Assembly line balancing problems (ALBP) consist of distributing the total workload for manufacturing any unit of the products to be assembled among the work stations along a manufacturing line as used in the automotive or the electronics industries. Usually, it is assumed in research papers...

This paper develops a stochastic model for comparing payments to U.S. corn producers under the U.S. Senate’s Average Crop Revenue Program (ACR) versus payments under the price-based marketing loan benefit and countercyclical payment programs. Using this model, the paper examines the...

This paper develops a stochastic model for estimating the probability density function of the Average Crop Revenue Election (ACRE), a revenue-based commodity support payment that is offered under the 2008 Farm Act as an alternative to the traditional suite of price-based commodity payments, that...

This paper presents a combinatorial polynomial-time algorithm for minimizing submolular set functions. The algorithm employs a scaling scheme that uses a flow in the complete directed graph on the underlying set with each arc capacity equal to thescaled parameter. The resulting algorithm runs in...

We consider the problem of scheduling a set of n jobs on m identical parallel machines so as to minimize the weighted sum of job completion times. This problem is NP-hard in the strong sense. The best approximation result known so far was a 1/2(1 + √2)-approximation algorithm that has been...

Given an undirected, connected, weighted graph, the leaf-constrained minimum spanning tree (LCMST) problem seeks a spanning tree of the graph with smallest weight among all spanning trees of the graph, which contains at least l leaves. In this paper we have proposed two new metaheuristic...

Given an undirected graph with weights associated with its vertices, the minimum weight vertex cover problem seeks a subset of vertices with minimum sum of weights such that each edge of the graph has at least one endpoint belonging to the subset. In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach,...