This book explores the methodological and application developments of network design in transportation and logistics. It identifies trends, challenges and research perspectives in network design for these areas. Network design is a major class of problems in operations research where network flow, combinatorial and mixed integer optimization meet. The analysis and planning of transportation and logistics systems continues to be one of the most important application areas of operations research. Networks provide the natural way of depicting such systems, so the optimal design and operation of networks is the main methodological area of operations research that is used for the analysis and planning of these systems. This book defines the current state of the art in the general area of network design, and then turns to its applications to transportation and logistics. New research challenges are addressed. Network Design with Applications to Transportation and Logistics is divided into three parts. Part I examines basic design problems including fixed-cost network design and parallel algorithms. After addressing the basics, Part II focuses on more advanced models. Chapters cover topics such as multi-facility network design, flow-constrained network design, and robust network design. Finally Part III is dedicated entirely to the potential application areas for network design. These areas range from rail networks, to city logistics, to energy transport. All of the chapters are written by leading researchers in the field, which should appeal to analysts and planners.

The conference proceeding LNCS 11346 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Combinatorial Optimization and Applications, COCOA 2018, held in Atlanta, GA, USA, in December 2018. The 50 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 106 submissions. The papers cover most aspects of t graph algorithms, routing and network design problems, scheduling algorithms, network optimization, combinatorial algorithms, approximation algorithms, paths and connectivity problems and much more.

Industries rely more and more on advanced technology. Accelerated computer evolution makes large-scale computation practical. Many enterprises are be ginning to benefit from more efficient allocation of resources and more effective planning, scheduling, manufacturing, and distribution by adopting state-of-the art decision support systems. Academics increasingly emphasize application driven research. All these forces have moved optimization from a pure class room and textbook terminology to an accepted tool in today's business world. This book chronicles and describes applications of combinatorial optimization in industry. A wide range of applications is included: manpower planning • production planning • job sequencing and scheduling • manufacturing layout design • facility planning • vehicle scheduling and routing • retail seasonal planning • I! space shuttle scheduling, and telecommunication network design . • The applications covered in this book comprise a representative set of industry sectors including electronics, airlines, manufacturing, tobacco, retail, telecom munication, defense, and livestock. These examples should encourage opera tions researchers and applied mathematicians by pointing out how the impor tance and practicality of optimization is starting to be realized by the manage ment of various organizations and how some pioneering developments in this field are beginning to bear fruit.

The evolution of industrial development since the 18th century is now experiencing the fourth industrial revolution. The effect of the development has propagated into almost every sector of the industry. From inventory to the circular economy, the effectiveness of technology has been fruitful for industry. The recent trends in research, with new ideas and methodologies, are included in this book. Several new ideas and business strategies are developed in the area of the supply chain management, logistics, optimization, and forecasting for the improvement of the economy of the society and the environment. The proposed technologies and ideas are either novel or help modify several other new ideas. Different real life problems with different dimensions are discussed in the book so that readers may connect with the recent issues in society and industry. The collection of the articles provides a glimpse into the new research trends in technology, business, and the environment.

This book presents recent developments and new trends in Combinatorial Optimization. Combinatorial Optimization is an active research area that has applications in many domains such as communications, network design, VLSI, scheduling, production, computational biology. In the past years, new results and major advances have been seen in many areas including computational complexity, approximation algorithms, cutting-plane based methods and submodularity function minimization. More efficient and powerful methods have been developed for approaching real-worlds problems, and new concepts and theoritical results have been introduced.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Combinatorial Optimization and Applications, COCOA 2015, held in Houston, TX, USA, in December 2015. The 59 full papers included in the book were carefully reviewed and selected from 125 submissions. Topics covered include classic combinatorial optimization; geometric optimization; network optimization; applied optimization; complexity and game; and optimization in graphs.