The following problem arose in a project run by Schlumberger Consulting for Illinois Power: Given a geographic region, place the minimum number of receivers (ampliiers) on existing utility poles so that all the region's wireless meters can transmit their reading to at least one. Due to the growing popularity of wireless meter reading, the size of the geographic regions involved, and of the amou...

General optimization techniques typically depend on analytical tools involving differentiation. However, for many problems, special intrinsic tools lead in a more natural way to insight. For information theory, instances of this phenomenon includes problems on the determination of capacity, the search for universal codes or maximum entropy distributions and the calculation of information projec...

There exist efficient algorithms to project a point onto the intersection of a convex cone and an affine subspace. Those conic projections are in turn the work-horse of a range of algorithms in conic optimization, having a variety of applications in science, finance and engineering. This chapter reviews some of these algorithms, emphasizing the so-called regularization algorithms for linear con...

We argue for the benefits of relations over functions for modelling programs, and even more so for modelling specifications. To support this argument, we present an extended case study for a class of optimization problems, deriving efficient functional programs from concise relational specifications.

Alternating direction methods are a common tool for general mathematical programming and optimization. These methods have become particularly important in the field of variational image processing, which frequently requires the minimization of non-differentiable objectives. This paper considers accelerated (i.e., fast) variants of two common alternating direction methods: the Alternating Direct...

In the study of graphical models, methods based on the concept of variational freeenergy bounds have been widely used for approximating functionals of probability distributions. In this paper, we provide a method based on the same principles that can be applied to problems of stochastic optimization. In particular, this method is based upon the same principles as the generalized EM algorithm. W...

in this paper, we consider a stochastic time-cost tradeoff problem (tctp) in pert networks for project management, in which all activities are subjected to a linear cost function and assumed to be exponentially distributed. the aim of this problem is to maximize the project completion probability with a pre-known deadline to a predefined probability such that the required additional cost is min...

Nesting problems have been present for as long as mankind exists. Present days these problems occur in many different industries, e.g. textile, paper, wood, metal and glass industry. These industries produce massive amounts of products to answer the global demand. To minimize the material waste making these products, a good cutting and packing layout is beneficial. The last three decades, resea...