Anticipatory Optimization For Dynamic Decision Making

The availability of today’s online information systems rapidly increases the relevance of dynamic decision making within a large number of operational contexts. Whenever a sequence of interdependent decisions occurs, making a single decision raises the need for anticipation of its future impact on the entire decision process. Anticipatory support is needed for a broad variety of dynamic and stochastic decision problems from different operational contexts such as finance, energy management, manufacturing and transportation. Example problems include asset allocation, feed-in of electricity produced by wind power as well as scheduling and routing. All these problems entail a sequence of decisions contributing to an overall goal and taking place in the course of a certain period of time. Each of the decisions is derived by solution of an optimization problem. As a consequence a stochastic and dynamic decision problem resolves into a series of optimization problems to be formulated and solved by anticipation of the remaining decision process. However, actually solving a dynamic decision problem by means of approximate dynamic programming still is a major scientific challenge. Most of the work done so far is devoted to problems allowing for formulation of the underlying optimization problems as linear programs. Problem domains like scheduling and routing, where linear programming typically does not produce a significant benefit for problem solving, have not been considered so far. Therefore, the industry demand for dynamic scheduling and routing is still predominantly satisfied by purely heuristic approaches to anticipatory decision making. Although this may work well for certain dynamic decision problems, these approaches lack transferability of findings to other, related problems. This book has serves two major purposes: ‐ It provides a comprehensive and unique view of anticipatory optimization for dynamic decision making. It fully integrates Markov decision processes, dynamic programming, data mining and optimization and introduces a new perspective on approximate dynamic programming. Moreover, the book identifies different degrees of anticipation, enabling an assessment of specific approaches to dynamic decision making. ‐ It shows for the first time how to successfully solve a dynamic vehicle routing problem by approximate dynamic programming. It elaborates on every building block required for this kind of approach to dynamic vehicle routing. Thereby the book has a pioneering character and is intended to provide a footing for the dynamic vehicle routing community.

Structuring, or, as it is referred to in the title of this book, the art of structuring, is one of the core elements in the discipline of Information Systems. While the world is becoming increasingly complex, and a growing number of disciplines are evolving to help make it a better place, structure is what is needed in order to understand and combine the various perspectives and approaches involved. Structure is the essential component that allows us to bridge the gaps between these different worlds, and offers a medium for communication and exchange. The contributions in this book build these bridges, which are vital in order to communicate between different worlds of thought and methodology – be it between Information Systems (IS) research and practice, or between IS research and other research disciplines. They describe how structuring can be and should be done so as to foster communication and collaboration. The topics covered reflect various layers of structure that can serve as bridges: models, processes, data, organizations, and technologies. In turn, these aspects are complemented by visionary outlooks on how structure influences the field.

The papers presented in this volume address diverse challenges in energy systems, ranging from operational to investment planning problems, from market economics to technical and environmental considerations, from distribution grids to transmission grids and from theoretical considerations to data provision concerns and applied case studies. The International Symposium on Energy System Optimization (ISESO) was held on November 9th and 10th 2015 at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS) and was organized by HITS, Heidelberg University and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Evolutionary Multi-Criterion Optimization, EMO 2019 held in East Lansing, MI, USA, in March 2019. The 59 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 76 submissions. The papers are divided into 8 categories, each representing a key area of current interest in the EMO field today. They include theoretical developments, algorithmic developments, issues in many-objective optimization, performance metrics, knowledge extraction and surrogate-based EMO, multi-objective combinatorial problem solving, MCDM and interactive EMO methods, and applications.

This book provides a straightforward overview for every researcher interested in stochastic dynamic vehicle routing problems (SDVRPs). The book is written for both the applied researcher looking for suitable solution approaches for particular problems as well as for the theoretical researcher looking for effective and efficient methods of stochastic dynamic optimization and approximate dynamic programming (ADP). To this end, the book contains two parts. In the first part, the general methodology required for modeling and approaching SDVRPs is presented. It presents adapted and new, general anticipatory methods of ADP tailored to the needs of dynamic vehicle routing. Since stochastic dynamic optimization is often complex and may not always be intuitive on first glance, the author accompanies the ADP-methodology with illustrative examples from the field of SDVRPs. The second part of this book then depicts the application of the theory to a specific SDVRP. The process starts from the real-world application. The author describes a SDVRP with stochastic customer requests often addressed in the literature, and then shows in detail how this problem can be modeled as a Markov decision process and presents several anticipatory solution approaches based on ADP. In an extensive computational study, he shows the advantages of the presented approaches compared to conventional heuristics. To allow deep insights in the functionality of ADP, he presents a comprehensive analysis of the ADP approaches.

Conference proceedings - Multidisciplinary Academic Conference on Economics, Management and Marketing in Prague 2014 (MAC-EMM 2014)

This contributed volume contains the selected and thoroughly reviewed research papers presented at the conference on logistics management LM2015 in Braunschweig, Germany. The conference of the special interest group in logistics of the German Academic Association for Business Research (VHB) was held in conjunction with the special interest group on production of the VHB. Thus, the papers reflect the current state-of-the-art in logistics and supply chain management while focusing especially on aspects of production logistics, i.e., facility layout, inventory management, line configuration, or flexible production.

This book reports on an operational management approach to improving bike-sharing systems by compensating for fluctuating demand patterns. The aim is to redistribute bikes within the system, allowing it to be “actively” balanced. The book describes a mathematical model, as well as data-driven and simulation-based approaches. Further, it shows how these elements can be combined in a decision-making support system for service providers. In closing, the book uses real-world data to evaluate the method developed and demonstrates that it can successfully anticipate changes in demand, thus supporting efficient scheduling of transport vehicles to manually relocate bikes between stations.