We present a modification of the simulated annealing algorithm designed for solving discrete stochastic optimization problems. Like the original simulated annealing algorithm, our method has the hill climbing feature, so it can find global optimal solutions to discrete stochastic optimization...

In this paper, we present a novel quantitative analysis for the strategic planning decision problem of allocating certain available prevention and protection resources to, respectively, reduce the failure probabilities of system safety measures and the total expected loss from a sequence of...

Recently there has been considerable interest in the average-case performance of heuristics. This paper pursues that interest, where it concerns sequencing and packing problems. In particular, we survey the methods that have been used to obtain formal probabilistic analyses of heuristics for...

Consider a plant that has information about the arrival schedule of its "inputs" over a planning cycle. The plant has parallel production lines for processing multiple types of products. However, changeover cost and changeover time are incurred when a line changes from processing one type of...

A cardinality-constrained TSP (CC-TSP) problem requires the salesman to visit at least L and at most U cities, represented by nodes of a graph. The objective of this problem is to maximize the sum of weights of nodes visited. In this paper we propose a tabu search method based on ejection chain...

We consider the resource-constrained project scheduling problem. The purpose of this paper is to direct the focus to a branch-and-bound concept that can, by simple adaptations, operate on a wide range of problem settings. The general approach can, e.g., deal with multimode problems, resource...

(This article originally appeared in Management Science, January 1981, Volume 27, Number 1, pp. 1--18, published by The Institute of Management Sciences.) One of the most computationally useful ideas of the 1970s is the observation that many hard integer programming problems can be viewed as...