We computationally assess policies for the elevator control problem by a new column-generation approach for the linear programming method for discounted infinite-horizon Markov decision problems. By analyzing the optimality of given actions in given states, we were able to provably improve the...

The Minimum Power Multicast Problem arises in wireless sensor networks and consists in assigning a transmission power to each node of a network in such a way that the total power consumption over the network is minimized, while a source node is connected to a set of destination nodes, toward...

Manpower still is one of the most expensive resources, in spite of increasing automation. While employee scheduling and rostering has been the topic of extensive research over the past decades, usually it is assumed that the demand for staff is either given or can be obtained without difficulty....

In the generalized balanced optimization problem (GBaOP) the objective value $${\max_{e \in S}{|c(e)-k\max(S)|}}$$ is minimized over all feasible subsets S of E = {1, . . . , m}. We show that the algorithm proposed in Punnen and Aneja (Oper Res Lett 32:27–30, 2004 ) can be modified to ensure...

Submodularity (or concavity) is considered as an important property in the field of cooperative game theory. In this article, we characterize submodular minimum coloring games and submodular minimum vertex cover games. These characterizations immediately show that it can be decided in polynomial...

This paper is concerned with the analysis and comparison of semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations for the satisfiability (SAT) problem. Our presentation is focussed on the special case of 3-SAT, but the ideas presented can in principle be extended to any instance of SAT specified by a set...

We consider a scheduling problem in which the processing time of each job deteriorates, i.e. it increases as time passes after the release date of the job. We present a dynamic programming algorithm coupled with upper bounding and lower bounding techniques to compute exact solutions. We report...