Ant Colony Optimization is a relatively new meta-heuristic that has proven its quality and versatility on various combinatorial optimization problems such as the traveling salesman problem, the vehicle routing problem and the job shop scheduling problem.(...)

In this paper we analyze the evolution of output decisions of adaptive firms in an environment of oligopolistic competition. The firm might either choose to produce one of several existing product variants or try to establish a new product variant on the market....

The Ant System is a new meta-heuristic method particularly appropriate to solve hard combinatorial optimization problems. It is a population-based, nature-inspired approach exploiting positive feedback as well as local information and has been applied successfully to a variety of combinatorial...

In this paper we propose a hybrid approach for solving vehicle routing problems. The main idea is to combine an Ant System (AS) with a problem specific constructive heuristic, namely the well known Savings algorithm. This differs from previous approaches, where the subordinate heuristic was the...

Vorliegendes Arbeitspapier beschreibt den entsprechenden Einsatz künstlicher Ameisen und diskutiert erste numerische Ergebnisse.

We introduce a very simple but efficient idea for branch & bound (B&B) algorithms in global optimization (GO). As input for our generic algorithm, we need an upper bound algorithm for the GO maximization problem and a branching rule....

Following [10] we continue the study of the problem of expected utility maximization in incomplete markets. Our goal is to find minimal conditions on a model and a utility function for the validity of several key assertions of the theory to hold true....

This paper presents first results from research into open source projects from a software engineering perspective. The research methodology employed relies on public data retrieved from the CVS-repository of the GNOME project and relevant discussion groups.(...)