Inventories are prevalent everywhere in the commercial world, whether it be in retail stores, manufacturing facilities, government stockpile material, Federal Reserve banks, or even your own household. This textbook examines basic mathematical techniques used to sufficiently manage inventories by using various computational methods and mathematical models.

The text is presented in a way such that each section can be read independently, and so the order in which the reader approaches the book can be inconsequential. It contains both deterministic and stochastic models along with...

Our globalized world brings us increasing complexity and many computationally hard problems. Metaheuristics are mathematical optimization methods that have become a powerful answer to many of these difficult problems. As a growing set of robust methods, Metaheuristics is producing effective algorithms that compute approximate solutions of high quality in realistic computational time.

METAHEURISTICS: Progress as Real Problem Solvers is a peer-reviewed volume of eighteen current, cutting-edge papers by leading researchers in the field. Included are an invited paper by...

We are witnessing the important developments of complex dynamic systems which include the areas of telecommunications, manufacturing, transportation or power networks, and the rapidly emerging research area seeking to understand and analyze biological systems using the tools of systems theory. In addition, countries' economies are increasingly dependent in the ongoing globalization of economic exchanges. This is in large part made possible by the massive development of information technologies, and the ubiquity of communication systems which permit the existence of global marketplaces....

Column Generation is an insightful overview of the state of the art in integer programming column generation and its many applications. The volume begins with "A Primer in Column Generation" which outlines the theory and ideas necessary to solve large-scale practical problems, illustrated with a variety of examples. Other chapters follow this introduction on "Shortest Path Problems with Resource Constraints," "Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Window," "Branch-and-Price Heuristics," "Cutting Stock Problems," each dealing with methodological aspects of the field. Three...

Graph theory is very much tied to the geometric properties of optimization and combinatorial optimization. Moreover, graph theory's geometric properties are at the core of many research interests in operations research and applied mathematics. Its techniques have been used in solving many classical problems including maximum flow problems, independent set problems, and the traveling salesman problem.

GRAPH THEORY AND COMBINATORIAL OPTIMIZATION explores the field's classical foundations and its developing theories, ideas and applications to new problems....

Recent years have seen a great variety of applications of DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) for use in evaluating the performances of many different kinds of entities engaged in many different activities in many different contexts in many different countries. One reason is that DEA has opened up possibilities for use in cases which have been resistant to other approaches because of the complex (often unknown) nature of the relations between multiple inputs and multiple outputs involved in many of these activities (which are often reported in non-commeasurable units). Examples include the...

Formal decision and evaluation models are so widespread that almost no one can pretend not to have used or suffered the consequences of one of them. This book is a guide aimed at helping the analyst to choose a model and use it consistently. A sound analysis of techniques is proposed and the presentation can be extended to most decision and evaluation models as a "decision aiding methodology."

The service economy is now the largest portion of the industrialized world's economic activity. This development has dramatically raised the importance of maximizing productivity excellence in service organizations. The need for productivity excellence has led service organization managers to use benchmarking techniques to identify and adopt best practices in their organizations. Benchmarking has enabled service organizations to continuously improve by allowing service units to learn from methods that prove the most efficient and effective.

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) offer a general framework for representing non-linear mappings from several input variables to several output variables, and they can be considered as an extension of the many conventional mapping techniques. In addition to many considerations on their biological foundations and their really wide spectrum of applications, constructing appropriate ANNs can be seen as a really hard problem. A distinguished task in building ANNs is the tuning of a set of parameters known as weights. This will be the main focus of the present book. The trained ANNs can be...

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) has grown has grown into a powerful quantitative, analytical tool for measuring and evaluating performance. It has been successfully applied to a host of different entities engaged in a wide variety of activities in many complex, multi-layered contexts worldwide.

DATA ENVELOPMENT ANALYSIS: A Comprehensive Text with Models, Applications, References, And DEA-Solver Software, 2nd Edition is designed to provide a systematic introduction to DEA and its uses as a multifaceted tool for evaluating problems in a variety of contexts....

This book represents the results of cross-fertilization between OR/MS and CS/AI. It is this interface of OR/CS that makes possible advances that could not have been achieved in isolation. Taken collectively, these articles are indicative of the state-of-the-art in the interface between OR/MS and CS/AI and of the high caliber of research being conducted by members of the INFORMS Computing Society.

Network Science, Nonlinear Science and Infrastructure Systems has been written by leading scholars in these areas. Its express purpose is to develop common theoretical underpinnings to better solve modern infrastructural problems. It is felt by many who work in these fields that many modern communication problems, ranging from transportation networks to telecommunications, Internet, supply chains, etc., are fundamentally infrastructure problems. Moreover, these infrastructure problems would benefit greatly from a confluence of theoretical and methodological work done with the areas of...

A number of methodologies have been employed to provide decision making solutions globalized markets. Hidden Markov Models in Finance offers the first systematic application of these methods to specialized financial problems: option pricing, credit risk modeling, volatility estimation and more. The book provides tools for sorting through turbulence, volatility, emotion, chaotic events - the random "noise" of financial markets - to analyze core components.