This dissertation considers three topics in professional advising and forecasting. Chapter 1 examines a principal's optimal contracting with experts. In an environment where experts have heterogeneous private signal distributions and type dependent reservation utilities, we show that the...

Efficient solid waste management is one of the most relevant issues for urban communities. With regard to the service type of household waste collection, there are two approaches in practice: When collecting household waste via a door-to-door system, the collection vehicles drive down all the...

Financial options typically incorporate times of exercise. Alternatively, they embody set-up costs or indivisibilities. Such features lead to planning problems with integer decision variables. Provided the sample space be finite, it is shown here that integrality constraints can often be...

We present a novel technique for cardinality-constrained index-tracking, a common task in the financial industry. Our approach is based on market graph models. We model our reference indices as market graphs and express the index-tracking problem as a quadratic K-medoids clustering problem. We...

It has been shown that evolutionary algorithms are able to construct suitable search strategies for classes of Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs) in Constraint Programming. This paper is an explanation of the use of multi-objective optimisation in contrast to simple additive weighting...

Automatic design of stochastic local search algorithms has been shown to be very effective in generating algorithms for the permutation flowshop problem for the most studied objectives including makespan, flowtime and total tardiness. The automatic design system uses a configuration tool to...

The effectiveness and efficiency of optimization algorithms might deteriorate when solving large-scale binary integer programs (BIPs). Consequently, researchers have tried to fix the values of certain variables called adjunct variables, and only optimize a small problem version formed from the...

Real‐world problems are becoming highly complex and therefore have to be solved with combinatorial optimization (CO) techniques. Motivated by the strong increase in publications on CO, 8393 articles from this research field are subjected to a bibliometric analysis. The corpus of literature is...

We establish the NP-completeness of the variant of the bilevel assignment problem, where the leader and the follower both have bottleneck objective functions and were the follower behaves according to the optimistic rule. This result settles a problem that has been left open by Klinz & Gassner...

In this article, we introduce the Maximum Diversity Assortment Selection Problem (MDASP), which is a generalization of the two-dimensional Knapsack Problem (2D-KP). Given a set of rectangles and a rectangular container, the goal of 2D-KP is to determine a subset of rectangles that can be placed...