Facility location-network design problems seek to simultaneously determine the locations of fa- cilities and the design of the network connecting the facilities so as to best serve a set of clients accessing the facilities via the network. Here we study a dynamic (multi-period) version of the problem, subject to a budget constraint limiting the investment … Read more
Model Predictive Control (also known as Receding Horizon Control (RHC)) has been highly successful in process control applications. Its use for aerospace applications has been hindered by its high computational requirements. In the present paper, we propose using enhanced primal-dual interior-point optimization techniques in the convex-quadratic-program-based RHC control of a rotorcraft. Our enhancements include a … Read more
In this paper, we propose a primal IP method for solving the optimal experimental design problem with a large class of smooth convex optimality criteria, including A-, D- and p th mean criterion, and establish its global convergence. We also show that the Newton direction can be computed efficiently when the size of the moment … Read more
The single row facility layout problem (SRFLP) is the problem of arranging facilities with given lengths on a line, while minimizing the weighted sum of the distances between all pairs of facilities. The problem is NP-hard. In this paper, we present two tabu search implementations, one involving an exhaustive search of the 2-opt neighborhood and … Read more
The single row facility layout problem (SRFLP) is the problem of arranging facilities with given lengths on a line, while minimizing the weighted sum of the distances between all pairs of facilities. The problem is known to be NP-hard. In this paper, we present a neighborhood search heuristic called LK-INSERT which uses a Lin-Kernighan neighborhood … Read more
The contributions of the first half of this thesis are on the computational and algebraic aspects of convexity in polynomial optimization. We show that unless P=NP, there exists no polynomial time (or even pseudo-polynomial time) algorithm that can decide whether a multivariate polynomial of degree four (or higher even degree) is globally convex. This solves … Read more
Estimating parameters from data is a key stage of the modelling process, particularly in biological systems where many parameters need to be estimated from sparse and noisy data sets. Over the years, a variety of heuristics have been proposed to solve this complex optimisation problem, with good results in some cases yet with limitations in … Read more
In this paper we consider robust models of surge capacity plans to be deployed in the event of a flu pandemic. In particular, we focus on managing critical staff levels at organizations that must remain operational during such an event. We develop efficient procedures for managing emergency resources so as to minimize the impact of … Read more
We suggest an approach for finding the maximal and the minimal spectral radius of linear operators from a given compact family of operators, which share a common invariant cone (e.g. for a family of nonnegative matrices). In case of families with so-called product structure, this leads to efficient algorithms for optimizing the spectral radius and … Read more
Two nonlinear Kalman smoothers are proposed using the Student’s t distribution. The first, which we call the T-Robust smoother, finds the maximum a posteriori (MAP) solution for Gaussian process noise and Student’s t observation noise. It is extremely robust against outliers, outperforming the recently proposed L1-Laplace smoother in extreme situations with data containing 20% or … Read more