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

Robust Execution Strategies For Project Scheduling With Unreliable Resources And Stochastic Durations, Na Fu, Hoong Chuin Lau, Pradeep Varakantham Dec 2015

Robust Execution Strategies For Project Scheduling With Unreliable Resources And Stochastic Durations, Na Fu, Hoong Chuin Lau, Pradeep Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The resource-constrained project scheduling problem with minimum and maximum time lags (RCPSP/max) is a general model for resource scheduling in many real-world problems (such as manufacturing and construction engineering). We consider RCPSP/max problems where the durations of activities are stochastic and resources can have unforeseen breakdowns. Given a level of allowable risk, (Formula presented.), our mechanisms aim to compute the minimum robust makespan execution strategy. Robust makespan for an execution strategy is any makespan value that has a risk less than (Formula presented.). The risk for a makespan value, (Formula presented.) given an execution strategy, is the probability that a …


Designing Bus Transit Services For Routine Crowd Situations At Large Event Venues, Jianli Du, Shih-Fen Cheng, Hoong Chuin Lau Sep 2015

Designing Bus Transit Services For Routine Crowd Situations At Large Event Venues, Jianli Du, Shih-Fen Cheng, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We are concerned with the routine crowd management problem after a major event at a known venue. Without properly design complementary transport services, such sudden crowd build-ups will overwhelm the existing infrastructure. In this paper, we introduce a novel flow-rate based model to model the dynamic movement of passengers over the transportation flow network. Based on this basic model, an integer linear programming model is proposed to solve the bus transit problem permanently. We validate our model against a real scenario in Singapore, where a newly constructed mega-stadium hosts various large events regularly. The results show that the proposed approach …


Ad-Hoc Automated Teller Machine Failure Forecast And Field Service Optimization, Michelle L. F. Cheong, Ping Shung Koo, B. Chandra Babu Aug 2015

Ad-Hoc Automated Teller Machine Failure Forecast And Field Service Optimization, Michelle L. F. Cheong, Ping Shung Koo, B. Chandra Babu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As part of its overall effort to maintain good customer service while managing operational efficiency and reducing cost, a bank in Singapore has embarked on using data and decision analytics methodologies to perform better ad-hoc ATM failure forecasting and plan the field service engineers to repair the machines. We propose using a combined Data and Decision Analytics Framework which helps the analyst to first understand the business problem by collecting, preparing and exploring data to gain business insights, before proposing what objectives and solutions can and should be done to solve the problem. This paper reports the work in analyzing …


Probabilistic Inference Based Message-Passing For Resource Constrained Dcops, Supriyo Ghosh, Akshat Kumar, Pradeep Varakantham Jul 2015

Probabilistic Inference Based Message-Passing For Resource Constrained Dcops, Supriyo Ghosh, Akshat Kumar, Pradeep Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Distributed constraint optimization (DCOP) is an important framework for coordinated multiagent decision making. We address a practically useful variant of DCOP, called resource-constrained DCOP (RC-DCOP), which takes into account agents’ consumption of shared limited resources. We present a promising new class of algorithm for RC-DCOPs by translating the underlying co- ordination problem to probabilistic inference. Using inference techniques such as expectation- maximization and convex optimization machinery, we develop a novel convergent message-passing algorithm for RC-DCOPs. Experiments on standard benchmarks show that our approach provides better quality than previous best DCOP algorithms and has much lower failure rate. Comparisons against an …


Retail Precinct Management: A Case Of Commercial Decentralization In Singapore, Robert De Souza, Hoong Chuin Lau, Mark Goh, Lindawati, Wee-Siong Ng, Puay-Siew Tan Jun 2015

Retail Precinct Management: A Case Of Commercial Decentralization In Singapore, Robert De Souza, Hoong Chuin Lau, Mark Goh, Lindawati, Wee-Siong Ng, Puay-Siew Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The synchronized last mile logistics concept seeks to address, through coordinated collaboration, several challenges that hinder reliability, cost efficiency, effective resource planning, scheduling and utilization; and increasingly, sustainability objectives. Subsequently, the meeting of service level and contractual commitments are competitively impacted with any loss of efficiency. These challenges, against a backdrop of Singapore, can essentially be addressed in selected industry sectors through a better understanding of logistics structures; innovative supply chain designs and coordination of services, operations and processes coupled with concerted policies and supply chain strategies.


History-Based Controller Design And Optimization For Partially Observable Mdps, Akshat Kumar, Shlomo Zilberstein Jun 2015

History-Based Controller Design And Optimization For Partially Observable Mdps, Akshat Kumar, Shlomo Zilberstein

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Partially observable MDPs provide an elegant framework forsequential decision making. Finite-state controllers (FSCs) are often used to represent policies for infinite-horizon problems as they offer a compact representation, simple-to-execute plans, and adjustable tradeoff between computational complexityand policy size. We develop novel connections between optimizing FSCs for POMDPs and the dual linear programfor MDPs. Building on that, we present a dual mixed integer linear program (MIP) for optimizing FSCs. To assign well-defined meaning to FSC nodes as well as aid in policy search, we show how to associate history-based features with each FSC node. Using this representation, we address another challenging …


Direct: A Scalable Approach For Route Guidance In Selfish Orienteering Problems, Pradeep Varakantham, Hala Mostafa, Na Fu, Hoong Chuin Lau May 2015

Direct: A Scalable Approach For Route Guidance In Selfish Orienteering Problems, Pradeep Varakantham, Hala Mostafa, Na Fu, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We address the problem of crowd congestion at venues like theme parks, museums and world expos by providing route guidance to multiple selfish users (with budget constraints) moving through the venue simultaneously. To represent these settings, we introduce the Selfish Orienteering Problem (SeOP) that combines two well studied problems from literature, namely Orienteering Problem (OP) and Selfish Routing (SR). OP is a single agent routing problem where the goal is to minimize latency (or maximize reward) in traversing a subset of nodes while respecting budget constraints. SR is a game between selfish agents looking for minimum latency routes from source …


Near-Optimal Decentralized Power Supply Restoration In Smart Grids, Pritee Agrawal, Akshat Kumar, Pradeep Varakantham May 2015

Near-Optimal Decentralized Power Supply Restoration In Smart Grids, Pritee Agrawal, Akshat Kumar, Pradeep Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Next generation of smart grids face a number of challenges including co-generation from intermittent renewable power sources, a shift away from monolithic control due to increased market deregulation, and robust operation in the face of disasters. Such heterogeneous nature and high operational readiness requirement of smart grids necessitates decentralized control for critical tasks such as power supply restoration (PSR) after line failures. We present a novel multiagent system based approach for PSR using Lagrangian dual decomposition. Our approach works on general graphs, provides provable quality-bounds and requires only local message-passing among different connected sub-regions of a smart grid, enabling decentralized …


Predicting Bundles Of Spatial Locations From Learning Revealed Preference Data, Truc Viet Le, Siyuan Liu, Hoong Chuin Lau, Ramayya Krishnan May 2015

Predicting Bundles Of Spatial Locations From Learning Revealed Preference Data, Truc Viet Le, Siyuan Liu, Hoong Chuin Lau, Ramayya Krishnan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose the problem of predicting a bundle of goods, where the goods considered is a set of spatial locations that an agent wishes to visit. This typically arises in the tourism setting where attractions can often be bundled and sold as a package to visitors. While the problem of predicting future locations given the current and past trajectories is well-established, we take a radical approach by looking at it from an economic point of view. We view an agent's past trajectories as revealed preference (RP) data, where the choice of locations is a solution to an optimisation problem according …


Designing A Portfolio Of Parameter Configurations For Online Algorithm Selection, Aldy Gunawan, Hoong Chuin Lau, Mustafa Misir Jan 2015

Designing A Portfolio Of Parameter Configurations For Online Algorithm Selection, Aldy Gunawan, Hoong Chuin Lau, Mustafa Misir

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Algorithm portfolios seek to determine an effective set of algorithms that can be used within an algorithm selection framework to solve problems. A limited number of these portfolio studies focus on generating different versions of a target algorithm using different parameter configurations. In this paper, we employ a Design of Experiments (DOE) approach to determine a promising range of values for each parameter of an algorithm. These ranges are further processed to determine a portfolio of parameter configurations, which would be used within two online Algorithm Selection approaches for solving different instances of a given combinatorial optimization problem effectively. We …