Deposits of clastic carbonate-dominated (calciclastic) sedimentary slope systems in the rock record have been identified mostly as linearly-consistent carbonate apron deposits, even though most ancient clastic carbonate slope deposits fit the submarine fan systems better. Calciclastic submarine fans are consequently rarely described and are poorly understood. Subsequently, very little is known especially in mud-dominated calciclastic submarine fan systems. Presented in this study are a sedimentological core and petrographic characterisation of samples from eleven boreholes from the Lower Carboniferous of Bowland Basin (Northwest England) that reveals a >250 m thick calciturbidite complex deposited in a calciclastic submarine fan setting. Seven facies are recognised from core and thin section characterisation and are grouped into three carbonate turbidite sequences. They include: 1) Calciturbidites, comprising mostly of highto low-density, wavy-laminated bioclast-rich facies; 2) low-density densite mudstones which are characterised by planar laminated and unlaminated muddominated facies; and 3) Calcidebrites which are muddy or hyper-concentrated debrisflow deposits occurring as poorly-sorted, chaotic, mud-supported floatstones. These

Phd by thesis

From the Publisher:
This book explores the meta-heuristics approach called tabu search, which is dramatically changing our ability to solve a hostof problems that stretch over the realms of resource planning,telecommunications, VLSI design, financial analysis, scheduling, spaceplanning, energy distribution, molecular engineering, logistics,pattern classification, flexible manufacturing, waste management,mineral exploration, biomedical analysis, environmental conservationand scores of other problems. The major ideas of tabu search arepresented with examples that show their relevance to multipleapplications. Numerous illustrations and diagrams are used to clarifyprinciples that deserve emphasis, and that have not always been wellunderstood or applied. The book's goal is to provide ''hands-on' knowledge and insight alike, rather than to focus exclusively eitheron computational recipes or on abstract themes. This book is designedto be useful and accessible to researchers and practitioners inmanagement science, industrial engineering, economics, and computerscience. It can appropriately be used as a textbook in a masterscourse or in a doctoral seminar. Because of its emphasis on presentingideas through illustrations and diagrams, and on identifyingassociated practical applications, it can also be used as asupplementary text in upper division undergraduate courses. 

Finally, there are many more applications of tabu search than canpossibly be covered in a single book, and new ones are emerging everyday. The book's goal is to provide a grounding in the essential ideasof tabu search that will allow readers to create successfulapplications of their own. Along with the essentialideas,understanding of advanced issues is provided, enabling researchers togo beyond today's developments and create the methods of tomorrow.

Tabu Search

The pickup and delivery problem with time windows is the problem of serving a number of transportation requests using a limited amount of vehicles. Each request involves moving a number of goods from a pickup location to a delivery location. Our task is to construct routes that visit all locations such that corresponding pickups and deliveries are placed on the same route, and such that a pickup is performed before the corresponding delivery. The routes must also satisfy time window and capacity constraints.

This paper presents a heuristic for the problem based on an extension of the large neighborhood search heuristic previously suggested for solving the vehicle routing problem with time windows. The proposed heuristic is composed of a number of competing subheuristics that are used with a frequency corresponding to their historic performance. This general framework is denoted adaptive large neighborhood search.

The heuristic is tested on more than 350 benchmark instances with up to 500 requests. It is able to improve the best known solutions from the literature for more than 50% of the problems.

The computational experiments indicate that it is advantageous to use several competing subheuristics instead of just one. We believe that the proposed heuristic is very robust and is able to adapt to various instance characteristics.

/pdf/an-adaptive-large-neighborhood-search-heuristic-for-the-54a14dq2lk.pdf

An Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search Heuristic for the Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows

Constraint programming is a powerful paradigm for solving combinatorial search problems that draws on a wide range of techniques from artificial intelligence, computer science, databases, programming languages, and operations research. Constraint programming is currently applied with success to many domains, such as scheduling, planning, vehicle routing, configuration, networks, and bioinformatics.

The aim of this handbook is to capture the full breadth and depth of the constraint programming field and to be encyclopedic in its scope and coverage. While there are several excellent books on constraint programming, such books necessarily focus on the main notions and techniques and cannot cover also extensions, applications, and languages. The handbook gives a reasonably complete coverage of all these lines of work, based on constraint programming, so that a reader can have a rather precise idea of the whole field and its potential. Of course each line of work is dealt with in a survey-like style, where some details may be neglected in favor of coverage. However, the extensive bibliography of each chapter will help the interested readers to find suitable sources for the missing details. Each chapter of the handbook is intended to be a self-contained survey of a topic, and is written by one or more authors who are leading researchers in the area.

The intended audience of the handbook is researchers, graduate students, higher-year undergraduates and practitioners who wish to learn about the state-of-the-art in constraint programming. No prior knowledge about the field is necessary to be able to read the chapters and gather useful knowledge. Researchers from other fields should find in this handbook an effective way to learn about constraint programming and to possibly use some of the constraint programming concepts and techniques in their work, thus providing a means for a fruitful cross-fertilization among different research areas.

The handbook is organized in two parts. The first part covers the basic foundations of constraint programming, including the history, the notion of constraint propagation, basic search methods, global constraints, tractability and computational complexity, and important issues in modeling a problem as a constraint problem. The second part covers constraint languages and solver, several useful extensions to the basic framework (such as interval constraints, structured domains, and distributed CSPs), and successful application areas for constraint programming.

- Covers the whole field of constraint programming
- Survey-style chapters
- Five chapters on applications

Table of Contents

Foreword (Ugo Montanari) 
Part I : Foundations
Chapter 1. Introduction (Francesca Rossi, Peter van Beek, Toby Walsh) 
Chapter 2. Constraint Satisfaction: An Emerging Paradigm (Eugene C. Freuder, Alan K. Mackworth) 
Chapter 3. Constraint Propagation (Christian Bessiere) 
Chapter 4. Backtracking Search Algorithms (Peter van Beek) 
Chapter 5. Local Search Methods (Holger H. Hoos, Edward Tsang) 
Chapter 6. Global Constraints (Willem-Jan van Hoeve, Irit Katriel)
Chapter 7. Tractable Structures for CSPs (Rina Dechter)
Chapter 8. The Complexity of Constraint Languages
(David Cohen, Peter Jeavons) 
Chapter 9. Soft Constraints (Pedro Meseguer, Francesca Rossi, Thomas Schiex) 
Chapter 10. Symmetry in Constraint Programming
(Ian P. Gent, Karen E. Petrie, Jean-Francois Puget)
Chapter 11. Modelling (Barbara M. Smith) 
Part II : Extensions, Languages, and Applications

Chapter 12. Constraint Logic Programming (Kim Marriott, Peter J. Stuckey, Mark Wallace) 
Chapter 13. Constraints in Procedural and Concurrent Languages (Thom Fruehwirth, Laurent Michel, Christian Schulte)
Chapter 14. Finite Domain Constraint Programming Systems (Christian Schulte, Mats Carlsson) 
Chapter 15. Operations Research Methods in Constraint Programming (John Hooker) 
Chapter 16. Continuous and Interval Constraints(Frederic Benhamou, Laurent Granvilliers) 
Chapter 17. Constraints over Structured Domains
(Carmen Gervet) 
Chapter 18. Randomness and Structure (Carla Gomes, Toby Walsh)
Chapter 19. Temporal CSPs (Manolis Koubarakis)
Chapter 20. Distributed Constraint Programming
(Boi Faltings) 
Chapter 21. Uncertainty and Change (Kenneth N. Brown, Ian Miguel)
Chapter 22. Constraint-Based Scheduling and Planning
(Philippe Baptiste, Philippe Laborie, Claude Le Pape, Wim Nuijten)
Chapter 23. Vehicle Routing (Philip Kilby, Paul Shaw) 
Chapter 24. Configuration (Ulrich Junker)
Chapter 25. Constraint Applications in Networks
(Helmut Simonis)
Chapter 26. Bioinformatics and Constraints (Rolf Backofen, David Gilbert)

/pdf/handbook-of-constraint-programming-53srutguo2.pdf

Handbook of Constraint Programming

https://www.mansci.ovgu.de/mansci_media/publikationen/2007/typology-EGOTEC-5t0pvr6fjifln4r4oav60tt612.pdf

An improved typology of cutting and packing problems

Vehicle routing problem (VRP) is a generic name given to a whole class of problems concerning the optimal design of routes to be used by a fleet of vehicles to serve a set of customers. The VRP generalizes one of the most famous and important combinatorial optimization problems: the traveling salesman problem (TSP). Since it was first proposed by Dantzig and Ramser in 1959, hundreds of papers in the areas of operations research were devoted to the exact and approximate solution of a member of the VRP class, known as the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP), where a homogeneous fleet of vehicles is available and the only constraint considered is the vehicle capacity constraint. Real-world applications of the VRP are, for instance, delivery and collection of goods, solid waste collection, street cleaning, school bus routing, dial-a-ride systems, transportation of handicapped persons, and routing of salesmen and of maintenance units. This article provides a review of the developments that had a major impact in the current state-of-the-art of exact algorithms for the CVRP. The paper also reports a comparison of the computational performances of the recent exact methods.


Keywords:

capacitated vehicle routing;
exact methods;
survey

Exact Solution of the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem

The multiple traveling salesman problem in presence of drone- and robot-supported packet stations

The generalized vehicle routing problem with time windows (GVRPTW) is defined on a directed graph G = ( V , A ) where the vertex set V is partitioned into clusters. One cluster contains only the depot, where is located a homogeneous fleet of vehicles, each with a limited capacity. The other clusters represent customers. A demand is associated with each cluster. Inside a cluster, the vertices represent the possible locations of the customer. A time window is associated with each vertex, during which the visit must take place if the vertex is visited. The objective is to find a set of routes such that the total traveling cost is minimized, exactly one vertex per cluster is visited, and all the capacity and time constraints are respected. This paper presents a set covering formulation for the GVRPTW which is used to provide a column generation based heuristic to solve it. The proposed solving method combines several components including a construction heuristic, a route optimization procedure, local search operators and the generation of negative reduced cost routes. Experimental results on benchmark instances show that the proposed algorithm is efficient and high-quality solutions for instances with up to 120 clusters are obtained within short computation times.

A column generation based heuristic for the generalized vehicle routing problem with time windows

In this paper we describe an hybrid heuristic approach, which combines Genetic Algorithms and Tabu Thresholding, for the static allocation of interacting processes onto a parallel target system, where the number of processes is greater than the number of available processors. This problem is known to be NP-hard and finds many practical applications, given the increasing diffusion of distributed and parallel computing systems.

The algorithm faces infeasibilities due to processors overload by incorporating them into the objective function and by adapting the mutation operator. Global search is performed on the set of local optima obtained by a repair search operator based on a Tabu Thresholding procedure.

Extensive computational testing on randomly generated instances with up to 100 processes characterized by different target network topologies with 4 to 25 processors, shows that the algorithm favorably compares with other approaches from the literature.

The proposed approach has also been extended to the allocation of parallel objects and classes, where an additional co-residence constraint between each parallel object and the associated class arises.

Daniele Vigo

Papers

Exact Solution of the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem

The multiple traveling salesman problem in presence of drone- and robot-supported packet stations

A column generation based heuristic for the generalized vehicle routing problem with time windows

A Genetic/Tabu Thresholding Hybrid Algorithm for the ProcessAllocation Problem

An Efficient Implementation of a Static Move Descriptor-based Local Search Heuristic