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Articles 211 - 240 of 391

Full-Text Articles in Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering

Strategic Decision Support System Using Heuristic Algorithm For Practical Outlet Zones Allocation To Dealers In A Beer Supply Distribution Network, Michelle Lee Fong Cheong Jan 2014

Strategic Decision Support System Using Heuristic Algorithm For Practical Outlet Zones Allocation To Dealers In A Beer Supply Distribution Network, Michelle Lee Fong Cheong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We consider a two-echelon beer supply distribution network with the brewer replenishing the dealers and the dealers serving the outlet zones directly, for multiple product types. The allocation of the outlet zones to the dealers will determine the quantity of products the brewer replenishes each dealer, which will in turn impact the total warehousing and transportation costs. The non-linear optimization model formulated is difficult to solve to optimality, and the model itself does not include practical business considerations in the distribution business. A heuristics algorithm is designed and easily implemented using spreadsheets with Visual Basic programming to effectively and efficiently …


Dynamic Queue Management For Hospital Emergency Room Services, Kar Way Tan Dec 2013

Dynamic Queue Management For Hospital Emergency Room Services, Kar Way Tan

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The emergency room (ER) – or emergency department (ED) – is often seen as a place with long waiting times and a lack of doctors to serve the patients. However, it is one of the most important departments in a hospital, and must efficiently serve patients with critical medical needs. In the existing literature, addressing the issue of long waiting times in an ED often takes the form of single-faceted queue-management strategies that are either from a demand perspective or from a supply perspective. From the demand perspective, there is work on queue design such as priority queues, or queue …


Improving Patient Length-Of-Stay In Emergency Department Through Dynamic Queue Management, Kar Way Tan, Hoong Chuin Lau, Francis Chun Yue Lee Dec 2013

Improving Patient Length-Of-Stay In Emergency Department Through Dynamic Queue Management, Kar Way Tan, Hoong Chuin Lau, Francis Chun Yue Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Addressing issue of crowding in an Emergency Department (ED) typically takes the form of process engineering or single-faceted queue management strategies such as demand restriction, queue prioritization or staffing the ED. This work provides an integrated framework to manage queue dynamically from both demand and supply perspectives. More precisely, we introduce intelligent dynamic patient prioritization strategies to manage the demand concurrently with dynamic resource adjustment policies to manage supply. Our framework allows decision-makers to select both the demand-side and supply-side strategies to suit the needs of their ED. We verify through a simulation that such a framework improves the patients' …


A Dynamic Programming Approach To Achieving An Optimal End State Along A Serial Production Line, Shih-Fen Cheng, Blake E. Nicholson, Marina A. Epelman, Daniel J. Reaume, Robert L. Smith Dec 2013

A Dynamic Programming Approach To Achieving An Optimal End State Along A Serial Production Line, Shih-Fen Cheng, Blake E. Nicholson, Marina A. Epelman, Daniel J. Reaume, Robert L. Smith

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In modern production systems, it is critical to perform maintenance, calibration, installation, and upgrade tasks during planned downtime. Otherwise, the systems become unreliable and new product introductions are delayed. For reasons of safety, testing, and access, task performance often requires the vicinity of impacted equipment to be left in a specific “end state” when production halts. Therefore, planning the shutdown of a production system to balance production goals against enabling non-production tasks yields a challenging optimization problem. In this paper, we propose a mathematical formulation of this problem and a dynamic programming approach that efficiently finds optimal shutdown policies for …


An Agent-Based Simulation Approach To Experience Management In Theme Parks, Shih-Fen Cheng, Larry Junjie Lin, Jiali Du, Hoong Chuin Lau, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham Dec 2013

An Agent-Based Simulation Approach To Experience Management In Theme Parks, Shih-Fen Cheng, Larry Junjie Lin, Jiali Du, Hoong Chuin Lau, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we illustrate how massive agent-based simulation can be used to investigate an exciting new application domain of experience management in theme parks, which covers topics like congestion control, incentive design, and revenue management. Since all visitors are heterogeneous and self-interested, we argue that a high-quality agent-based simulation is necessary for studying various problems related to experience management. As in most agent-base simulations, a sound understanding of micro-level behaviors is essential to construct high-quality models. To achieve this, we designed and conducted a first-of-its-kind real-world experiment that helps us understand how typical visitors behave in a theme-park environment. …


Decision Trees To Model The Impact Of Disruption And Recovery In Supply Chain Networks, Loganathan Ponnanbalam, L. Wenbin, Xiuju Fu, Xiaofeng Yin, Zhaoxia Wang, Rick S. M. Goh Dec 2013

Decision Trees To Model The Impact Of Disruption And Recovery In Supply Chain Networks, Loganathan Ponnanbalam, L. Wenbin, Xiuju Fu, Xiaofeng Yin, Zhaoxia Wang, Rick S. M. Goh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Increase in the frequency of disruptions in the recent times and their impact have increased the attention in supply chain disruption management research. The objective of this paper is to understand as to how a disruption might affect the supply chain network - depending upon the network structure, the node that is disrupted, the disruption in production capacity of the disrupted node and the period of the disruption - via decision trees. To this end, we first developed a 5-tier agent-based supply chain model and then simulated it for various what-if disruptive scenarios for 3 different network structures (80 trials …


Social Media For Supply Chain Risk Management, Xiuju Fu, Rick S. M. Goh, J. C. Tong, Loganathan Ponnanbalam, Xiaofeng Yin, Zhaoxia Wang, H. Y. Xu, Sifei Lu Dec 2013

Social Media For Supply Chain Risk Management, Xiuju Fu, Rick S. M. Goh, J. C. Tong, Loganathan Ponnanbalam, Xiaofeng Yin, Zhaoxia Wang, H. Y. Xu, Sifei Lu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the rapid increase of online social network users worldwide, social media feeds have become a rich and valuable information resource and attract great attention across diversified domains. In social media data, there are abundant contents of two-way and interactive communication about products, demand, customer services and supply. This makes social media a valuable channel for listening to the voices from the market and measuring supply chain risks and new market trends for companies. In this study, we surveyed the potential value of social media in supply chain risk management (SCRM) and examined how they can be applied to SCRM …


Optimization Approaches For Solving Chance Constrained Stochastic Orienteering Problems, Pradeep Varakantham, Akshat Kumar Nov 2013

Optimization Approaches For Solving Chance Constrained Stochastic Orienteering Problems, Pradeep Varakantham, Akshat Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Orienteering problems (OPs) are typically used to model routing and trip planning problems. OP is a variant of the well known traveling salesman problem where the goal is to compute the highest reward path that includes a subset of nodes and has an overall travel time less than the specified deadline. Stochastic orienteering problems (SOPs) extend OPs to account for uncertain travel times and are significantly harder to solve than deterministic OPs. In this paper, we contribute a scalable mixed integer LP formulation for solving risk aware SOPs, which is a principled approximation of the underlying stochastic optimization problem. Empirically, …


Budgeted Personalized Incentive Approaches For Smoothing Congestion In Resource Networks, Pradeep Varakantham, Na Fu, William Yeoh, Shih-Fen Cheng, Hoong Chuin Lau Nov 2013

Budgeted Personalized Incentive Approaches For Smoothing Congestion In Resource Networks, Pradeep Varakantham, Na Fu, William Yeoh, Shih-Fen Cheng, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Congestion occurs when there is competition for resources by sel sh agents. In this paper, we are concerned with smoothing out congestion in a network of resources by using personalized well-timed in- centives that are subject to budget constraints. To that end, we provide: (i) a mathematical formulation that computes equilibrium for the re- source sharing congestion game with incentives and budget constraints; (ii) an integrated approach that scales to larger problems by exploiting the factored network structure and approximating the attained equilib- rium; (iii) an iterative best response algorithm for solving the uncon- strained version (no budget) of the …


On The Allocation Of Exclusive-Use Counters For Airport Check-In Queues: Static Vs. Dynamic Policies, Mahmut Parlar, Brian Rodrigues, Sharafali Moosa Sep 2013

On The Allocation Of Exclusive-Use Counters For Airport Check-In Queues: Static Vs. Dynamic Policies, Mahmut Parlar, Brian Rodrigues, Sharafali Moosa

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In this paper we propose a static policy for the optimal allocation of a fixed number of exclusive-use check-in counters dedicated to a single flight. We first provide the motivation for considering the static policy by showing that the dynamic policy already available in the literature suffers from the curse of dimensionality. The objective is to minimize the (expected) total cost of waiting, counter operation, and passenger delay costs which we show to be convex in the number of counters allocated. In those cases where the passenger delay cost is difficult to estimate, we propose an alternative formulation and minimize …


Improving Patient Length-Of-Stay In Emergency Department Through Dynamic Resource Allocation Policies, Kar Way Tan, Wei Hao Tan, Hoong Chuin Lau Aug 2013

Improving Patient Length-Of-Stay In Emergency Department Through Dynamic Resource Allocation Policies, Kar Way Tan, Wei Hao Tan, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this work, we consider the problem of allocating doctors in the ambulatory area of a hospital's emergency department (ED) based on a set of policies. Traditional staffing methods are static, hence do not react well to surges in patient demands. We study strategies that intelligently adjust the number of doctors based on current and historical information about the patient arrival. Our main contribution is our proposed data-driven online approach that performs adaptive allocation by utilizing historical as well as current arrivals by running symbiotic simulation in real-time. We build a simulation prototype that models ED process that is close …


A Multi-Objective Memetic Algorithm For Vehicle Resource Allocation In Sustainable Transportation Planning, Hoong Chuin Lau, Lucas Agussurja, Shih-Fen Cheng, Pang Jin Tan Aug 2013

A Multi-Objective Memetic Algorithm For Vehicle Resource Allocation In Sustainable Transportation Planning, Hoong Chuin Lau, Lucas Agussurja, Shih-Fen Cheng, Pang Jin Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Sustainable supply chain management has been an increasingly important topic of research in recent years. At the strategic level, there are computational models which study supply and distribution networks with environmental considerations. At the operational level, there are, for example, routing and scheduling models which are constrained by carbon emissions. Our paper explores work in tactical planning with regards to vehicle resource allocation from distribution centers to customer locations in a multi-echelon logistics network. We formulate the bi-objective optimization problem exactly and design a memetic algorithm to efficiently derive an approximate Pareto front. We illustrate the applicability of our approach …


Interacting Knapsack Problem In Designing Resource Bundles, Truong Huy D. Nguyen, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Hoong Chuin Lau, Shih-Fen Cheng Aug 2013

Interacting Knapsack Problem In Designing Resource Bundles, Truong Huy D. Nguyen, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Hoong Chuin Lau, Shih-Fen Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In many real-life businesses, the service provider/seller keeps a log of the visitors’ behavior as a way to assess the efficiency of the current business/operation model and find room for improvement. For example, by tracking when visitors entering attractions in a theme park, theme park owners can detect when and where congestion may occur, thus having contingency plans to reroute the visitors accordingly. Similarly, a Cable TV service provider can track channel switching events at each household to identify uninteresting channels. Subsequently, the repertoire of channels up for subscription can evolve over time to better serve the entertainment demand of …


Scalable Randomized Patrolling For Securing Rapid Transit Networks, Pradeep Varakantham, Hoong Chuin Lau, Zhi Yuan Aug 2013

Scalable Randomized Patrolling For Securing Rapid Transit Networks, Pradeep Varakantham, Hoong Chuin Lau, Zhi Yuan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mass Rapid Transit using rail is a popular mode of transport employed by millions of people in many urban cities across the world. Typically, these networks are massive, used by many and thus, can be a soft target for criminals. In this paper, we consider the problem of scheduling randomised patrols for improving security of such rail networks. Similar to existing work in randomised patrols for protecting critical infrastructure, we also employ Stackelberg Games to represent the problem. In solving the Stackelberg games for massive rail networks, we make two key contributions. Firstly, we provide an approach called RaPtoR for …


Flotra: Flower-Shape Trajectory Mining For Instance-Specific Parameter Tuning, Lindawati Lindawati, Feida Zhu, Hoong Chuin Lau Aug 2013

Flotra: Flower-Shape Trajectory Mining For Instance-Specific Parameter Tuning, Lindawati Lindawati, Feida Zhu, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The performance of a heuristic algorithm is highly dependent on its parameter configuration, yet finding a good parameter configuration is often a time-consuming task. In this paper we propose FloTra, a Flower graph mining for graph search Trajectory pattern extraction for generic instance-specific automated parameter tuning. This algorithm provides efficient extraction of compact and discriminative features of the search trajectory, upon which problem instances are clustered and the corresponding optimal parameter configurations are computed. Experimental evaluations of our approach on the Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP) show that our approach offers promising improvement over existing parameter tuning algorithms. In this work, …


Multi-Agent Orienteering Problem With Time-Dependent Capacity Constraints, Cen Chen, Shih-Fen Cheng, Hoong Chuin Lau Aug 2013

Multi-Agent Orienteering Problem With Time-Dependent Capacity Constraints, Cen Chen, Shih-Fen Cheng, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Orienteering Problem (OP), as originally defined by Tsiligirides, is the problem of cross-countr sport in which participants get rewards from visiting a predefined set of checkpoints. As Orienteering Problem can be used to describe a wide variety of real-world problems like route planning for facility inspection, patrolling of strategic location, and reward-weighted traveling salesman problem, it has attracted continuous interests from researchers and a large number of variants and corresponding algorithms for solving them have been introduced.


“Network-Theoretic” Queuing Delay Estimation In Theme Park Attractions, Ajay Aravamudhan, Archan Misra, Hoong Chuin Lau Aug 2013

“Network-Theoretic” Queuing Delay Estimation In Theme Park Attractions, Ajay Aravamudhan, Archan Misra, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Queuing is a common phenomenon in theme parks which negatively affects visitor experience and revenue yields. There is thus a need for park operators to infer the real queuing delays without expensive investment in human effort or complex tracking infrastructure. In this paper, we depart from the classical queuing theory approach and provide a data-driven and online approach for estimating the time-varying queuing delays experienced at different attractions in a theme park. This work is novel in that it relies purely on empirical observations of the entry time of individual visitors at different attractions, and also accommodates the reality that …


Riskvis: Supply Chain Visualization With Risk Management And Real-Time Monitoring, Rick S. M. Goh, Zhaoxia Wang, Xiaofeng Yin, Xiuju Fu, Loganathan Ponnanbalam, Sifei Lu, Xiaorong Li Aug 2013

Riskvis: Supply Chain Visualization With Risk Management And Real-Time Monitoring, Rick S. M. Goh, Zhaoxia Wang, Xiaofeng Yin, Xiuju Fu, Loganathan Ponnanbalam, Sifei Lu, Xiaorong Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With increased complexity, supply chain networks (SCNs) of modern era face higher risks and lower efficiency due to limited visibility. Hence, there is an immediate need to provide end-to-end supply chain visibility for efficient management of complex supply chains. This paper proposes a visualization scheme based on multi-hierarchical modular design and develops a supply chain visualization platform with risk management and real-time monitoring, named RiskVis, for realizing better Supply Chain Risk Management (SCRM). A Supply Chain Visualizer (SCV) with a graphical visualization platform is mounted as a part of a SCRM management decision-making dashboard and it provides senior management a …


Tesla: An Extended Study Of An Energy-Saving Agent That Leverages Schedule Flexibility, Jun Young Kwak, Pradeep Varakantham, Rajiv Maheswaran, Milind Tambe, Burcin Becerik-Gerber Jul 2013

Tesla: An Extended Study Of An Energy-Saving Agent That Leverages Schedule Flexibility, Jun Young Kwak, Pradeep Varakantham, Rajiv Maheswaran, Milind Tambe, Burcin Becerik-Gerber

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents transformative energy-saving schedule-leveraging agent (TESLA), an agent for optimizing energy usage in commercial buildings. TESLA’s key insight is that adding flexibility to event/meeting schedules can lead to significant energy savings. This paper provides four key contributions: (i) online scheduling algorithms, which are at the heart of TESLA, to solve a stochastic mixed integer linear program for energy-efficient scheduling of incrementally/dynamically arriving meetings and events; (ii) an algorithm to effectively identify key meetings that lead to significant energy savings by adjusting their flexibility; (iii) an extensive analysis on energy savings achieved by TESLA; and (iv) surveys of real …


Real-Life Vehicle Routing With Non-Standard Constraints, Wee Leong Lee Jul 2013

Real-Life Vehicle Routing With Non-Standard Constraints, Wee Leong Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Real-life vehicle routing problems comprise of a number of complexities that are not considered by the classical models found in vehicle routing literature. I present, in this paper, a two-stage sweep-based heuristic to find good solutions to a real-life Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP). The problem I shall consider, will deal with some non-standard constraints beyond those normally associated with the classical VRP. Other than considering the capacity constraints for vehicles and the time windows for deliveries, I shall introduce four additional non-standard constraints: merging of customer orders, controlling the maximum number of drop points, matching orders to vehicle types, and …


Anonymous Authentication Of Visitors For Mobile Crowd Sensing At Amusement Parks, Divyan Konidala, Robert H. Deng, Yingjiu Li, Hoong Chuin Lau, Stephen Fienberg May 2013

Anonymous Authentication Of Visitors For Mobile Crowd Sensing At Amusement Parks, Divyan Konidala, Robert H. Deng, Yingjiu Li, Hoong Chuin Lau, Stephen Fienberg

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper we focus on authentication and privacy aspects of an application scenario that utilizes mobile crowd sensing for the benefit of amusement park operators and their visitors. The scenario involves a mobile app that gathers visitors’ demographic details, preferences, and current location coordinates, and sends them to the park’s sever for various analyses. These analyses assist the park operators to efficiently deploy their resources, estimate waiting times and queue lengths, and understand the behavior of individual visitors and groups. The app server also offers visitors optimal recommendations on routes and attractions for an improved dynamic experience and minimized …


Master Physician Scheduling Problem, Aldy Gunawan, Hoong Chuin Lau May 2013

Master Physician Scheduling Problem, Aldy Gunawan, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We study a real-world problem arising from the operations of a hospital service provider, which we term the master physician scheduling problem. It is a planning problem of assigning physicians’ full range of day-to-day duties (including surgery, clinics, scopes, calls, administration) to the defined time slots/shifts over a time horizon, incorporating a large number of constraints and complex physician preferences. The goals are to satisfy as many physicians’ preferences and duty requirements as possible while ensuring optimum usage of available resources. We propose mathematical programming models that represent different variants of this problem. The models were tested on a real …


Distributed Gibbs: A Memory-Bounded Sampling-Based Dcop Algorithm, Duc Thien Nguyen, William Yeoh, Hoong Chuin Lau May 2013

Distributed Gibbs: A Memory-Bounded Sampling-Based Dcop Algorithm, Duc Thien Nguyen, William Yeoh, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Researchers have used distributed constraint optimization problems (DCOPs) to model various multi-agent coordination and resource allocation problems. Very recently, Ottens et al. proposed a promising new approach to solve DCOPs that is based on confidence bounds via their Distributed UCT (DUCT) sampling-based algorithm. Unfortunately, its memory requirement per agent is exponential in the number of agents in the problem, which prohibits it from scaling up to large problems. Thus, in this paper, we introduce a new sampling-based DCOP algorithm called Distributed Gibbs, whose memory requirements per agent is linear in the number of agents in the problem. Additionally, we show …


Demand Forecasting Using A Growth Model And Negative Binomial Regression Framework, Cally Yeru Ong, Murphy Choy, Michelle L. F. Cheong May 2013

Demand Forecasting Using A Growth Model And Negative Binomial Regression Framework, Cally Yeru Ong, Murphy Choy, Michelle L. F. Cheong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we look at demand forecasting by using a growth model and negative binomial regression framework. Using cumulative sales, we model the sales data for different wristwatch brands and relate it to their sales and growth characteristics. We apply clustering to determine the distinctive characteristics of each individual cluster. Four different growth models are applied to the clusters to find the most suitable growth model to be used. After determining the appropriate growth model to be applied, we then forecast the sales by applying the model to new products being launched in the market and continue to monitor …


Implementation Of Slowly Changing Dimension To Data Warehouse To Manage Marketing Campaigns In Banks, Lihui Wang, Junyu Choy, Michelle L. F. Cheong May 2013

Implementation Of Slowly Changing Dimension To Data Warehouse To Manage Marketing Campaigns In Banks, Lihui Wang, Junyu Choy, Michelle L. F. Cheong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Management of updating and recording campaign leads in data warehouse of any banking environment is complex especially with multiple campaigns are active simultaneously. As a way to avoid overly contacting customers for sales-based marketing contacts, the concept of Recency Frame is introduced to “lock” the customers who are targeted in Sales-based campaign for a specified time period. During this Recency Frame, the customer cannot be targeted by other Sales-based campaign under the same channel. This approach increased the difficulties of managing the customers’ data with proper data updating and storing and procedures have to be placed and made sufficiently robust …


Tesla: An Energy-Saving Agent That Leverages Schedule Flexibility, Jun Young Kwak, Pradeep Varakantham, Rajiv Maheswaran, Burcin Becerik-Gerber, Milind Tambe May 2013

Tesla: An Energy-Saving Agent That Leverages Schedule Flexibility, Jun Young Kwak, Pradeep Varakantham, Rajiv Maheswaran, Burcin Becerik-Gerber, Milind Tambe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This innovative application paper presents TESLA, an agent-based application for optimizing the energy use in commercial buildings. TESLA’s key insight is that adding flexibility to event/meeting schedules can lead to significant energy savings. TESLA provides three key contributions: (i) three online scheduling algorithms that consider flexibility of people’s preferences for energyefficient scheduling of incrementally/dynamically arriving meetings and events; (ii) an algorithm to effectively identify key meetings that lead to significant energy savings by adjusting their flexibility; and (iii) surveys of real users that indicate that TESLA’s assumptions exist in practice. TESLA was evaluated on data of over 110,000 meetings held …


Decision Support For Assorted Populations In Uncertain And Congested Environments, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Asrar Ahmed, Shih-Fen Cheng Jan 2013

Decision Support For Assorted Populations In Uncertain And Congested Environments, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Asrar Ahmed, Shih-Fen Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This research is motivated by large scale problems in urban transportation and labor mobility where there is congestion for resources and uncertainty in movement. In such domains, even though the individual agents do not have an identity of their own and do not explicitly interact with other agents, they effect other agents. While there has been much research in handling such implicit effects, it has primarily assumed deterministic movements of agents. We address the issue of decision support for individual agents that are identical and have involuntary movements in dynamic environments. For instance, in a taxi fleet serving a city, …


Automated Parameter Tuning Framework For Heterogeneous And Large Instances: Case Study In Quadratic Assignment Problem, Linda Lindawati, Zhi Yuan, Hoong Chuin Lau, Feida Zhu Jan 2013

Automated Parameter Tuning Framework For Heterogeneous And Large Instances: Case Study In Quadratic Assignment Problem, Linda Lindawati, Zhi Yuan, Hoong Chuin Lau, Feida Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper is concerned with automated tuning of parameters of algorithms to handle heterogeneous and large instances. We propose an automated parameter tuning framework with the capability to provide instance-specific parameter configurations. We report preliminary results on the Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP) and show that our framework provides a significant improvement on solutions qualities with much smaller tuning computational time.


Regret Based Robust Solutions For Uncertain Markov Decision Processes, Asrar Ahmed, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Yossiri Adulyasak, Patrick Jaillet Jan 2013

Regret Based Robust Solutions For Uncertain Markov Decision Processes, Asrar Ahmed, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Yossiri Adulyasak, Patrick Jaillet

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we seek robust policies for uncertain Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Most robust optimization approaches for these problems have focussed on the computation of maximin policies which maximize the value corresponding to the worst realization of the uncertainty. Recent work has proposed minimax regret as a suitable alternative to the maximin objective for robust optimization. However, existing algorithms for handling minimax regret are restricted to models with uncertainty over rewards only. We provide algorithms that employ sampling to improve across multiple dimensions: (a) Handle uncertainties over both transition and reward models; (b) Dependence of model uncertainties across state, …


Uncertain Congestion Games With Assorted Human Agent Populations , Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Asrar Ahmed, Shih-Fen Cheng Jan 2013

Uncertain Congestion Games With Assorted Human Agent Populations , Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Asrar Ahmed, Shih-Fen Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Congestion games model a wide variety of real-world resource congestion problems, such as selfish network routing, traffic route guidance in congested areas, taxi fleet optimization and crowd movement in busy areas. However, existing research in congestion games assumes: (a) deterministic movement of agents between resources; and (b) perfect rationality (i.e. maximizing their own expected value) of all agents. Such assumptions are not reasonable in dynamic domains where decision support has to be provided to humans. For instance, in optimizing the performance of a taxi fleet serving a city, movement of taxis can be involuntary or nondeterministic (decided by the specific …