There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

Praise for the Third Edition: "This is one of the best books available. Its excellent organizational structure allows quick reference to specific models and its clear presentation . . . solidifies the understanding of the concepts being presented."IIE Transactions on Operations EngineeringThoroughly revised and expanded to reflect the latest developments in the field, Fundamentals of Queueing Theory, Fourth Edition continues to present the basic statistical principles that are necessary to analyze the probabilistic nature of queues. Rather than presenting a narrow focus on the subject, this update illustrates the wide-reaching, fundamental concepts in queueing theory and its applications to diverse areas such as computer science, engineering, business, and operations research.This update takes a numerical approach to understanding and making probable estimations relating to queues, with a comprehensive outline of simple and more advanced queueing models. Newly featured topics of the Fourth Edition include:Retrial queuesApproximations for queueing networksNumerical inversion of transformsDetermining the appropriate number of servers to balance quality and cost of serviceEach chapter provides a self-contained presentation of key concepts and formulae, allowing readers to work with each section independently, while a summary table at the end of the book outlines the types of queues that have been discussed and their results. In addition, two new appendices have been added, discussing transforms and generating functions as well as the fundamentals of differential and difference equations. New examples are now included along with problems that incorporate QtsPlus software, which is freely available via the book's related Web site.With its accessible style and wealth of real-world examples, Fundamentals of Queueing Theory, Fourth Edition is an ideal book for courses on queueing theory at the upper-undergraduate and graduate levels. It is also a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners who analyze congestion in the fields of telecommunications, transportation, aviation, and management science.

Fundamentals of Queueing Theory

Introduction to stochastic programming

In the last four decades the container as an essential part of a unit-load-concept has achieved undoubted importance in international sea freight transportation. With ever increasing containerization the number of seaport container terminals and competition among them have become quite remarkable. Operations are nowadays unthinkable without effective and efficient use of information technology as well as appropriate optimization (operations research) methods. In this paper we describe and classify the main logistics processes and operations in container terminals and present a survey of methods for their optimization.

Container terminal operation and operations research — a classification and literature review

Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition and column generation, devised for linear programs, is a success story in large-scale integer programming. We outline and relate the approaches, and survey mainly recent contributions, not yet found in textbooks. We emphasize the growing understanding of the dual point of view, which has brought considerable progress to the column generation theory and practice. It stimulated careful initializations, sophisticated solution techniques for the restricted master problem and subproblem, as well as better overall performance. Thus, the dual perspective is an ever recurring concept in our "selected topics."

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Selected Topics in Column Generation

Triangulations appear everywhere, from volume computations and meshing to algebra and topology. This book studies the subdivisions and triangulations of polyhedral regions and point sets and presents the first comprehensive treatment of the theory of secondary polytopes and related topics. A central theme of the book is the use of the rich structure of the space of triangulations to solve computational problems (e.g., counting the number of triangulations or finding optimal triangulations with respect to various criteria), and to establish connections to applications in algebra, computer science, combinatorics, and optimization. With many examples and exercises, and with nearly five hundred illustrations, the book gently guides readers through the properties of the spaces of triangulations of "structured" (e.g., cubes, cyclic polytopes, lattice polytopes) and "pathological" (e.g., disconnected spaces of triangulations) situations using only elementary principles.

Triangulations: Structures for Algorithms and Applications

I Optimal Control for Ordinary Differential Equations.- Sensitivity Analysis and Real-Time Optimization of Parametric Nonlinear Programming Problems.- Sensitivity Analysis and Real-Time Control of Parametric Optimal Control Problems Using Boundary Value Methods.- Sensitivity Analysis and Real-Time Control of Parametric Optimal Control Problems Using Nonlinear Programming Methods.- Sensitivity Analysis and Real-Time Control of a Container Crane under State Constraints.- Real-Time Control of an Industrial Robot under Control and State Constraints.- Real-Time Optimal Control of Shape Memory Alloy Actuators in Smart Structures.- Real-Time Solutions for Perturbed Optimal Control Problems by a Mixed Open- and Closed-Loop Strategy.- Real-Time Optimization of DAE Systems.- Real-Time Solutions of Bang-Bang and Singular Optimal Control Problems.- Conflict Avoidance During Landing Approach Using Parallel Feedback Control.- II Optimal Control for Partial Differential Equations.- Optimal Control Problems with a First Order PDE System - Necessary and Sufficient Optimality Conditions.- Optimal Control Problems for the Nonlinear Heat Equation.- Fast Optimization Methods in the Selective Cooling of Steel.- Real-Time Optimization and Stabilization of Distributed Parameter Systems with Piezoelectric Elements.- Instantaneous Control of Vibrating String Networks.- Modelling, Stabilization, and Control of Flow in Networks of Open Channels.- Optimal Control of Distributed Systems with Break Points.- to Model Based Optimization of Chemical Processes on Moving Horizons.- Multiscale Concepts for Moving Horizon Optimization.- Real-Time Optimization for Large Scale Processes: Nonlinear Model Predictive Control of a High Purity Distillation Column.- Towards Nonlinear Model-Based Predictive Optimal Control of Large-Scale Process Models with Application to Air Separation Plants.- IV Delay Differential Equations in Medical Decision Support Systems.- Differential Equations with State-Dependent Delays.- Biomathematical Models with State-Dependent Delays for Granulocytopoiesis.- Stochastic Optimization for Operating Chemical Processes under Uncertainty.- A Multistage Stochastic Programming Approach in Real-Time Process Control.- Optimal Control of a Continuous Distillation Process under Probabilistic Constraints.- Adaptive Optimal Stochastic Trajectory Planning.- Stochastic Optimization Methods in Robust Adaptive Control of Robots.- Multistage Stochastic Integer Programs: An Introduction.- Decomposition Methods for Two-Stage Stochastic Integer Programs.- Modeling of Uncertainty for the Real-Time Management of Power Systems.- Online Scheduling of Multiproduct Batch Plants under Uncertainty.- VIII Combinatorial Online Planning in Transportation.- Combinatorial Online Optimization in Real Time.- Online Optimization of Complex Transportation Systems.- Stowage and Transport Optimization in Ship Planning.- IX Real-Time Annealing in Image Segmentation.- Basic Principles of Annealing for Large Scale Non-Linear Optimization.- Multiscale Annealing and Robustness: Fast Heuristics for Large Scale Non-linear Optimization.- Author Index.

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Online optimization of large scale systems

TOPCOM is a package for computing triangulations of point configurations and oriented matroids. For example, for a point configuration one can compute the chirotope, components of the flip graph of triangulations, enumerate all triangulations. The core algorithms implemented in TOPCOM are described, and implentation issues are discussed.

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TOPCOM: Triangulations of Point Configurations and Oriented Matroids

We consider the following online dial-a-ride problem (OLDARP): Objects are to be transported between points in a metric space. Transportation requests arrive online, specifying the objects to be transported and the corresponding source and destination. These requests are to be handled by a server which starts its work at a designated origin and which picks up and drops objects at their sources and destinations. The server can move at constant unit speed. After the end of its service the server returns to its start in the origin. The goal of OLDARP is to come up with a transportation schedule for the server which finishes as early as possible, i.e., which minimizes the makespan. We analyze several competitive algorithms for OLDARP and establish tight competitiveness results. The first two algorithms, REPLAN and IGNORE are very simple and natural: REPLAN completely discards its (preliminary) schedule and recomputes a new one when a new request arrives. IGNORE always runs a (locally optimal) schedule for a set of known requests and ignores all new requests until this schedule is completed. We show that both strategies, REPLAN and IGNORE, are 5/2-competitive. We then present a somewhat less natural strategy SMARTSTART, which in contrast to the other two strategies may leave the server idle from time to time although unserved requests are known. The SMARTSTART-algorithm has an improved competitive ratio of 2, which matches our lower bound.

Online dial-a-ride problems : Minimizing the completion time

In 1994, Sturmfels gave a polyhedral version of the Cayley Trick of elimination theory: he established an order-preserving bijection between the posets of coherent mixed subdivisions of a Minkowski sum ?1+...+?
 r
 of point configurations and of coherent polyhedral subdivisions of the associated Cayley embedding ?(?1,...,?
 r
 
). In this paper we extend this correspondence in a natural way to cover also non-coherent subdivisions. As an application, we show that the Cayley Trick combined with results of Santos on subdivisions of Lawrence polytopes provides a new independent proof of the Bohne-Dress theorem on zonotopal tilings. This application uses a combinatorial characterization of lifting subdivisions, also originally proved by Santos.

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Jörg Rambau

Papers

Triangulations: Structures for Algorithms and Applications

Online optimization of large scale systems

TOPCOM: Triangulations of Point Configurations and Oriented Matroids

Online dial-a-ride problems : Minimizing the completion time

The Cayley Trick, lifting subdivisions and the Bohne-Dress theorem on zonotopal tilings