This book represents the results of cross-fertilization between OR/MS and CS/AI. It is this interface of OR/CS that makes possible advances that could not have been achieved in isolation. Taken collectively, these articles are indicative of the state-of-the-art in the interface between OR/MS and CS/AI and of the high caliber of research being conducted by members of the INFORMS Computing Society.

Computer Science and Operations Research continue to have a synergistic relationship and this book represents the results of the cross-fertilization between OR/MS and CS/AI. It is this interface of OR/CS that makes possible advances that could not have been achieved in isolation. Taken collectively, these articles are indicative of the state of the art in the interface between OR/MS and CS/AI and of the high-caliber research being conducted by members of the INFORMS Computing Society.

Discrete event systems (DES) have become pervasive in our daily lives. Examples include (but are not restricted to) manufacturing and supply chains, transportation, healthcare, call centers, and financial engineering. However, due to their complexities that often involve millions or even billions of events with many variables and constraints, modeling these stochastic simulations has long been a hard nut to crack. The advance in available computer technology, especially of cluster and cloud computing, has paved the way for the realization of a number of stochastic simulation optimization for complex discrete event systems. This book will introduce two important techniques initially proposed and developed by Professor Y C Ho and his team; namely perturbation analysis and ordinal optimization for stochastic simulation optimization, and present the state-of-the-art technology, and their future research directions.

The primary objective of this essential text is to emphasize the deep relations existing between the semiring and dioïd structures with graphs and their combinatorial properties. It does so at the same time as demonstrating the modeling and problem-solving flexibility of these structures. In addition the book provides an extensive overview of the mathematical properties employed by "nonclassical" algebraic structures which either extend usual algebra or form a new branch of it.

This book is published in conjunction with the 12th Computing Society Conference, held January 9, 2011, in Monterey, California. The themes of the conference and this book are operations research, computing, and homeland defense. The papers cover topics on the theory of computing, mathematical programming, game theory, statistics and more; over half have applications to homeland defense.

A unified view of metaheuristics This book provides a complete background on metaheuristics and shows readers how to design and implement efficient algorithms to solve complex optimization problems across a diverse range of applications, from networking and bioinformatics to engineering design, routing, and scheduling. It presents the main design questions for all families of metaheuristics and clearly illustrates how to implement the algorithms under a software framework to reuse both the design and code. Throughout the book, the key search components of metaheuristics are considered as a toolbox for: Designing efficient metaheuristics (e.g. local search, tabu search, simulated annealing, evolutionary algorithms, particle swarm optimization, scatter search, ant colonies, bee colonies, artificial immune systems) for optimization problems Designing efficient metaheuristics for multi-objective optimization problems Designing hybrid, parallel, and distributed metaheuristics Implementing metaheuristics on sequential and parallel machines Using many case studies and treating design and implementation independently, this book gives readers the skills necessary to solve large-scale optimization problems quickly and efficiently. It is a valuable reference for practicing engineers and researchers from diverse areas dealing with optimization or machine learning; and graduate students in computer science, operations research, control, engineering, business and management, and applied mathematics.

Cellular Genetic Algorithms defines a new class of optimization algorithms based on the concepts of structured populations and Genetic Algorithms (GAs). The authors explain and demonstrate the validity of these cellular genetic algorithms throughout the book with equal and parallel emphasis on both theory and practice. This book is a key source for studying and designing cellular GAs, as well as a self-contained primary reference book for these algorithms.