Chance, Design, Defeat

Chance Constrained Network Design

When designing or upgrading a communication network, operators are faced with a major issue, as uncertainty on communication demands makes it difficult to correctly provision the network capacity. When a probability on traffic matrices is given, finding the cheapest capacity allocation that guarantees, within a prescribed level of confidence, that each arc can support the traffic demands peaks ...

Chance, design and discovery.

Chance and Design in Biosynthesis

Biosynthetic hypotheses of organic chemists found practical applications initially in assisting the determinations of the structures of natural products. They later contributed to biochemical work by suggesting what incorporations of isotopically labelled precursors should be examined. They also postulated biochemical mechanisms, including predictions such as C-methylation from methionine and t...

First Things - Chance, by Design

The question of how to reconcile chance with divine providence long predated Darwin. People didn’t need science to tell them that chance had something to do with their being here. Each of us is the product of a long and tenuous chain of improbable events. We wouldn’t have been born if our parents hadn’t happened to meet or if some ancestor hadn’t escaped disaster by a hair’s breadth. Nor is the...

Chance-Constrained Multi-Terminal Network Design Problems

We consider a reliable network design problem under uncertain edge failures. Our goal is to select a minimum-cost subset of edges in the network to connect multiple terminals together with high probability. This problem can be seen as a stochastic variant of the Steiner tree problem. We propose two scenario-based Steiner cut formulations, study the strength of the proposed valid inequalities, a...