39,523 research outputs found
Heuristic Solutions for Loading in Flexible Manufacturing Systems
Production planning in flexible manufacturing system deals with the efficient organization of the production resources in order to meet a given production schedule. It is a complex problem and typically leads to several hierarchical subproblems that need to be solved sequentially or simultaneously. Loading is one of the planning subproblems that has to addressed. It involves assigning the necessary operations and tools among the various machines in some optimal fashion to achieve the production of all selected part types. In this paper, we first formulate the loading problem as a 0-1 mixed integer program and then propose heuristic procedures based on Lagrangian relaxation and tabu search to solve the problem. Computational results are presented for all the algorithms and finally, conclusions drawn based on the results are discussed
A Diffie-Hellman based key management scheme for hierarchical access control
All organizations share data in a carefully managed fashion\ud
by using access control mechanisms. We focus on enforcing access control by encrypting the data and managing the encryption keys. We make the realistic assumption that the structure of any organization is a hierarchy of security classes. Data from a certain security class can only be accessed by another security class, if it is higher or at the same level in the hierarchy. Otherwise access is denied. Our solution is based on the Die-Hellman key exchange protocol. We show, that the theoretical worst case performance of our solution is slightly better than that of all other existing solutions. We also show, that our performance in practical cases is linear in the size of the hierarchy, whereas the best results from the literature are quadratic
A Sparse Multi-Scale Algorithm for Dense Optimal Transport
Discrete optimal transport solvers do not scale well on dense large problems
since they do not explicitly exploit the geometric structure of the cost
function. In analogy to continuous optimal transport we provide a framework to
verify global optimality of a discrete transport plan locally. This allows
construction of an algorithm to solve large dense problems by considering a
sequence of sparse problems instead. The algorithm lends itself to being
combined with a hierarchical multi-scale scheme. Any existing discrete solver
can be used as internal black-box.Several cost functions, including the noisy
squared Euclidean distance, are explicitly detailed. We observe a significant
reduction of run-time and memory requirements.Comment: Published "online first" in Journal of Mathematical Imaging and
Vision, see DO
Algorithms for Hierarchical and Semi-Partitioned Parallel Scheduling
We propose a model for scheduling jobs in a parallel machine setting that takes into account the cost of migrations by assuming that the processing time of a job may depend on the specific set of machines among which the job is migrated. For the makespan minimization objective, the model generalizes classical scheduling problems such as unrelated parallel machine scheduling, as well as novel ones such as semi-partitioned and clustered scheduling. In the case of a hierarchical family of machines, we derive a compact integer linear programming formulation of the problem and leverage its fractional relaxation to obtain a polynomial-time 2-approximation algorithm. Extensions that incorporate memory capacity constraints are also discussed
On the Two-user Multi-carrier Joint Channel Selection and Power Control Game
In this paper, we propose a hierarchical game approach to model the energy
efficiency maximization problem where transmitters individually choose their
channel assignment and power control. We conduct a thorough analysis of the
existence, uniqueness and characterization of the Stackelberg equilibrium.
Interestingly, we formally show that a spectrum orthogonalization naturally
occurs when users decide sequentially about their transmitting carriers and
powers, delivering a binary channel assignment. Both analytical and simulation
results are provided for assessing and improving the performances in terms of
energy efficiency and spectrum utilization between the simultaneous-move game
(with synchronous decision makers), the social welfare (in a centralized
manner) and the proposed Stackelberg (hierarchical) game. For the first time,
we provide tight closed-form bounds on the spectral efficiency of such a model,
including correlation across carriers and users. We show that the spectrum
orthogonalization capability induced by the proposed hierarchical game model
enables the wireless network to achieve the spectral efficiency improvement
while still enjoying a high energy efficiency.Comment: 31 pages, 13 figures, accepted in IEEE Transactions on Communication
Worst-case Optimal Submodular Extensions for Marginal Estimation
Submodular extensions of an energy function can be used to efficiently
compute approximate marginals via variational inference. The accuracy of the
marginals depends crucially on the quality of the submodular extension. To
identify the best possible extension, we show an equivalence between the
submodular extensions of the energy and the objective functions of linear
programming (LP) relaxations for the corresponding MAP estimation problem. This
allows us to (i) establish the worst-case optimality of the submodular
extension for Potts model used in the literature; (ii) identify the worst-case
optimal submodular extension for the more general class of metric labeling; and
(iii) efficiently compute the marginals for the widely used dense CRF model
with the help of a recently proposed Gaussian filtering method. Using synthetic
and real data, we show that our approach provides comparable upper bounds on
the log-partition function to those obtained using tree-reweighted message
passing (TRW) in cases where the latter is computationally feasible.
Importantly, unlike TRW, our approach provides the first practical algorithm to
compute an upper bound on the dense CRF model.Comment: Accepted to AISTATS 201
A Constraint-directed Local Search Approach to Nurse Rostering Problems
In this paper, we investigate the hybridization of constraint programming and
local search techniques within a large neighbourhood search scheme for solving
highly constrained nurse rostering problems. As identified by the research, a
crucial part of the large neighbourhood search is the selection of the fragment
(neighbourhood, i.e. the set of variables), to be relaxed and re-optimized
iteratively. The success of the large neighbourhood search depends on the
adequacy of this identified neighbourhood with regard to the problematic part
of the solution assignment and the choice of the neighbourhood size. We
investigate three strategies to choose the fragment of different sizes within
the large neighbourhood search scheme. The first two strategies are tailored
concerning the problem properties. The third strategy is more general, using
the information of the cost from the soft constraint violations and their
propagation as the indicator to choose the variables added into the fragment.
The three strategies are analyzed and compared upon a benchmark nurse rostering
problem. Promising results demonstrate the possibility of future work in the
hybrid approach
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