Cloud computing is one of the rapidly improving technologies. It provides scalable resources needed for the applications hosted on it. As cloud-based services become more dynamic, resource provisioning becomes more challenging. The QoS constrained resource allocation problem is considered in this paper, in which customers are willing to host their applications on the provider’s cloud with a giv...

This paper presents a spreadsheet calculator to estimate biogas production and the operational revenue and costs for UK-based farm-fed anaerobic digesters. There exist sophisticated biogas production models in published literature, but the application of these in farm-fed anaerobic digesters is often impractical. This is due to the limited measuring devices, financial constraints, and the opera...

We introduce the idea of optimisation validation, which is to formally establish that an instance of an optimising transformation indeed improves with respect to some resource measure. This is related to, but in contrast with, translation validation, which aims to establish that a particular instance of a transformation undertaken by an optimising compiler is semantics preserving. Our main sett...

In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for the off-line flow allocation problem for traffic engineering in MPLS networks. We use a multi-stage optimization that considers minimizing successively congestion, resource consumption and operational costs. The framework is based on linear programming and presents an efficient solution for the problem both in terms of computational complexity a...

Airlines and their services are very often part of the supply chain in tourism. Therefore, the quality of on-board service contributes to the passengers’ overall satisfaction with the entire journey. Given that the cost of personnel is the second highest component of direct operational costs next to fuel, airlines are more inclined to reduce the level of their workforces rather than to invest i...

The crew scheduling problem in the airline industry is extensively investigated in the operations research literature since efficient crew employment can drastically reduce operational costs of airline companies. Given the flight schedule of an airline company, crew scheduling is the process of assigning all necessary crew members in such a way that the airline is able to operate all its flight...

Application-level multi-tenancy is an architectural design principle for Software-as-a-Service applications to enable the hosting of multiple customers (or tenants) by a single application instance. Despite the operational cost and maintenance benefits of application-level multitenancy, the current middleware component models for multi-tenant application design are inflexible with respect to pr...

This study addresses a capacitated intermediate product selection and blending problem typical for two-stage production systems in the food processing industry. The problem involves the selection of a set of intermediates and end product recipes characterizing how those selected intermediates are blended into end products to minimise the total operational costs under production and storage capa...

Increasing costs and competitive business strategies are pushing sawmill enterprises to make an effort for optimization of their process management. Organizational decisions mainly concentrate on performance and reduction of operational costs in order to maintain profit margins. Although many efforts have been made, effective utilization of resources, optimal planning and maximum productivity i...

This paper introduces an energy management system, FeTOP, which provides an optimal operational planning and control scheme of energy plants. It consists of three functions: an energy forecasting function, an optimal operational planning function of the facilities, and a simulation function of the energy plant. In order to generate optimal operational planning for energy plants, startup/shutdow...