In spite of its tremendous economic significance, the problem of sales staff schedule optimization for retail stores has received relatively scant attention. Current approaches typically attempt to minimize payroll costs by closely fitting a staffing curve derived from exogenous sales forecasts,...

The Hunter Valley Coal Chain is the largest coal export operation in the world with a throughput in excess of 100 million tonnes per annum (Mtpa). Coal is delivered to the shipping terminal from 40 mines using 27 coal load points spread across the Hunter Valley region. This paper describes an...

Due to the emergence of bandwidth-requiring services, telecommunication operators are brought to renew their fixed access network, most of them favoring the Fiber To The Home (FTTH) technology. This paper focuses on the optimization of FTTH deployment, which is of prime importance due to the...

Selecting optimal location is a key decision problem in business and engineering. This research focuses to develop mathematical models for a special type of location problems called grid-based location problems. It uses a real-world problem of placing lights in a park to minimize the amount of...

Wireless sensor networks involve many different real-world contexts, such as monitoring and control tasks for traffic, surveillance, military and environmental applications, among others. Usually, these applications consider the use of a large number of low-cost sensing devices to monitor the...

Elevated fuel loads are contributing to an increase in the occurrence of, and area burned by, severe wildfires in many regions across the globe. In an attempt to reverse this trend, fire and land management agencies are investing in extensive fuel management programs. However, the planning of...

Given an undirected graph G=(V,E), a k-club is a subset of nodes that induces a subgraph with diameter at most k. The k-club problem is to find a maximum cardinality k-club. In this study, we use a linear programming relaxation standpoint to compare integer formulations for the k-club problem....

Production optimization of gas-lifted oil wells under facility, routing and pressure constraints is a challenging problem, which has attracted the interest of operations engineers aiming to drive economic gains and scientists for its inherent complexity. The hardness of this problem rests on the...

Pisinger et al. introduced the concept of ‘aggressive reduction’ for large-scale combinatorial optimization problems. The idea is to spend much time and effort in reducing the size of the instance, in the hope that the reduced instance will then be small enough to be solved by an exact...