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Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

2007

Business

Singapore Management University

Articles 1 - 6 of 6

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

Multi-Period Combinatorial Auction Mechanism For Distributed Resource Allocation And Scheduling, Hoong Chuin Lau, Shih-Fen Cheng, Thin Yin Leong, Jong Han Park, Zhengyi Zhao Nov 2007

Multi-Period Combinatorial Auction Mechanism For Distributed Resource Allocation And Scheduling, Hoong Chuin Lau, Shih-Fen Cheng, Thin Yin Leong, Jong Han Park, Zhengyi Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We consider the problem of resource allocation and scheduling where information and decisions are decentralized, and our goal is to propose a market mechanism that allows resources from a central resource pool to be allocated to distributed decision makers (agents) that seek to optimize their respective scheduling goals. We propose a generic combinatorial auction mechanism that allows agents to competitively bid for the resources needed in a multi-period setting, regardless of the respective scheduling problem faced by the agent, and show how agents can design optimal bidding strategies to respond to price adjustment strategies from the auctioneer. We apply our …


Designing The Market Game For A Commodity Trading Simulation, Shih-Fen Cheng Nov 2007

Designing The Market Game For A Commodity Trading Simulation, Shih-Fen Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose to design a market game that (a) can be used in modeling and studying commodity trading scenarios, and (b) can be used in capturing human traders' behaviors. Specifically, we demonstrate the usefulness of this commodity trading game in a single-commodity futures trading scenario. A pilot experiment was run with a mixture of human traders and an autonomous agent that emulates the aggregatedmarket condition, with the assumption that this autonomous agent would hint each of its action through a public announcement. We show that the information collected from this simulation can be used to extract the …


The Price Of Stability In Selfish Scheduling Games, Lucas Agussurja, Hoong Chuin Lau Nov 2007

The Price Of Stability In Selfish Scheduling Games, Lucas Agussurja, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Game theory has gained popularity as an approach to analysing and understanding distributed systems with selfinterested agents. Central to game theory is the concept of Nash equilibrium as a stable state (solution) of the system, which comes with a price - the loss in efficiency. The quantification of the efficiency loss is one of the main research concerns. In this paper, we study the quality and computational characteristic of the best Nash equilibrium in two selfish scheduling models: the congestion model and the sequencing model. In particular, we present the following results: (1) In the congestion model: first, the best …


Robust Local Search And Its Application To Generating Robust Schedules, Hoong Chuin Lau, Fei Xiao, Thomas Ou Sep 2007

Robust Local Search And Its Application To Generating Robust Schedules, Hoong Chuin Lau, Fei Xiao, Thomas Ou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose an extended local search framework to solve combinatorial optimization problems with data uncertainty. Our approach represents a major departure from scenario-based or stochastic programming approaches often used to tackle uncertainty. Given a value 0 < ? 1, we are interested to know what the robust objective value is, i.e. the optimal value if we allow an chance of not meeting it, assuming that certain data values are defined on bounded random variables. We show how a standard local search or metaheuristic routine can be extended to efficiently construct a decision rule with such guarantee, albeit heuristically. We demonstrate its practical applicability on the Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problem with minimal and maximal time lags (RCPSP/max) taking into consideration activity duration uncertainty. Experiments show that, partial order schedules can be constructed that are robust in our sense without the need for a large planned horizon (due date), which improves upon the work proposed by Policella et al. 2004.


Generating Job Schedules For Vessel Operations In A Container Terminal, Thin Yin Leong, Hoong Chuin Lau Jul 2007

Generating Job Schedules For Vessel Operations In A Container Terminal, Thin Yin Leong, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.


Towards Efficient Computation Of Quality Bounded Solutions In Pomdps: Expected Value Approximation And Dynamic Disjunctive Beliefs, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Rajiv Maheswaran, Tapana Gupta, Milind Tambe Jan 2007

Towards Efficient Computation Of Quality Bounded Solutions In Pomdps: Expected Value Approximation And Dynamic Disjunctive Beliefs, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Rajiv Maheswaran, Tapana Gupta, Milind Tambe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While POMDPs (partially observable markov decision problems) are a popular computational model with wide-ranging applications, the computational cost for optimal policy generation is prohibitive. Researchers are investigating ever-more efficient algorithms, yet many applications demand such algorithms bound any loss in policy quality when chasing efficiency. To address this challenge, we present two new techniques. The first approximates in the value space to obtain solutions efficiently for a pre-specified error bound. Unlike existing techniques, our technique guarantees the resulting policy will meet this bound. Furthermore, it does not require costly computations to determine the quality loss of the policy. Our second …