The Single Frontier Bi-Directional Search (SBS) framework was recently introduced. A node in SBS corresponds to a pair of states, one from each of the frontiers and it uses front-tofront heuristics. In this paper we present an enhanced version of SBS, called eSBS, where pruning and caching techniques are applied, which significantly reduce both time and memory needs of SBS. We then present a hy...

Exploring an unknown environment with multiple robots requires an efficient coordination method to minimize the total duration. A standard method to discover new areas is to assign frontiers (boundaries between unexplored and explored accessible areas) to robots. In this context, the frontier allocation method is paramount. This paper introduces a decentralized and computationally efficient fro...

  Selecting an effective project plan is a significant area in the project management. The present paper introduces a technique to identify the project plan efficient frontier for assessing the alternative project plans and selecting the best plan. The efficient frontier includes two criteria: the project cost and the project time. Besides, the paper presents a scheme to incorporate Directed Ac...

We evaluate the probability that an estimated Sharpe ratio exceeds a given threshold in presence of non-Normal returns. We show that this new uncertainty-adjusted investment skill metric (called Probabilistic Sharpe ratio, or PSR) has a number of important applications: First, it allows us to establish the track record length needed for rejecting the hypothesis that a measured Sharpe ratio is b...

BACKGROUND The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is among the world's largest investors in biomedical research, with a mandate to: "…lengthen life, and reduce the burdens of illness and disability." Its funding decisions have been criticized as insufficiently focused on disease burden. We hypothesize that modern portfolio theory can create a closer link between basic research and outcome, and...

The solar photovoltaic (PV) energy is one of the most promising sources of energy, which has attracted many interests. Itis potentially the largest source of energy in the world and is capable to mitigategreenhouse gas (GHG) emissions significantly in comparison with fossil fuels.Location optimization of solar plants can play a vital role to rise the efficiency and performance of the solar PV s...

There is increasing interest in fully ranking the performance of organizational units with multiple inputs and outputs. We smooth the congenital differences of efficient and inefficient units. The concept of the secondary frontier is to eliminate the effects of super-efficiency and inefficiency. The pseudo secondary frontier is constructed to lie between the efficient and inefficient units. Lo...

the markowitz’s optimization problem is considered as a standard quadratic programming problem that has exact mathematical solutions. considering real world limits and conditions, the portfolio optimization problem is a mixed quadratic and integer programming problem for which efficient algorithms do not exist. therefore, the use of meta-heuristic methods such as neural networks and evolutionar...