This monograph deals with theoretical and practical aspects of creating course timetables at academic institutions. The task is typically to create a timetable that suits the requirements of the stakeholders – students, lecturers, and the administration – as well as possible. The book presents an exposition of the basic combinatorial problems and solution methods for course timetabling and …
This monograph provides a detailed analysis on fair queueing rules from a normative, a strategic, and a non-cooperative viewpoint. The queueing problem is concerned with the following situation: There is a group of agents who must be served in a facility. The facility can handle only one agent at a time and agents incur waiting costs. The problem is to find the order in which to serve agents an…
This book offers a thorough and systematic introduction to the modified failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) models based on uncertainty theories (e.g. fuzzy logic, intuitionistic fuzzy sets, D numbers and 2-tuple linguistic variables) and various multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) approaches such as distance-based MCDM, compromise ranking MCDM and hybrid MCDM, etc. As such, it provides e…
This book shows how common operation management methods and algorithms can be extended to deal with vague or imprecise information in decision-making problems. It describes how to combine decision trees, clustering, multi-attribute decision-making algorithms and Monte Carlo Simulation with the mathematical description of imprecise or vague information, and how to visualize such information. Mor…
This book provides an introduction to incorporating preference information in Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) with a special emphasis in Value Efficiency Analysis. In addition to theoretical considerations, numerous illustrative examples are included. Hence, the book can be used as a teaching text as well. Only a modest mathematical background is needed to understand the main principles. The on…
How do applications affect behavior? Experimental Economics Volume II seeks to answer these questions by examining the auction mechanism, imperfect competition and incentives to understand financial crises, political preferences and elections, and more.
Exploring Lean manufacturing in a holistic manner, this book helps organizations to implement Lean principles successfully by offering theoretical, empirical and practical knowledge. It empirically demonstrates how a successful Lean initiative can improve organizational efficiency, and incorporates valuable primary research to substantiate findings. It argues that Lean principles need to be app…
This book clearly shows the importance, usefulness, and powerfulness of current optimization technologies, in particular, mixed-integer programming and its remarkable applications. It is intended to be the definitive study of state-of-the-art optimization technologies for students, academic researchers, and non-professionals in industry. The chapters of this book are based on a collection of se…
This is the first book to cover GRASP (Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedures), a metaheuristic that has enjoyed wide success in practice with a broad range of applications to real-world combinatorial optimization problems. The state-of-the-art coverage and carefully crafted pedagogical style lends this book highly accessible as an introductory text not only to GRASP, but also to combinat…