This paper investigates the structure of qualitative capacities, which are monotonic increasing set functions ranging on a finite totally ordered scale equipped with an orderreversing map. More specifically, we study whether these qualitative set-functions can be viewed as classes of more particular set functions, namely possibility measures, paralleling the situation of quantitative capacities...

An uncapacitated facility location problem considers a set of n warehouses W and a set of m stores S. Each warehouse w has a fixed cost fw, and the transportation cost from warehouse w to store s is given by cws. The problem is to find a subset of warehouses and an assignment of warehouses to stores in order to minimize the fixed and transportation costs. Observe that once the warehouses are se...

In physics, a phase transition from liquid to solid means that molecules are stuck between their neighbours. We investigate a similar effect in a crowd at a small exit. People cross the exit one by one, but the majority moves very slowly. Those from behind press, and if the density is large enough, it is impossible to move with respect to our neighbours. Can one withdraw from the crowd or he/sh...

We study the influence of the dimension of cellular automata (CA) for real time language recognition of one-dimensional languages with parallel input. Specifically, we focus on the question of determining whether every language that can be recognized in real time on a 2-dimensional CA working on the Moore neighborhood can also be recognized in real time by a 1-dimensional CA working on the stan...

Network decontamination (or disinfection) is a widely studied problem in distributed computing. Network sites are assumed to be contaminated (e.g., by a virus) and a team of agents is deployed to decontaminate the whole network. In the vast literature a variety of assumptions are made on the power of the agents, which can typically communicate, exchange information, remember the past, etc. In t...

In this paper we propose three different VNS variants to solve the Max-Mean Dispersion Problem. This problem consists of selecting a set of elements in such a way that the average distance between them is maximized. To tackle this problem, we propose a Basic Variable Neighborhood Search (BVNS), a Variable Neighborhood Descent (VND) and a Generalized Variable Neighborhood Search (GVNS) that hybr...