Generalized sequential assignment problem

The Sequential Stochastic Assignment Problem (SSAP) deals with assigning sequentially arriving tasks with stochastic parameters to workers with fixed success rates. The reward of each assignment is the product of the worker's success rate and the task value assigned to the worker. The objective is to maximize the total expected reward. There has been a surge of interest in studying sequential assignment problems due to their applications in online matching markets, asset selling, and organ transplant. This dissertation studies several variations of SSAP by relaxing the main assumptions. The first part assumes that the workers' success rates are random values coming from a known distribution. This generalization modifies the SSAP from a problem with a single random value (i.e., the task value) at each stage to an online matching problem with several random parameters (i.e., the task value and the workers' success rates). The optimal assignment policy uses backward induction to first solve smaller subproblems, and then use them to optimally assign tasks to workers from the first stage. An approximation algorithm is proposed that achieves a fraction of the optimal reward in a polynomial time. Assuming that the value of sequentially arriving elements are independently drawn from a known distribution is unrealistic in many applications. The second part of thesis relaxes this assumption and uses the well-known Secretary Problem to derive constant-competitive algorithms for SSAP with tasks having a random arrival order. Several deterministic and randomized algorithms are proposed and their performance are compared with the maximum offline reward. These algorithms use the first stages of the problem as a training phase to compute thresholds for the task values. These thresholds are used to assign tasks to workers after the training phase. The third part uses the linear programming technique to derive bounds on the performance of optimal policy for several variations of SSAP. Formulating an online matching problem as a linear program is a useful tool. In addition to deriving bounds on performance of optimal policies, the linear programming technique can be used to formulate extensions of the problem as linear programs by simple changes in the objective function and constraints of the basic formulation. The linear programming formulation of the incentive compatible problem and the sequential assignment problem with unknown number of elements are also proposed. The edge-weighted online bipartite matching problem is used to design assignment policies for each of the formulated problems. The last part relaxes the assumption that at most one task must be assigned to each worker in SSAP. It is assumed that a worker is available for possible future assignments after performing the previously assigned task. The number of stages that the worker is not available due to a prior task assignment is referred to as the task duration. This problem is studied under various models for the task duration. First, it is assumed that the task duration is fixed. Then, assignment policies are proposed for the problem with a memoryless model for the task duration. The proposed algorithms are extensions of the optimal algorithm for the sequential assignment problem. They divide the n-stage assignment process to periods whose lengths are equal to the expected task duration. Then, they assign tasks to workers in each period by applying the optimal algorithm of the sequential assignment problem

The Structured Process Modeling Method (SPMM) : what is the best way for me to construct a process model?

More and more organizations turn to the construction of process models to support strategical and operational tasks. At the same time, reports indicate quality issues for a considerable part of these models, caused by modeling errors. Therefore, the research described in this paper investigates the development of a practical method to determine and train an optimal process modeling strategy that aims to decrease the number of cognitive errors made during modeling. Such cognitive errors originate in inadequate cognitive processing caused by the inherent complexity of constructing process models. The method helps modelers to derive their personal cognitive profile and the related optimal cognitive strategy that minimizes these cognitive failures. The contribution of the research consists of the conceptual method and an automated modeling strategy selection and training instrument. These two artefacts are positively evaluated by a laboratory experiment covering multiple modeling sessions and involving a total of 149 master students at Ghent University

Adaptive use of task assignment models in team-based mobile business processes

Most mobile business processes are executed under uncertain and dynamic working environments. This makes the traditional centralized approach for the management of mobile tasks inappropriate to respond to the changes in working environment quickly as collecting the changing information from geographically distributed workforces in real time is expensive if not impossible. This raises the need of a distributed approach in the management of mobile tasks. This paper proposes a distributed architecture for team-based coordination support for mobile task management. In this architecture, tasks are managed via peer-to-peer style coordination between team members who have better understanding on the changing working environment than a centralised system. The novelty of the design of the architecture is explained by applying it to a real business process in the UK

Multi-talker Speech Separation with Utterance-level Permutation Invariant Training of Deep Recurrent Neural Networks

In this paper we propose the utterance-level Permutation Invariant Training (uPIT) technique. uPIT is a practically applicable, end-to-end, deep learning based solution for speaker independent multi-talker speech separation. Specifically, uPIT extends the recently proposed Permutation Invariant Training (PIT) technique with an utterance-level cost function, hence eliminating the need for solving an additional permutation problem during inference, which is otherwise required by frame-level PIT. We achieve this using Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) that, during training, minimize the utterance-level separation error, hence forcing separated frames belonging to the same speaker to be aligned to the same output stream. In practice, this allows RNNs, trained with uPIT, to separate multi-talker mixed speech without any prior knowledge of signal duration, number of speakers, speaker identity or gender. We evaluated uPIT on the WSJ0 and Danish two- and three-talker mixed-speech separation tasks and found that uPIT outperforms techniques based on Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) and Computational Auditory Scene Analysis (CASA), and compares favorably with Deep Clustering (DPCL) and the Deep Attractor Network (DANet). Furthermore, we found that models trained with uPIT generalize well to unseen speakers and languages. Finally, we found that a single model, trained with uPIT, can handle both two-speaker, and three-speaker speech mixtures

The energy scheduling problem: Industrial case-study and constraint propagation techniques

This paper deals with production scheduling involving energy constraints, typically electrical energy. We start by an industrial case-study for which we propose a two-step integer/constraint programming method. From the industrial problem we derive a generic problem,the Energy Scheduling Problem (EnSP). We propose an extension of specific resource constraint propagation techniques to efficiently prune the search space for EnSP solving. We also present a branching scheme to solve the problem via tree search.Finally,computational results are provided