Operations Research/Computer Science Interfaces Series – serie

Reactive Search and Intelligent Optimization is an excellent introduction to the main principles of reactive search, as well as an attempt to develop some fresh intuition for the approaches. The book looks at different optimization possibilities with an emphasis on opportunities for learning and self-tuning strategies. While focusing more on methods than on problems, problems are introduced wherever they help make the discussion more concrete, or when a specific problem has been widely studied by reactive search and intelligent optimization heuristics.Individual chapters cover reacting on the neighborhood; reacting on the annealing schedule; reactive prohibitions; model-based search; reacting on the objective function; relationships between reactive search and reinforcement learning; and much more. Each chapter is structured to show basic issues and algorithms; the parameters critical for the success of the different methods discussed; and opportunities forthe automated tuning of these parameters.

Computer Science and Operations Research continue to have a synergistic relationship and this book represents the results of the cross-fertilization between OR/MS and CS/AI. It is this interface of OR/CS that makes possible advances that could not have been achieved in isolation. Taken collectively, these articles are indicative of the state of the art in the interface between OR/MS and CS/AI and of the high-caliber research being conducted by members of the INFORMS Computing Society.

Simulation Approaches in Transportation Analysis: Recent Advances and Challenges presents the latest developments in transport simulation, including dynamic network simulation and micro-simulation of people’s movement in an urban area. It offers a collection of the major simulation models that are now in use throughout the world; it illustrates each model in detail, examines potential problems, and points to directions for future development. The reader will be able to understand the functioning, applicability, and usefulness of advanced transport simulation models. The material in this book will be of wide use to graduate students and practitioners as well as researchers in the transportation engineering and planning fields.

Metaheuristics: Progress as Real Problem Solvers is a peer-reviewed volume of eighteen current, cutting-edge papers by leading researchers in the field. Included are an invited paper by F. Glover and G. Kochenberger, which discusses the concept of Metaheuristic agent processes, and a tutorial paper by M.G.C. Resende and C.C. Ribeiro discussing GRASP with path-relinking. Other papers discuss problem-solving approaches to timetabling, automated planograms, elevators, space allocation, shift design, cutting stock, flexible shop scheduling, colorectal cancer and cartography. A final group of methodology papers clarify various aspects of Metaheuristics from the computational view point.

This edited book serves as a companion volume to the Seventh INFORMS Telecommunications Conference held in Boca Raton, Florida, March 7-10, 2004. The 18 papers in this book were carefully selected after a thorough re­ view process. The research presented within these articles focuses on the latest methodological developments in three key areas—pricing of telecommunica­ tions services, network design, and resource allocation—that are most relevant to current telecommunications planning. With the global deregulation of the telecommunications industry, effective pricing and revenue management, as well as an understanding of competi­ tive pressures are key factors that will improve revenue in telecommunica­ tions companies. Chapters 1-5 address these topics by focusing on pricing of telecommunications services. They present some novel ideas related to pricing (including auction-based pricing of network bandwidth) and modeling compe­ tition in the industry. The successful telecommunications companies of the future will likely be the ones that can minimize their costs while meeting customer expectations. In this context the optimal design/provisioning of telecommunication networks plays an important role. Chapters 6-12 address these topics by focusing on net­ work design for a wide range of technologies including SONET, SDH, WDM, and MPLS. They include the latest research developments related to the mod­ eling and solving of network design problems. Day-to-day management/control of telecommunications networks is depen­ dent upon the optimal allocation of resources. Chapters 13-18 provide insight­ ful solutions to several intriguing resource allocation problems.

1.1 Freight Transshipment We observe an ongoing trend towards globalized industrial produc­ tion. Multinational companies aim at strategic competitive advantages by distributing their activities around the globe. As a result, the in­ dividual supply chains become longer and more complex. Next to the supply chain reliability, companies try to keep supply chains cost effi­ cient and responsive, i.e. warrant short order fulfillment lead times (Siirie and Wagner, 2005). The above goals dictate low inventory levels at the stages of a supply chain as well as a high frequency of transports between the partners involved. Supply Chain Requirements. Detailed performance measures for a supply chain are provided by the Supply Chain Operations Refer­ ence (SCOR) model (Supply-Chain Council, 2002). The SCOR model provides four levels with increasing detail of process modeling. In accor­ dance to the process detail depicted SCOR metrics are defined for each level. Level 1 distinguishes metrics addressing the reliability of supply chains, their responsiveness, flexibility, cost and optionally their assets. On levels 2-4 these metrics are operationalized with respect to the pro­ cess types source, make and deliver. Thus, as substantial activities of the deliver process, transport and transshipment are evaluated as an integral part of the supply chain.

Metaheuristic Procedures For Training Neural Networks provides successful implementations of metaheuristic methods for neural network training. Moreover, the basic principles and fundamental ideas given in the book will allow the readers to create successful training methods on their own. Apart from Chapter 1, which reviews classical training methods, the chapters are divided into three main categories. The first one is devoted to local search based methods, including Simulated Annealing, Tabu Search, and Variable Neighborhood Search. The second part of the book presents population based methods, such as Estimation Distribution algorithms, Scatter Search, and Genetic Algorithms. The third part covers other advanced techniques, such as Ant Colony Optimization, Co-evolutionary methods, GRASP, and Memetic algorithms. Overall, the book's objective is engineered to provide a broad coverage of the concepts, methods, and tools of this important area of ANNs within the realm of continuous optimization.

Saul Gass has been a leading contributor to the field of Operations Research for more than 50 years. He has been affiliated with the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland for more than 30 years. On February 25, 2006, "Operations Research in the 21st Century: A Symposium in Honor of Professor Saul Gass' 80th Birthday," was held on our campus. Opening remarks by Deans Howard Prank and Rudy Lamone were followed by talks by Alfred Blumstein, Karla Hoffman, Richard Larson, Christoph Witzgall, Thomas Magnanti, Rakesh Vohra, and Bruce Golden. The celebration continued into the evening with dinner in the Executive Din­ ing Room of Van Munching Hall, followed by numerous toasts to Saul. It was a special day for all of us who were in attendance, but it was especially memorable for Saul and his family. This Festschrift companion to the Symposium includes articles from each of the Symposium distinguished speakers plus 16 other articles from friends, colleagues, and several of Saul's former students. The book is divided into three sections. The first section comprises eight articles focusing on the field of Operations Research from a historical or professional perspective. The second section contains nine articles whose theme is optimization and heuristic search, while the third section includes six articles in the general area of modeling and decision making. Collectively, these articles pay tribute to Saul Gass' major interests in the field of Operations Research.

Computer Science and Operations Research continue to have a synergistic relationship and this book represents the results of cross-fertilization between OR/MS and CS/AI. It is this interface of OR/CS that makes possible advances that could not have been achieved in isolation. Taken collectively, these articles are indicative of the state-of-the-art in the interface between OR/MS and CS/AI and of the high caliber of research being conducted by members of the INFORMS Computing Society.Extending the Horizons: Advances in Computing, Optimization, and Decision Technologies is a volume that presents the latest, leading research in the design and analysis of algorithms, computational optimization, heuristic search and learning, modeling languages, parallel and distributed computing, simulation, computational logic and visualization. This volume also emphasizes a variety of novel applications in the interface of CS, AI, and OR/MS.

Dynamic Fleet Management will focus on real time management of a distribution system. This means that when a dynamic event occurs within the distribution chain, action must be taken in "real-time." The book will integrate the latest results in system design, algorithm development and system implementation, to capture the state-of-the art research and application trends. While much of the research in this area of transportation problems have almost exclusively concentrated on carrying out static plans on optional distribution conditions, this book will examine those problems when some dynamic or unplanned even occurs within the transport or network system. It will focus specifically on these cases and integrate the latest results in systems, routing algorithms and case studies where information (a dynamic event) is revealed to the decision maker in a real-time manner.

The aim of Metaheuristics: Progress in Complex Systems Optimization is to provide several different kinds of information: a delineation of general metaheuristics methods, a number of state-of-the-art articles from a variety of well-known classical application areas as well as an outlook to modern computational methods in promising new areas. Therefore, this book may equally serve as a textbook in graduate courses for students, as a reference book for people interested in engineering or social sciences, and as a collection of new and promising avenues for researchers working in this field.Highlighted are recent developments in the areas of Simulated Annealing, Path Relinking, Scatter Search, Tabu Search, Variable Neighborhood Search, Hyper-heuristics, Constraint Programming, Iterated Local Search, GRASP, bio-inspired algorithms like Genetic Algorithms, Memetic Algorithms, Ant Colony Optimization or Swarm Intelligence, and several other paradigms.

In the past 30 years, commercial transport traffic has more than doubled in both Europe and North America, while Asian traffic has likely increased even more. As any mismatch between supply and demand can result into significant disturbances of manufacturing processes, just-in-time practices necessitate punctual, reliable, and flexible transportation.Fleet Telematics: Real-Time Management and Planning of Commercial Vehicle Operations combines wireless telematics systems with dynamic vehicle routing algorithms and vehicle-positioning systems to produce a telematics-enabled information system that can be employed by commercial fleet operators for real-time monitoring, control, and planning. The book presents a Messaging & Fleet Monitoring System that automatically identifies deviations between the planned and the current state of the transportation system and a Dynamic Planning System (DPS) that provides real-time decision support considering the current state of the transportation system.

The primary objective of this essential text is to emphasize the deep relations existing between the semiring and dioid structures with graphs and their combinatorial properties. It does so at the same time as demonstrating the modeling and problem-solving flexibility of these structures. In addition the book provides an extensive overview of the mathematical properties employed by "nonclassical" algebraic structures which either extend usual algebra or form a new branch of it.

Cellular Genetic Algorithms defines a new class of optimization algorithms based on the concepts of structured populations and Genetic Algorithms (GAs). The authors explain and demonstrate the validity of these cellular genetic algorithms throughout the book. This class of genetic algorithms is shown to produce impressive results on a whole range of domains, including complex problems that are epistatic, multi-modal, deceptive, discrete, continuous, multi-objective, and random in nature. The focus of this book is twofold. On the one hand, the authors present new algorithmic models and extensions to the basic class of Cellular GAs in order to tackle complex problems more efficiently. On the other hand, practical real world tasks are successfully faced by applying Cellular GA methodologies to produce workable solutions of real-world applications. These methods can include local search (memetic algorithms), cooperation, parallelism, multi-objective, estimations of distributions, and self-adaptive ideas to extend their applicability.The methods are benchmarked against well-known metaheuristics like Genetic Algorithms, Tabu Search, heterogeneous GAs, Estimation of Distribution Algorithms, etc. Also, a publicly available software tool is offered to reduce the learning curve in applying these techniques. The three final chapters will use the classic problem of “vehicle routing” and the hot topics of “ad-hoc mobile networks” and “DNA genome sequencing” to clearly illustrate and demonstrate the power and utility of these algorithms.

Theoretical research and practical applications in the ?eld of vehicle routing started in 1959 with the truck dispatching problem posed by Dantzig and Ramser [1]: ?nd the “. . . optimum routing of a ?eet of gasoline delivery trucks between a bulk terminal and a large number of service stations supplied by the terminal. ” Using a method based on a linear programming formulation, their hand calculations produced a near-optimal solution with four routes to aproblemwithtwelve service stations. The authorsproclaimed:“Nopractical applications of the method have been made as yet. ” In the nearly 50 years since the Dantzig and Ramser paper appeared, work in the ?eld has exploded dramatically. Today, a Google Scholar search of the words vehicle routing problem (VRP) yields more than 21,700 entries. The June 2006 issue of OR/MS Today provided a survey of 17 vendors of commercial routing software whose packages are currently capable of solving average-size problems with 1,000 stops, 50 routes, and two-hour hard-time windows in two to ten minutes [2]. In practice, vehicle routing may be the single biggest success story in operations research. For example, each day 103,500 drivers at UPS follow computer-generated routes. The drivers visit 7. 9 million customers and handle an average of 15. 6 million packages [3].

Telecommunications Modeling, Policy, and Technology Examines the newer and emerging models of telecommunications technology that play instrumental roles in providing international economic and societal interconnectivity. Advancing technology in the field imposes the need to develop new models to solve complex planning and decision making problems. The global, national, and local societal impact of the technology necessitates careful analysis of telecommunications policy at all of these levels. The book explores natural output of the new technical developments and applications with selective chapter treatment on novel business models to fill the emerging technical and business needs.

"Schedule-Based Modeling of Transportation Networks: Theory and Applications" follows the book Schedule-Based Dynamic Transit Modeling, published in this series in 2004, recognizing the critical role that schedules play in transportation systems.Conceived for the simulation of transit systems, in the last few years the schedule-based approach has been expanded and applied to operational planning of other transportation schedule services besides mass transit, e.g. freight transport. This innovative approach allows forecasting the evolution over time of the on-board loads on the services and their time-varying performance, using credible user behavioral hypotheses. It opens new frontiers in transportation modeling to support network design, timetable setting, and investigation of congestion effects, as well as the assessment of such new technologies, such as users system information (ITS technologies).

Operations Research and Cyber-Infrastructure is the companion volume to the Eleventh INFORMS Computing Society Conference (ICS 2009), held in Charleston, South Carolina, from January 11 to 13, 2009. It includes 24 high-quality refereed research papers.  As always, the focus of interest for ICS is the interface between Operations Research and Computer Science, and the papers in this volume reflect that interest. This is naturally an evolving area as computational power increases rapidly while decreasing in cost even more quickly, and the papers included here illustrate the wide range of topics at this interface.

Since the introduction of genetic algorithms in the 1970s, an enormous number of articles together with several significant monographs and books have been published on this methodology. As a result, genetic algorithms have made a major contribution to optimization, adaptation, and learning in a wide variety of unexpected fields. Over the years, many excellent books in genetic algorithm optimization have been published; however, they focus mainly on single-objective discrete or other hard optimization problems under certainty. There appears to be no book that is designed to present genetic algorithms for solving not only single-objective but also fuzzy and multiobjective optimization problems in a unified way. Genetic Algorithms And Fuzzy Multiobjective Optimization introduces the latest advances in the field of genetic algorithm optimization for 0-1 programming, integer programming, nonconvex programming, and job-shop scheduling problems under multiobjectiveness and fuzziness. In addition, the book treats a wide range of actual real world applications. The theoretical material and applications place special stress on interactive decision-making aspects of fuzzy multiobjective optimization for human-centered systems in most realistic situations when dealing with fuzziness. The intended readers of this book are senior undergraduate students, graduate students, researchers, and practitioners in the fields of operations research, computer science, industrial engineering, management science, systems engineering, and other engineering disciplines that deal with the subjects of multiobjective programming for discrete or other hard optimization problems under fuzziness. Real world research applications are used throughout the book to illustrate the presentation. These applications are drawn from complex problems. Examples include flexible scheduling in a machine center, operation planning of district heating and cooling plants, and coal purchase planning in an actual electric power plant.

The field of metaheuristics has been fast evolving. Techniques such as simulated annealing, tabu search, genetic algorithms, scatter search, greedy randomized adaptive search, variable neighbourhood search, ant systems, and their hybrids are currently among the most efficient and robust optimization strategies to find high-quality solutions to many real-life optimization problems. A very large number of successful applications of metaheuristics are reported in the literature and spread throughout many books, journals, and conference proceedings. A series of international conferences entirely devoted to the theory, applications, and computational developments in metaheuristics has been attracting an increasing number of participants, from universities and the industry. For this text, specialists have written surveys on the following subjects: simulated annealing (E. Aarts and J. Korst, The Netherlands): noising methods (I. Charon and O. Hudry, France); strategies for the parallel implementation of metaheuristics (V.-D. Cung and C. Roucairol, France, and S.L. Martins and C.C. Ribeiro, Brazil); greedy randomized adaptive search procedures (P. Festa, Italy, and M.G.C.Resende, USA); tabu search (M. Gendreau, Canada); variable neighborhood search (P. Hansen and N. Mladenovic, Canada), ant colonies (V. Maniezzo and A. Carbonaro, Italy); and evolutionary algorithms (H. Mohlenbein and Th. Mahnig, Germany). Several further essays address issues or variants of metaheuristics, as well as innovative or successful applications of metaheuristics to classical or new combinatorial optimization problems.

Business modelling is a vast arena of research and practice, which is gaining increasing important in the rapid development of e-commerce, globalization, and in particular, the movement toward global e-business. The ability to utilize advanced computing technology to model, analyse and simulate various aspects of ever-changing businesses has made a significant impact on the way businesses are designed and run these days. With the current global e-business and e-commerce initiatives, it has become important that all businesses carefully validate their business objectives, requirements, and strategies through a careful process of formal business modelling. It is important for effective enterprise decision making to have clear, concise business models that allow the extraction of critical value from business processes and specify the rules to be globally enforced. Particularly in e-business specifications, the need to be unambiguous, accurate, and complete becomes even greater, because there may be no human mediator or agent to rely on in complex or unforeseen situations.Business Modelling: Multidisciplinary Approaches - Economics, Operational, and Information Systems Perspectives, arranged in three parts, brings scholarly perspectives from various disciplines to bear on some of the critical aspects of business modeling. The first part (chapters 1-8) focuses on business modelling fundamentals and starts with a series of economics and operations research perspectives. The second part (chapters 9-19) concentrates on modelling in electronic businesses and focuses on Management Information Systems and Decision Support Systems. The third part (chapters 20-22) centers on multidisciplinary business modelling progress, in particular on the seminal work of Professor Andrew B. Whinston.

Technology, people, e-workplaces: these are the elements that fast moving organizations use to meet changing business requirements by using technology to invent new business processes, to re-align organizational structures, and to implement new management practices. Moreover, it has become apparent in today's global information economy, the most critical resource that distinguishes market leaders from everyone else is human talent. Countries, communities, and organizations are suddenly interested in developing the human capacities that will allow them to compete in a networked world. Successful growing organizations have placed the combined development of information technology and human resources as their top priority. With the help of human resource professionals, organizations must grasp the pertinent aspects of both people and technology issues to create an effective e-workplace. These issues occur at the intersection of the disciplines of computer science, operation research, and human resource development. Because these issues are complex, they can best be understood through cross-disciplinary collaboration among experts who approach them from a range of perspectives.This book presents just such a collaborative effort from leaders in the field, describing the changes that are occurring as technology plays a more central role in human resource development. It compares methods and tools that organizations can use to create their own practices for developing their most critical resource - people. In addition, the authors pose a set of research questions that should help the reader to further explore how countries, local communities, and organizations build dynamic systems for developing a sustained competitive advantage with human talent.

Global competition and growing costumer expectations force indus­ trial enterprises to reorganize their business processes and to support cost-effective customer services. Realizing the potential savings to be gained by exacting customer-delivery processes, logistics is currently sub­ ject to incisive changes. This upheaval aims at making competitive ad­ vantage from logistic services instead of viewing them simply as business necessity. With respect to this focus logistics management comprises the process of planning, implementing, and controlling the efficient, effective flow and storage of goods and services, and related information from point of origin to point of consumption for the purpose of conforming customer requirements I . This definition implies a holistic view on the logistic network, where the actors are suppliers, manufacturers, stock keepers, shipping agents, distributors, retailers and finally consumers. The flow of goods along the supply chain considers raw-materials, work-in-process parts, intermedi­ ate and finished products, and possibly waste. The prevailing manage­ ment of logistics operation is driven by aggregated forecasting of these material flows. Modern logistics management propagates a disaggregated view of the material flow in order to meet the precise requirements at the interface between actors in the supply chain. Replacing aggregated information by detailed values establishes the prerequisites for an integrated process planning which goes for the shift from anticipatory towards response­ based logistic81. Smaller units of goods are considered at shorter periods for planning, implementing and controlling the material flow. From Icf. the Council of Logistics Management (1995).

This text reflects the need for preserving the marriage between operations research and computing in order to create more efficient and powerful software tools in the years ahead. The 17 papers included in this volume were carefully selected to cover a wide range of topics related to the interface between operations research and computer science. The volume includes the now perennial applications of metaheuristics (such as genetic algorithms, scatter search and tabu search) as well as research on global optimization, knowledge management, software maintainability and object-oriented modelling. These topics reflect the complexity and variety of the problems that current and future software tools must be capable of tackling. The OR/CS interface is frequently at the core of successful applications and the development of new methodologies, making the research in this book a relevant reference, in the future. The editors' goal for this book has been to increase the interest in the interface of computer science and operations research. Both researchers and practitioners should find this book useful.The tutorial papers may spark the interest of practitioners for developing and applying new techniques to complex problems. In addition, the book includes papers that explore new angles of well-established methods for problems in the area pf nonlinear optimization and mixed integer programming, which researchers in these fields may find interesting.

Linguistic Geometry: From Search to Construction is the first book of its kind. Linguistic Geometry (LG) is an approach to the construction of mathematical models for large-scale multi-agent systems. A number of such systems, including air/space combat, robotic manufacturing, software re-engineering and Internet cyberwar, can be modeled as abstract board games. These are games with moves that can be represented by the movement of abstract pieces over locations on an abstract board. The purpose of LG is to provide strategies to guide the games' participants to their goals. Traditionally, discovering such strategies required searches in giant game trees. These searches are often beyond the capacity of modern and even conceivable future computers. LG dramatically reduces the size of the search trees, making the problems computationally tractable. LG provides a formalization and abstraction of search heuristics used by advanced experts including chess grandmasters. Essentially, these heuristics replace search with the construction of strategies. To formalize the heuristics, LG employs the theory of formal languages (i.e. formal linguistics), as well as certain geometric structures over an abstract board. The new formal strategies solve problems from different domains far beyond the areas envisioned by the experts. For a number of these domains, Linguistic Geometry yields optimal solutions.

Computer Science and Operations Research continue to have a synergistic relationship and this book - as a part of the Operations Research and Computer Science Interface Series - sits squarely in the center of the confluence of these two technical research communities. The research presented in the volume is evidence of the expanding frontiers of these two intersecting disciplines and provides researchers and practitioners with new work in the areas of logic programming, stochastic optimization, heuristic search and post-solution analysis for integer programs. The chapter topics span the spectrum of application level. Some of the chapters are highly applied and others represent work in which the application potential is only beginning. In addition, each chapter contains expository material and reviews of the literature designed to enhance the participation of the reader in this expanding interface.

Project management has become a widespread instrument enabling organizations to efficiently master the challenges of steadily shortening product life cycles, global markets and decreasing profit margins. With projects increasing in size and complexity, their planning and control represents one of the most crucial management tasks. This is especially true for scheduling, which is concerned with establishing execution dates for the sub-activities to be performed in order to complete the project. The ability to manage projects where resources must be allocated between concurrent projects or even sub-activities of a single project requires the use of commercial project management software packages. However, the results yielded by the solution procedures included are often rather unsatisfactory. Scheduling of Resource-Constrained Projects develops more efficient procedures, which can easily be integrated into software packages by incorporated programming languages, and thus should be of great interest for practitioners as well as scientists working in the field of project management. The book is divided into two parts. In Part I, the project management process is described and the management tasks to be accomplished during project planning and control are discussed. This allows for identifying the major scheduling problems arising in the planning process, among which the resource-constrained project scheduling problem is the most important. Part II deals with efficient computer-based procedures for the resource-constrained project scheduling problem and its generalized version. Since both problems are NP-hard, the development of such procedures which yield satisfactory solutions in a reasonable amount of computation time is very challenging, and a number of new and very promising approaches are introduced. This includes heuristic procedures based on priority rules and tabu search as well as lower bound methods and branch and bound procedures which can be applied for computing optimal solutions.

Welcome to ANALYZE, designed to provide computer assistance for analyzing linear programs and their solutions. Chapter 1 gives an overview of ANALYZE and how to install it. It also describes how to get started and how to obtain further documentation and help on-line. Chapter 2 reviews the forms of linear programming models and describes the syntax of a model. One of the routine, but important, functions of ANALYZE is to enable convenient access to rows and columns in the matrix by conditional delineation. Chapter 3 illustrates simple queries, like DISPLAY, LIST, and PICTURE. This chapter also introduces the SUBMAT command level to define any submatrix by an arbitrary sequence of additions, deletions and reversals. Syntactic explanations and a schema view are also illustrated. Chapter 4 goes through some elementary exercises to demonstrate computer­ assisted analysis and introduce additional conventions of the ANALYZE language. Besides simple queries, it demonstrates the INTERPRT command, which automates the analysis process and gives English explanations of results. The last 2 exercises are diagnoses of elementary infeasible instances of a particular model. Chapter 5 progresses to some advanced uses of ANALYZE. The first is blocking to obtain macro views of the model and for finding embedded substructures, like a netform. The second is showing rates of substitution described by the basic equations. Then, the use of the REDUCE and BASIS commands are illustrated for a variety of applications, including solution analysis, infeasibility diagnosis, and redundancy detection.

Modeling by Object-Driven Linear Elemental Relations (MODLER) is a computer language for representing linear programming models, completely separate from instances defined by data realizations. It also includes representations of binary variables and logical constraints, which arise naturally in large-scale planning and operational decision support. The basic input to MODLER is a model file, and its basic output is a matrix file that is in a standard (MPS) format for most optimizers and for ANALYZE and RANDMOD. MODLER can also generate a syntax file for ANALYZE to enable automatic translation of activities and constraints into English for intelligent analysis support. The book is accompanied by a DOS version of MODLER on 3.5 inch diskettes and A Laboratory Manual for Teaching Linear Programming is available upon request.