Surveillance Planning against Smart Insurgents in Complex Terrain

This study is concerned with finding a way to solve a surveillance system allocation problem based on the need to consider intelligent insurgency that takes place in a complex geographical environment. Although this effort can be generalized to other situations, it is particularly geared towards protecting military outposts in foreign lands. The technological assets that are assumed available include stare-devices, such as tower-cameras and aerostats, as well as manned and unmanned aerial systems. Since acquiring these assets depends on the ability to control and monitor them on the target terrain, their operations on the geo-location of interest ought to be evaluated. Such an assessment has to also consider the risks associated with the environmental advantages that are accessible to a smart adversary. Failure to consider these aspects might render the forces vulnerable to surprise attacks. The problem of this study is formulated as follows: given a complex terrain and a smart adversary, what types of surveillance systems, and how many entities of each kind, does a military outpost need to adequately monitor its surrounding environment? To answer this question, an analytical framework is developed and structured as a series of problems that are solved in a comprehensive and realistic fashion. This includes digitizing the terrain into a grid of cell objects, identifying high-risk spots, generating flight tours, and assigning the appropriate surveillance system to the right route or area. Optimization tools are employed to empower the framework in enforcing constraints--such as fuel/battery endurance, flying assets at adequate altitudes, and respecting the climbing/diving rate limits of the aerial vehicles--and optimizing certain mission objectives--e.g. revisiting critical regions in a timely manner, minimizing manning requirements, and maximizing sensor-captured image quality. The framework is embedded in a software application that supports a friendly user interface, which includes the visualization of maps, tours, and related statistics. The final product is expected to support designing surveillance plans for remote military outposts and making critical decisions in a more reliable manner

Sequential Decision Making Schemes in Inventory and Transportation Environments

Many mathematical models exist for the simultaneous optimization of transportation and inventory functions. A simultaneous model, while giving the lowest total cost, may not be easily implemented in a firm with decentralized transportation and inventory departments. As such, this thesis studies sequential models, where the primary department is artificially given the authority to make some set of decisions prior to the decisions made by the secondary department. Some known formulations for simultaneous models are studied in an attempt to create a sequential process for the same environment. Finally, a generalized sequential approach is developed that can be applied to any transportation and inventory model with separable costs. The generalized approach allows for the full optimization of the primary departmental costs, and then sequentially allows the optimization of the secondary departmental costs subject to a maximum allowable increase in the costs of the primary department. The analysis of this sequential approach notably reveals that when the relative deviation from the optimal cost of each department is equal, a reasonable solution with respect to total cost is attained. This balance in relative deviation is defined as the fairness point solution. Differing cost scenarios are thus tested to determine the relationship between the cost ratio among departments and the performance of the fairness point solution. The fairness point solution provides an average deviation of total cost from the total optimal cost of less than 1% in four of the seven scenarios tested. Other sequential approaches are discussed and fairness with respect to these new approaches is considered.1 yea

Routing Problems for Unmanned Surface Vehicles with Limited Battery Life

Given a set of locations (i.e. bridges, bays, docks, etc.) that must be inspected and a set ofwaypoints, we design and implement a model to route a fleet of unmanned surface vehicles via a set of waypoints that allow the aforementioned locations to be surveilled. Furthermore, the velocity at which the vehicles traverse each part of the route is dependent upon the level of surveillance required for each site. More specifically, the model constructs the optimal set of routes for at most K unmanned surface vehicles that minimizes the fleet\u27s total distance, subject to distance, battery life, and site number constraints, while ensuring that a set of sites are covered during the tours. In addition, the model also determines the velocity of each vehicle along each arc of the tour, where the velocity is dependent upon the importance of the sites that are covered along that arc. Lastly, we modify, design, and implement heuristics to construct feasible solutions

A Decision-Making Tool for a Regional Network of Clinical Laboratories

For healthcare systems that operate in large, geographically dispersed areas, the quality of the services provided requires the effective management of a complex transportation problem. We present a decision support system to help healthcare managers improve the delivery of biological samples collected from patients in hospitals and outpatient clinics to laboratories that perform tests on them. We develop an optimization model for supporting strategic decisions on the transport of samples and the assignment of work in a large healthcare network with geographically dispersed hospitals, clinics, and testing laboratories. We embed our model in a Web-based tool to provide planners with interactive functions, enabling them to explore solutions and interactively access data to facilitate the analysis of what-if scenarios. The tool proved invaluable in helping the Andalusian Healthcare System obtain significant improvements in efficiency, quality of service, and outsourcing costsJunta de Andalucía TEP-606

Project for the analysis of technology transfer Quarterly report, 13 Jul. - 12 Oct. 1968

Statistical characteristics of transfer data bank users, and outline of technology transfer and utilization instruction cours

Modelling and solution methods for stochastic optimisation

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.In this thesis we consider two research problems, namely, (i) language constructs for modelling stochastic programming (SP) problems and (ii) solution methods for processing instances of different classes of SP problems. We first describe a new design of an SP modelling system which provides greater extensibility and reuse. We implement this enhanced system and develop solver connections. We also investigate in detail the following important classes of SP problems: singlestage SP with risk constraints, two-stage linear and stochastic integer programming problems. We report improvements to solution methods for single-stage problems with second-order stochastic dominance constraints and two-stage SP problems. In both cases we use the level method as a regularisation mechanism. We also develop novel heuristic methods for stochastic integer programming based on variable neighbourhood search. We describe an algorithmic framework for implementing decomposition methods such as the L-shaped method within our SP solver system. Based on this framework we implement a number of established solution algorithms as well as a new regularisation method for stochastic linear programming. We compare the performance of these methods and their scale-up properties on an extensive set of benchmark problems. We also implement several solution methods for stochastic integer programming and report a computational study comparing their performance. The three solution methods, (a) processing of a single-stage problem with second-order stochastic dominance constraints, (b) regularisation by the level method for two-stage SP and (c) method for solving integer SP problems, are novel approaches and each of these makes a contribution to knowledge.Financial support was obtained from OptiRisk Systems

Az otthoni ápolás mint szolgáltatás logisztikai és fenntarthatósági szempontú kérdéseinek vizsgálata

A demográfiai elöregedés gyorsuló tendenciát mutat Európában, ezért az elmúlt néhány évtizedben ez a jelenség számottevő tudományos érdeklődésre tett szert. Az otthoni ápolás egyre jobban terjedő formája az idős, mozgásában korlátozott vagy tartós gondoskodásra szoruló egyének segítésének. Ennek okait számos kutatás vizsgálta: az egészségügyi intézmények túlterheltségének és alulfinanszírozottságának problémakörén túl a korcsoport tagjai körében is ez a preferált ellátási forma. Jelen tanulmány az otthoni ápolás logisztikai vonatkozású kérdéseit vizsgálja, három különböző szempontból, amelyek rávilágítanak a szolgáltatás speciális aspektusaira: a sűrűség és eloszlás összefüggései, az időablakok és a szolgáltatásminőség kérdései, valamint az útvonal- és munkaterhelés-elosztás optimalizálása. Az eredmények alkalmasak lehetnek a fenntartók erőforrásallokálási, szervezeti döntési folyamatainak segítésére

Static Dial-a-Ride Problem with Money as an Incentive : Study of the Cost Constraint

In this paper, we study a taxi sharing problem. Given a set of clients with different transportation requests, the problem is to define a set of taxis that will be shared by the clients in order to reduce their bill by a given factor α < 1. To achieve this, each client shares the cost of the ride with other passengers. More precisely, the fragments of the ride in which the client is alone is fully paid by this client. On the contrary, for each fragment in which the client shares the taxi with other passengers, the cost is equally divided between the passengers. Firstly, we show that the problem consisting in searching for a unique taxi satisfying this cost constraint is NP-Complete, even if we do not impose this taxi to pick up every client. In addition, we show that, even if the factor α and the capacities of the taxis are fixed, the problem of satisfying all the requests is NP-Complete. Secondly, we propose a nonlinear MIP model. Nonlinearity is due to the computation of the shared price of the clients. We propose different linearizations. Then we establish some necessary conditions that are used to reduce the size of the problem. The end of the paper is dedicated to a numerical study of the model in order to evaluate its performances

Languages and Tools for Optimization of Large-Scale Systems

Modeling and simulation are established techniques for solving design problems in a wide range of engineering disciplines today. Dedicated computer languages, such as Modelica, and efficient software tools are available. In this thesis, an extension of Modelica, Optimica, targeted at dynamic optimization of Modelica models is proposed. In order to demonstrate the Optimica extension, supporting software has been developed. This includes a modularly extensible Modelica compiler, the JModelica compiler, and an extension that supports also Optimica. A Modelica library for paper machine dryer section modeling, DryLib, has been developed. The classes in the library enable structured and hierarchical modeling of dryer sections at the application user level, while offering extensibility for the expert user. Based on DryLib, a parameter optimization problem, a model reduction problem, and an optimization-based control problem have been formulated and solved. A start-up optimization problem for a plate reactor has been formulated in Optimica, and solved by means of the Optimica compiler. In addition, the robustness properties of the start-up trajectories have been evaluated by means of Monte-Carlo simulation. In many control systems, it is necessary to consider interaction with a user. In this thesis, a manual control scheme for an unstable inverted pendulum system, where the inputs are bounded, is presented. The proposed controller is based on the notion of reachability sets and guarantees semi global stability for all references. An inverted pendulum on a two wheels robot has been developed. A distributed control system, including sensor processing algorithms and a stabilizing control scheme has been implemented on three on-board embedded processors