A framework for online decision making under uncertainty and time constraints, with online stochastic algorithms for implementing the framework, performance guarantees, and demonstrations of a variety of applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Integration of AI and OR Techniques in Constraint Programming for Combinatorial Optimization Problems, CPAIOR 2008, held in Paris, France, in May 2008. The 18 revised long papers and 22 revised short papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 130 submissions. The papers describe current research in the fields of constraint programming, artificial intelligence, and operations research to explore ways of solving large-scale, practical optimization problems through integration and hybridization of the fields' different techniques.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Integration of AI and OR Techniques in Constraint Programming for Combinatorial Optimization Problems, CPAIOR 2006, held in Cork, Ireland in May/June 2006. The 20 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 67 submissions. The papers address methodological and foundational issues from AI, OR, and algorithmics and present applications to the solution of combinatorial optimization problems in various fields via constraint programming.

Balancing the solution-quality/time trade-off and optimizing problems which feature offline and online phases can deliver significant improvements in efficiency and budget control. Offline/online integration yields benefits by achieving high quality solutions while reducing online computation time. This book considers multi-stage optimization problems under uncertainty and proposes various methods that have broad applicability. Due to the complexity of the task, the most popular approaches depend on the temporal granularity of the decisions to be made and are, in general, sampling-based methods and heuristics. Long-term strategic decisions that may have a major impact are typically solved using these more accurate, but expensive, sampling-based approaches. Short-term operational decisions often need to be made over multiple steps within a short time frame and are commonly addressed via polynomial-time heuristics, with the more advanced sampling-based methods only being applicable if their computational cost can be carefully managed. Despite being strongly interconnected, these 2 phases are typically solved in isolation. In the first part of the book, general methods based on a tighter integration between the two phases are proposed and their applicability explored, and these may lead to significant improvements. The second part of the book focuses on how to manage the cost/quality trade-off of online stochastic anticipatory algorithms, taking advantage of some offline information. All the methods proposed here provide multiple options to balance the quality/time trade-off in optimization problems that involve offline and online phases, and are suitable for a variety of practical application scenarios.

In its thousands of years of history, mathematics has made an extraordinary ca reer. It started from rules for bookkeeping and computation of areas to become the language of science. Its potential for decision support was fully recognized in the twentieth century only, vitally aided by the evolution of computing and communi cation technology. Mathematical optimization, in particular, has developed into a powerful machinery to help planners. Whether costs are to be reduced, profits to be maximized, or scarce resources to be used wisely, optimization methods are available to guide decision making. Opti mization is particularly strong if precise models of real phenomena and data of high quality are at hand - often yielding reliable automated control and decision proce dures. But what, if the models are soft and not all data are around? Can mathematics help as well? This book addresses such issues, e. g. , problems of the following type: - An elevator cannot know all transportation requests in advance. In which order should it serve the passengers? - Wing profiles of aircrafts influence the fuel consumption. Is it possible to con tinuously adapt the shape of a wing during the flight under rapidly changing conditions? - Robots are designed to accomplish specific tasks as efficiently as possible. But what if a robot navigates in an unknown environment? - Energy demand changes quickly and is not easily predictable over time. Some types of power plants can only react slowly.

Why aren't the most powerful new technologies being used to solve the world's most important problems: hunger, poverty, conflict, employment, disease? In Link, Dr. Lorien Pratt answers these questions by exploring the solution that is emerging worldwide to take Artificial Intelligence to the next level: Decision Intelligence.

From the reviews: "About 30 years ago, when I was a student, the first book on combinatorial optimization came out referred to as "the Lawler" simply. I think that now, with this volume Springer has landed a coup: "The Schrijver". The box is offered for less than 90.- EURO, which to my opinion is one of the best deals after the introduction of this currency." OR-Spectrum