Resource-constrained project scheduling under a net present value objective attracts growing interest. Because this is an NP-hard problem, it is unlikely that optimum solutions can be computed for large instances. Thus, heuristics have become a popular research field. Up to now, however, tight...

This paper introduces a new general framework for genetic algorithms to solve a broad range of optimization problems. When designing a genetic algorithm, there may be several alternatives for a component such as crossover, mutation or decoding procedure, and it may be difficult to determine the...

Sales force management decisions belong to the major issues considered in marketing research. Among others, the alignment of sales territories has been one of the main field of work for years. Recent results have reported a strong impact of the alignment of sales territories on profit, and,...

Combinatorial auctions permitting bids on bundles of items have been developed to remedy the exposure problem associated with single-item auctions. Given winning bundle prices a set of item prices is called market clearing or equilibrium if all the winning bids are greater than or equal and if...

Recently, Branzei, Dimitrov, and Tijs (2003) introduced cooperative interval-valued games. Among other insights, the notion of an interval core has been coined and proposed as a solution concept for interval-valued games. In this paper we will present a general mathematical programming algorithm...

A single round robin tournament (SRRT) consists of n teams and a set of periods. Matches between the teams have to be scheduled such that each team plays against each other team exactly once and each team plays at most once per period. In order to establish fairness among teams we consider a...

We introduce a new class of valid inequalities for the maximum round robin tournament (MRRT) problem. They strengthen the linear relaxation and improve the upper bound. We also answer negatively the question of Briskorn if the optimal objective value of the MRRT problem and that of its...

This paper studies the allocation of buffer times in a single machine environment. Buffer times are a common tool to protect the schedule against disruptions such as machine failures. We introduce new classes of robust machine scheduling problems. For an arbitrary scheduling problem 1

This paper studies inventory constraints in a machine scheduling environment. Jobs can add and remove items of different types to the inventory and from the inventory, respectively. Jobs removing items cannot be processed if the required amount of items is not available. We first have a look at...

Single round robin tournaments are a well known class of sports leagues schedules. We consider leagues with a set T of n teams where n is even. Costs are associated to each possible match. Moreover, stadium availability, fixed matches, and regions' capacities are taken into account. The goal is...