This paper summarizes work on a General Branch and Bound formulation which includes previous formulations as special cases and provides a unified approach to understanding most heuristic search procedures developed in A.I. for Pattern Analysis University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742

We consider the following integer feasibility problem: Given positive integer numbers a0 a1 an, with gcd a1 an = 1 and a = a1 an , does there exist a vector x ∈ n≥0 satisfying a x = a0? We prove that if the coefficients a1 an have a certain decomposable structure, then the Frobenius number associated with a1 an, i.e., the largest value of a0 for which a x= a0 does not have a nonnegative integer...

Recombination plays an important role in creating genetic diversity within species, and inferring past recombination events is central to many problems in genetics. Given a set M of sampled sequences, finding an evolutionary history for M with the minimum number of recombination events is a computationally very challenging problem. In this paper, we present a novel branch and bound algorithm fo...

Preemptively scheduling a set of independent jobs with release time on one processor is a historical problem. In this paper, the same problem has been considered in which objective is to minimize the mean flow time. To prepare a perfect branch-and-bound, some optimality conditions have been represented and they have been compared with the optimality conditions which have been proposed before. O...

Consider a situation with n agents or players where some of the players form a coalition with a certain collective objective. Simple games are used to model systems that can decide whether coalitions are successful (winning) or not (losing). A simple game can be viewed as a monotone boolean function. The dimension of a simple game is the smallest positive integer d such that the simple game can...

We consider the queueing maximal covering location-allocation problem (QM-CLAP) with an M/M/1 queueing system. We propose a new solution procedure based on decomposition of the problem into smaller sub-problems. We solve the resulting sub-problems both with a branch and bound algorithm and with the meta-heuristic GRASP. We also solve the entire model with GRASP. Computational results for these ...

In this paper we consider the non-preemptive variant of a multi-mode resource constrained project scheduling problem (MRCPSP) with mode identity, in which a set of project activities is partitioned into disjoint subsets while all activities forming one subset have to be processed in the same mode. We present a depth-first branch and bound algorithm for the resource constrained project schedulin...

This paper investigates the Stackelberg equilibrium for pricing and ordering decisions in a dominant retailer dual-channel supply chain. In a dual-channel sales network, the products are sold through both a traditional, physical retailer and a direct Internet channel. It is assumed that the retailer is the leader and the powerful member of the supply chain has the market power and acts as a lea...

this paper addresses the problem of minimizing the sum of maximum earliness and tardiness on identical parallel machines scheduling problem. each job has a processing time and a due date. since this problem is trying to minimize and diminish the values of earliness and tardiness, the results can be useful for just–in-time production systems. it is shown that the problem is np-hard. using effici...