A simheuristic for routing electric vehicles with limited driving ranges and stochastic travel times

Green transportation is becoming relevant in the context of smart cities, where the use of electric vehicles represents a promising strategy to support sustainability policies. However the use of electric vehicles shows some drawbacks as well, such as their limited driving-range capacity. This paper analyses a realistic vehicle routing problem in which both driving-range constraints and stochastic travel times are considered. Thus, the main goal is to minimize the expected time-based cost required to complete the freight distribution plan. In order to design reliable Routing plans, a simheuristic algorithm is proposed. It combines Monte Carlo simulation with a multi-start metaheuristic, which also employs biased-randomization techniques. By including simulation, simheuristics extend the capabilities of metaheuristics to deal with stochastic problems. A series of computational experiments are performed to test our solving approach as well as to analyse the effect of uncertainty on the routing plans.Peer Reviewe

Efficient and Effective Query Auto-Completion

Query Auto-Completion (QAC) is an ubiquitous feature of modern textual search systems, suggesting possible ways of completing the query being typed by the user. Efficiency is crucial to make the system have a real-time responsiveness when operating in the million-scale search space. Prior work has extensively advocated the use of a trie data structure for fast prefix-search operations in compact space. However, searching by prefix has little discovery power in that only completions that are prefixed by the query are returned. This may impact negatively the effectiveness of the QAC system, with a consequent monetary loss for real applications like Web Search Engines and eCommerce. In this work we describe the implementation that empowers a new QAC system at eBay, and discuss its efficiency/effectiveness in relation to other approaches at the state-of-the-art. The solution is based on the combination of an inverted index with succinct data structures, a much less explored direction in the literature. This system is replacing the previous implementation based on Apache SOLR that was not always able to meet the required service-level-agreement.Comment: Published in SIGIR 202

B+-tree Index Optimization by Exploiting Internal Parallelism of Flash-based Solid State Drives

Previous research addressed the potential problems of the hard-disk oriented design of DBMSs of flashSSDs. In this paper, we focus on exploiting potential benefits of flashSSDs. First, we examine the internal parallelism issues of flashSSDs by conducting benchmarks to various flashSSDs. Then, we suggest algorithm-design principles in order to best benefit from the internal parallelism. We present a new I/O request concept, called psync I/O that can exploit the internal parallelism of flashSSDs in a single process. Based on these ideas, we introduce B+-tree optimization methods in order to utilize internal parallelism. By integrating the results of these methods, we present a B+-tree variant, PIO B-tree. We confirmed that each optimization method substantially enhances the index performance. Consequently, PIO B-tree enhanced B+-tree's insert performance by a factor of up to 16.3, while improving point-search performance by a factor of 1.2. The range search of PIO B-tree was up to 5 times faster than that of the B+-tree. Moreover, PIO B-tree outperformed other flash-aware indexes in various synthetic workloads. We also confirmed that PIO B-tree outperforms B+-tree in index traces collected inside the Postgresql DBMS with TPC-C benchmark.Comment: VLDB201

Searches for Direct Pair Production of Supersymmetric Top and Supersymmetric Bottom Quarks in p-pbar Collisions at sqrt(s)=1.96 TeV

We search for direct pair production of supersymmetric top quarks and supersymmetric bottom quarks in proton-antiproton collisions at sqrt(s)=1.96 TeV, using 295 pb^-1 of data recorded by the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF II) experiment. The supersymmetric top (supersymmetric bottom) quarks are selected by reconstructing their decay into a charm (bottom) quark and a neutralino, which is assumed to be the lightest supersymmetric particle. The signature of such processes is two energetic heavy-flavor jets and missing transverse energy. The number of events that pass our selection for each search process is consistent with the expected standard model background. By comparing our results to the theoretical production cross sections of the supersymmetric top and supersymmetric bottom quarks in the minimal supersymmetric standard model, we exclude, at a 95% confidence level in the frame of that model, a supersymmetric top quark mass up to 132 GeV/c^2 for a neutralino mass of 48 GeV/c^2, and a supersymmetric bottom quark mass up to 193 GeV/c^2 for a neutralino mass of 40 GeV/c^2.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.