Location, scheduling and design problems are assignment type problems with quadratic cost functions and occur in many contexts stretching from spatial economics via plant and office layout planning to VLSI design and similar prob- lems in high-technology production settings. The presence of nonlinear inter- action terms in the objective function makes these, otherwise simple, problems NP hard. In the first two chapters of this monograph we provide a survey of models of this type and give a common framework for them as Boolean quadratic problems with special ordered sets (BQPSs). Special...

Location, scheduling and design problems are assignment type problems with quadratic cost functions and occur in many contexts stretching from spatial economics via plant and office layout planning to VLSI design and similar prob- lems in high-technology production settings. The presence of nonlinear inter- action terms in the objective function makes these, otherwise simple, problems NP hard. In the first two chapters of this monograph we provide a survey of models of this type and give a common framework for them as Boolean quadratic problems with special ordered sets (BQPSs). Special...