Sometimes, the best available information about an uncertain future is a single forecast. On the other hand, stochastic-programming models need future data in the form of scenario trees. While a single forecast does not provide enough information to construct a scenario tree, a forecast combined with historical data does—but none of the standard scenario-generation methods is suited to handle t...

In this paper we present our ideas for conducting a cost benefit analysis by using three different methods: scenario analysis, decision trees and simulation. Then we introduce our case study and examine these methods in a real world situation. We show how these tools can be used and what the results are for each of them. Our aim is to conduct a comparison of these different probabilistic method...

during the implementation, construction projects usually encounter situation that considerably affects the project scheduling and cost. this study aims at using an improved version of the harmony search algorithm (hsa) to schedule resource constrained construction projects. this model is formulated as a global optimization problem. it will determine the duration of each activity to minimize the...

Several concepts have been used to describe potential serous accidents in industrial activities. Examples of these concepts are worst case scenarios, likelier-but-less-catastrophic scenarios, most credible scenarios etc. A worst case scenario is a sequence of events/actions/accidents for a certain place (site) and time which causes the worst magnitude of an accident. Often these kind of acciden...

Given a convex stochastic programming problem with a discrete initial probability distribution, the problem of optimal scenario reduction is stated as follows: Determine a scenario subset of prescribed cardinality and a probability measure based on this set that is the closest to the initial distribution in terms of a natural (or canonical) probability metric. Arguments from stability analysis ...

We consider fully-online construction of indexing data structures for multiple texts. Let T = {T1, . . . , TK} be a collection of texts. By fully-online, we mean that a new character can be appended to any text in T at any time. This is a natural generalization of semi-online construction of indexing data structures for multiple texts in which, after a new character is appended to the kth text ...