We can reformulate a vehicle routing problem (VRP) as an open shop scheduling problem (SSP) by representing visits as activities, vehicles as resources on the factory floor, and travel as set up costs between activities. In this paper we present two reformulations: from VRP to open shop, and the inverse, from SSP to VRP. Not surprisingly, VRP technology performs poorly on reformulated SSP’s, as...

We propose an abstraction of emerging vehicle routing problems, the VRP with Black Box Feasibility. In this problem the routes of a basic VRP need to satisfy an unknown set of constraints. A black box function to test the feasibility of a route is provided. Practical examples of such problems are combinations of VRP with Loading or VRP with Scheduling. We propose a heuristic column generation-b...

We analyze a model of conflict with endogenous choice of effort, where subsets of the contenders may force the resolution to be sequential: First the alliance fights it out with the rest and – in case they win – later they fight it out among themselves. For three-player games, we find that it will not be in the interest of any two of them to form an alliance. We obtain this result under two dif...

the problem of designing a set of routes with minimum cost to serve a collection of customers with a fleet of vehicles is a fundamental challenge when the number of customers to be dropped or picked up is not known during the planning horizon. the purpose of this paper is to develop a vehicle routing problem (vrp) model that addresses stochastic simultaneous pickup and delivery in the urban pub...

One of the motivations of hyper-heuristic research is to investigate the development of adaptive decision support systems that can be applied to a range of different problems and different problem instances [5]. One possible approach is to dynamically adjust the preferences of a set of simple lowlevel heuristics (or neighbourhood operators) during the search. Hyper-heuristics have been used to ...

The development of multiagent vaccines offers the advantage of eliciting protection against multiple diseases with minimal inoculations over a shorter time span. We report here the results of using formulations of individual Venezuelan equine encephalitis (VEE) virus replicon-vectored vaccines against a bacterial disease, anthrax; a viral disease, Marburg fever; and against a toxin-mediated dis...

I describe a real-time implementation of Ull-man's visual routine processor (VRP) theory of intermediate vision for visual search. The system performs serial self-terminating visual search and computes 2D spatial relations of objects from live color video using low cost hardware. I present a formal model of a VRP with unbounded resources and quantify the amount of external control structure req...

We have recently identified a novel ligand of the vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) family termed VEGF-related protein (VRP), which specifically binds to the FLT4 receptor. To characterize the signaling events after VRP engagement of its cognate receptor in hematopoietic cells, a population of human erythroleukemia (HEL) cells, termed HEL-JW, expressing high levels of FLT4 receptor was ...

Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV) is the causative agent of one of the most devastating and economically significant viral disease of pigs worldwide. The vaccines currently available on the market elicit only limited protection. Recombinant vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) replicon particles (VRP) have been used successfully to induce protection against influenza A vir...

This paper provides a review of the recent developments that had a major impact on the current state-ofthe-art exact algorithms for the vehicle routing problem (VRP). The paper reviews mathematical formulations, relaxations and recent exact methods for two of the most important variants of the VRP: the capacitated VRP (CVRP) and the VRP with time windows (VRPTW). The paper also reports a compar...