This edited volume contains 16 research articles. It presents recent and pressing issues in stochastic processes, control theory, differential games, optimization, and their applications in finance, manufacturing, queueing networks, and climate control. One of the salient features is that the book is highly multi-disciplinary. The book is dedicated to Professor Suresh Sethi on the occasion of his 60th birthday, in view of his distinguished career.

This book shows the breadth and depth of stochastic programming applications. All the papers presented here involve optimization over the scenarios that represent possible future outcomes of the uncertainty problems. The applications, which were presented at the 12th International Conference on Stochastic Programming held in Halifax, Nova Scotia in August 2010, span the rich field of uses of these models. The finance papers discuss such diverse problems as longevity risk management of individual investors, personal financial planning, intertemporal surplus management, asset management with benchmarks, dynamic portfolio management, fixed income immunization and racetrack betting. The production and logistics papers discuss natural gas infrastructure design, farming Atlantic salmon, prevention of nuclear smuggling and sawmill planning. The energy papers involve electricity production planning, hydroelectric reservoir operations and power generation planning for liquid natural gas plants. Finally, two telecommunication papers discuss mobile network design and frequency assignment problems.

Since the introduction of system signatures in Francisco Samaniego’s 1985 paper, the properties of this technical concept have been examined, tested and proven in a wide variety of systems applications. Based on the practical and research success in building reliability into systems with system signatures, this is the first book treatment of the approach. Its purpose is to provide guidance on how reliability problems might be structured, modeled and solved.

Thesubjectofthisbookisthenested partitions method(NP),arelativelynew optimization method that has been found to be very e?ective solving discrete optimization problems. Such discrete problems are common in many practical applications and the NP method is thus useful in diverse application areas. It can be applied to both operational and planning problems and has been demonstrated to e?ectively solve complex problems in both manufacturing and service industries. To illustrate its broad applicability and e?ectiveness, in this book we will show how the NP method has been successful in solving complex problems in planning and scheduling, logistics and transportation, supply chain design, data mining, and health care. All of these diverse app- cationshaveonecharacteristicincommon:theyallleadtocomplexlarge-scale discreteoptimizationproblemsthatareintractableusingtraditionaloptimi- tion methods. 1.1 Large-Scale Optimization IndevelopingtheNPmethodwewillconsideroptimization problemsthatcan be stated mathematically in the following generic form: minf(x), (1.1) x?X where the solution space or feasible region X is either a discrete or bounded ? set of feasible solutions. We denote a solution to this problem x and the ? ? objective function value f = f (x ).

This book covers several bases at once. It is useful as a textbook for a second course in experimental optimization techniques for industrial production processes. In addition, it is a superb reference volume for use by professors and graduate students in Industrial Engineering and Statistics departments. It will also be of huge interest to applied statisticians, process engineers, and quality engineers working in the electronics and biotech manufacturing industries. In all, it provides an in-depth presentation of the statistical issues that arise in optimization problems, including confidence regions on the optimal settings of a process, stopping rules in experimental optimization, and more.

Proportional Optimization and Fairness is a long-needed attempt to reconcile optimization with apportionment in just-in-time (JIT) sequences and find the common ground in solving problems ranging from sequencing mixed-model just-in-time assembly lines through just-in-time batch production, balancing workloads in event graphs to bandwidth allocation internet gateways and resource allocation in computer operating systems. The book argues that apportionment theory and optimization based on deviation functions provide natural benchmarks for a process, and then looks at the recent research and developments in the field. Individual chapters look at the theory of apportionment and just-in-time sequences; minimization of just-in-time sequence deviation; optimality of cyclic sequences and the oneness; bottleneck minimization; competition-free instances, Fraenkel’s Conjecture, and optimal admission sequences; response time variability; applications to the Liu-Layland Problem and pinwheel scheduling; temporal capacity constraints and supply chain balancing; fair queuing and stride scheduling; and smoothing and batching.

The subject for this book is my life work on the enterprise modeling and integration by a stochastic/queuing form, and the book plan was conceived before my stay in the USA in 1996–97 as a visiting scholar. The rst title was “Stochastic Management and Design of Manufacturing Systems.” The rst version was attempted in 2001; however, this version was inappropriate and was not revised till now. It is 40 years since I attempted a stochastic approach to manufacturing and management due to the limitations of statistical approaches. The century in which industrial engineering and management rose to the forefront was one in which a static/statistical approach was applied to the development of classical models and general/average theory. This book presents a stochastic management approach to the manufacturing and service enterprise with risks by a game/strategic view, and is based on many papers in production/queueing studies that have appeared in famous journals. The book’s objective is to discuss and show the goals and constraints on manufacturing and service enterprises, and to provide a strategic/collaborative solution for management with risks in heterogeneity. This book mainly focuses on the three manufacturing classes: continuous, poi- wise, and exible stream types under risks. These manufacturing streams are rst studied using the respective stochastic processes, and are characterized and dev- oped as a queueing/strategic control problem of look-ahead/buffer, selection/swit- over, and arrangement/routings. Moreover, the behaviors of some design/control variables are shown and useful theories for design are established.