Constraint Satisfaction Problems can be solved using either iterative improvement or constructive search approaches. Iterative improvement techniques converge quicker than the constructive search techniques on large problems, but they have a propensity to converge to local optima. Therefore, a key research topic on iterative improvement search is the development of effective techniques for esca...

In this paper we study the resource-constrained project scheduling problem with weighted earliness-tardiness penalty costs. Project activities are assumed to have a known deterministic due date, a unit earliness as well as a unit tardiness penalty cost and constant renewable resource requirements. The objective is to schedule the activities in order to minimize the total weighted earliness-tard...

In this paper a gas turbine power plant including air preheater (recuperator), heat recovery steam generator and air cooler system was modeled. Eight parameters were selected as the design variables.  Fast and elitist non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) was applied (to maximize the exergy efficiency and to minimize the total cost rate) for the mentioned cogeneration system. Th...

In this paper, we address the question of how the assessment of costs influences decisions in a newsvendor setting. We expect that different cost types lead to different behavior. In our investigation, we consider a newsvendor problem with opportunity costs and a newsvendor problem with penalty costs. In addition, we differentiate between three cases with different margins for each of the two p...

We analyze optimal protection when a benevolent government must maintain nonnegative domestic profits and when the domestic import-competing firm has private information about its costs. A costly audit mechanism can deter strategic manipulation of this private information. We show that a high-penalty/lowprobability of investigation is optimal when the shadow price of the firm profit is low comp...

Copyright q 2012 Zhou Chao et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. We designed a distributed collision-free formation flight control law in the framework of nonlinear model predictive control. Formation configuratio...

We examine the implications of a firm outsourcing both (i) security device management which attempts to prevent security breaches and (ii) security monitoring which attempts to detect security breaches to managed security service providers (MSSPs). In the context of security outsourcing, the firm not only faces the traditional moral hazard problem as it cannot observe an MSSP’s prevention or de...

The conventional method towards deriving schedule for a fleet of ships to minimize cost alone has the short-coming of not addressing the problem of operation revenue losses associated with delays during maintenance at ships dockyards. In this paper, a preventive maintenance schedule for a fleet of ships that incorporates op-portunity cost is presented. The idea is to assign a penalty cost to al...

This paper analyzes situations in which a project consisting of several activities is not realized according to plan. If the project is expedited, a reward arises. Analogously, a penalty arises if the project is delayed. This paper considers the case of arbitrary nondecreasing reward and penalty functions on the total expedition and delay, respectively. Attention is focused on how to divide the...