a new way of dealing with operational risk, which relies on the well known aggregate planning model. To … Read more

A polyhedral study of the Network Pricing Problem with Connected Toll Arcs

Consider the problem that consists in maximizing the revenue generated by tolls set on a subset of arcs of a transportation network, and where origin-destination flows are assigned to shortest paths with respect to the sum of tolls and initial costs. In this work, we address the instance where toll arcs must be connected, as … Read more

Approximate Solutions for Deterministic and Stochastic Multi-Dimensional Sequencing

We investigate the problem of sequencing jobs that have multiple components. Each component of the job needs to be processed independently on a specified machine. We derive approximate algorithms for the problem of scheduling such vector jobs to minimize their total completion time in the deterministic as well as stochastic setting. In particular, we propose … Read more

Partition Inequalities for Capacitated Survivable Network Design Based on Directed P-Cycles

We study the design of capacitated survivable networks using directed p-cycles. A p-cycle is a cycle with at least three arcs, used for rerouting disrupted flow during edge failures. Survivability of the network is accomplished by reserving sufficient slack on directed p-cycles so that if an edge fails, its flow can be rerouted along the … Read more

An O(n^2) Algorithm for Lot Sizing with Inventory Bounds and Fixed Costs

Lot-sizing problems with inventory bounds and fixed charges have not received much attention in the literature, even though there are many emerging applications in which highly specialized storage is the main activity of interest. The traditional infinite capacity and variable cost assumptions on inventory that have been prevalent in the literature are inappropriate in situations … Read more

A new lower bound for one-machine earliness-tardiness scheduling

In one-machine scheduling, MIP time-indexed formulations are often used to provide very good lower bounds through Lagrangian relaxations. In order to get an improved lower bound, we add valid cuts to a time-indexed formulation and show we still have a Lagrangian relaxation that can be solved as a shortest path in a graph. Two branch-and-bound … Read more