Robust routing and optimal partitioning of a traffic demand polytope

In this paper we consider the problem of optimal partitioning of a traffic demand polytope using a hyperplane. In our model all possible demand matrices belong to a polytope. The polytope can be divided into parts, and different routing schemes can be applied while dealing with traffic matrices from different parts of the polytope. We consider three basic models: Robust‐Routing, No‐Sharing and Dynamic‐Routing. We apply two different partitioning strategies depending on whether the reservation vectors on opposite sides of the hyperplane are required to be identical, or allowed to differ. We provide efficient algorithms that solve these problems. Moreover, we prove polynomiality of some of the considered cases. Finally, we present numerical results proving the applicability of the introduced algorithms and showing differences between the routing strategies.     

The Quantum Setting with Randomized Queries for Continuous Problems

The standard setting of quantum computation for continuous problems uses deterministic queries and the only source of randomness for quantum algorithms is through measurement. Without loss of generality we may consider quantum algorithms which use only one measurement. This setting is related to the worst case setting on a classical computer in the sense that the number of qubits needed to solve a continuous problem must be at least equal to the logarithm of the worst case information complexity of this problem. Since the number of qubits must be finite, we cannot solve continuous problems on a quantum computer with infinite worst case information complexity. This can even happen for continuous problems with small randomized complexity on a classical computer. A simple example is integration of bounded continuous functions. To overcome this bad property that limits the power of quantum computation for continuous problems, we study the quantum setting in which randomized queries are allowed. This type of query is used in Shor’s algorithm. The quantum setting with randomized queries is related to the randomized classical setting in the sense that the number of qubits needed to solve a continuous problem must be at least equal to the logarithm of the randomized information complexity of this problem. Hence, there is also a limit to the power of the quantum setting with randomized queries since we cannot solve continuous problems with infinite randomized information complexity. An example is approximation of bounded continuous functions. We study the quantum setting with randomized queries for a number of problems in terms of the query and qubit complexities defined as the minimal number of queries/qubits needed to solve the problem to within ɛ by a quantum algorithm. We prove that for path integration we have an exponential improvement for the qubit complexity over the quantum setting with deterministic queries.     

On Exact Solutions for the Rectilinear Steiner Tree Problem Part I: Theoretical Results

The rectilinear Steiner tree problem asks for a shortest tree connecting given points in the plane with rectilinear distance. The best theoretically analyzed algorithms for this problem are based on dynamic programming and have a running time of O(n ² . . . 2.62 ⁿ ) (Ganley and Cohoon), resp. (Smith). The first algorithm can solve problems of size 27, the second one is highly impractical because of the large constant in the exponent. The best implementations perform poorly even on small problem instances; the best practical results can be reached using a Branch \& Bound approach (Salowe and Warme); this implementation can solve random problems of size 35 within a day, while the dynamic programming approach of Ganley and Cohoon can handle only 27 point examples. In this paper we improve the theoretical worst-case time bound to O(n ² . . . 2.38 ⁿ ) , for random problem instances we prove a running time of α ⁿ with a constant α < 2 . We have implemented our algorithms and can now solve problems of 40 points in a day using a provably good dynamic programming approach, and can solve problems of 55 points with a Branch \& Bound strategy. For exponential-time algorithms, this is an enormous improvement. Received April 2, 1997; revised January 5, 1998.     

Minimum cost service composition in service overlay networks

In service computing, it is often desirable to find the service composition solution for a given service composition request such that the total cost of the service composition solution is minimized. In this paper, we study the problem of finding the minimum cost service composition (MCSC) for a general service composition request which is represented by a directed acyclic graph (DAG). We first prove that the general case of the MCSC problem is NP-Hard. We then show that optimal solutions can be found in polynomial time for some special structured service composition requests. To this end, we derive a sufficient condition on the service composition request graph and propose corresponding algorithms to find the optimal solutions in polynomial time. Using such algorithms as building blocks, we propose heuristic algorithms to decompose the general service composition request graph into service composition request subgraphs with optimal structures. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed heuristic algorithms.     

The problem of upload competition in peer‐to‐peer systems with incentive mechanisms

As peer‐to‐peer (P2P) file‐sharing systems revolve around cooperation, the design of upload incentives has been one of the most important topics in P2P research for more than a decade. Several deployed systems, such as private BitTorrent communities, successfully manage to foster cooperation by banning peers when their sharing ratio becomes too low. Interestingly, recent measurements have shown that such systems tend to have an oversupply instead of an undersupply of bandwidth designers that have been obsessed with since the dawn of P2P. In such systems, the ‘selfish peer’ problem is finally solved, but a new problem has arisen: because peers have to keep up their sharing ratios, they now have to compete to upload. In this paper, we explore this new problem and show how even highly cooperative peers might in the end not survive the upload competition. On the basis of recent measurements of over half a million peers in private P2P communities, we propose and analyze several algorithms for uploader selection under oversupply. Our algorithms enable sustained sharing ratio enforcement and are easy to implement in both existing and new systems. Overall, we offer an important design consideration for the new generation of P2P systems in which selfishness is no longer an issue. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Completion time variance minimization in single machine and multi-machine systems

In this paper we consider the problem of minimizing the completion time variance of n jobs on a single machine with deterministic processing times. We propose a new heuristic and compare the results with existing popular heuristics for the problem. We also propose a method based on genetic algorithms to solve the problem. We present the worst case performance analysis of the proposed heuristic. We also consider the problem of minimizing the completion time variance of n jobs on m identical parallel machines in both restricted and unrestricted versions. A heuristic method and a method based on genetic algorithms are presented for both the cases and results of computational testing are provided. It is concluded that the proposed methods provide better results compared to existing methods for the single machine case as well as for the multi-machine case.     

时间依赖的网络中最小时间路径算法

时间依赖的网络与传统网络模型相比更具有现实意义，具有广泛的应用领域，交通网络和通信网络可以抽象为时间依赖的网络模型，当模型中弧的工度是时间依赖的变量，最短路径问题的求解变得非常困难，早期的研究者通过具体的网络实例认识到传统最短路径算法在这种情况下是不正确的，因此给出限制性条件使得传统最短路径算法是有效的。该文从最短路径算法的理论基础入手，从理论上证明了传统最短路径算法，如Dijkstra算法和标号设置算法，在时间依赖的网络上不能有效地求解最短路径问题，并且，在没有任何限制性条件下，给出了时间依赖的网络模型，理论基础，求解最小时间路径的优化条件和SPTDN算法，从理论上证明了SPTDN算法的正确性，算法的实验结果是正确的，最后给出了时间依赖的网络应用实例。     

Iterative algorithms for the linear complementarity problem

Direct complementary pivot algorithms for the linear complementarity problem with P-matrices are known to have exponential computational complexity. The analog of Gauss-Seidel and SOR iteration for linear complementarity problems with P-matrices has not been extensively developed. This paper extends some work of van Bokhoven to a class of nonsymmetric P-matrices, and develops and compares several new iterative algorithms for the linear complementarity problem. Numerical results for several hundred test problems are presented. Such indirect iterative algorithms may prove useful for large sparse complementarity problems.     

多值传播的相容性技术

相容性技术是求解约束满足问题的重要手段. 本文针对目前已有相容性算法的单值传播特点, 提出多值传播理论, 证明出k次单值传播与一次多值传播的等价性, 在此基础上, 给出多值传播的弧相容定理. 将该定理与目前流行的Singleton弧相容技术结合, 得到多值传播算法SAC-MP, 并证明其完备性和正确性. 通过对随机问题、N皇后、鸽巢问题及基准用例的测试表明, 算法SAC-MP的执行效率是已有算法SAC-SDS和SAC-3的2～3倍.     

The complexity of agent design problems: Determinism and history dependence

The agent design problem is as follows: given a specification of an environment, together with a specification of a task, is it possible to construct an agent that can be guaranteed to successfully accomplish the task in the environment? In this article, we study the computational complexity of the agent design problem for tasks that are of the form “achieve this state of affairs” or “maintain this state of affairs.” We consider three general formulations of these problems (in both non-deterministic and deterministic environments) that differ in the nature of what is viewed as an “acceptable” solution: in the least restrictive formulation, no limit is placed on the number of actions an agent is allowed to perform in attempting to meet the requirements of its specified task. We show that the resulting decision problems are intractable, in the sense that these are non-recursive (but recursively enumerable) for achievement tasks, and non-recursively enumerable for maintenance tasks. In the second formulation, the decision problem addresses the existence of agents that have satisfied their specified task within some given number of actions. Even in this more restrictive setting the resulting decision problems are either pspace-complete or np-complete. Our final formulation requires the environment to be history independent and bounded. In these cases polynomial time algorithms exist: for deterministic environments the decision problems are nl-complete; in non-deterministic environments, p-complete.     

Computing Minimum Cuts by Randomized Search Heuristics

We study the minimum s-t-cut problem in graphs with costs on the edges in the context of evolutionary algorithms. Minimum cut problems belong to the class of basic network optimization problems that occur as crucial subproblems in many real-world optimization problems and have a variety of applications in several different areas. We prove that there exist instances of the minimum s-t-cut problem that cannot be solved by standard single-objective evolutionary algorithms in reasonable time. On the other hand, we develop a bi-criteria approach based on the famous maximum-flow minimum-cut theorem that enables evolutionary algorithms to find an optimal solution in expected polynomial time.     

A new static output feedback approach to the suboptimal mixed H2/H∞ problem

In this paper we propose a new approach to solve the static output feedback suboptimal mixed H₂/H_∞ control problem using a state fixed‐structure feedback design. We formulate the static output feedback problem as a constrained static state feedback problem and obtain three coupled design equations: one Riccati equation, one Lyapunov equation, and a gain equation. We will prove the equivalence of the proposed solution to the existing solution. A very simple iterative algorithm is then presented to solve the design equations for the stabilizing output feedback gain that minimizes an upper bound of H₂ norm while satisfying the H_∞ disturbance attenuation requirement. A unique feature of the new approach is that it admits the Kalman gain as an initial stabilizing gain to start the above iterative solution procedure, which is computationally attractive and advantageous compared to the direct approach, as the latter has to deal with the difficult algorithm initialization problem. Some illustrative numerical examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An Algorithm for Clustering Using L1‐Norm Based on Hyperbolic Smoothing Technique

Cluster analysis deals with the problem of organization of a collection of objects into clusters based on a similarity measure, which can be defined using various distance functions. The use of different similarity measures allows one to find different cluster structures in a data set. In this article, an algorithm is developed to solve clustering problems where the similarity measure is defined using the L₁‐norm. The algorithm is designed using the nonsmooth optimization approach to the clustering problem. Smoothing techniques are applied to smooth both the clustering function and the L₁‐norm. The algorithm computes clusters sequentially and finds global or near global solutions to the clustering problem. Results of numerical experiments using 12 real‐world data sets are reported, and the proposed algorithm is compared with two other clustering algorithms.     

Customer satisfaction‐aware scheduling for utility maximization on geo‐distributed data centers

With the increasingly growing amount of service requests from the world‐wide customers, the cloud systems are capable of providing services while meeting the customers' satisfaction. Recently, to achieve the better reliability and performance, the cloud systems have been largely depending on the geographically distributed data centers. Nevertheless, the dollar cost of service placement by service providers (SP) differ from the multiple regions. Accordingly, it is crucial to design a request dispatching and resource allocation algorithm to maximize net profit. The existing algorithms are either built upon energy‐efficient schemes alone, or multi‐type requests and customer satisfaction oblivious. They cannot be applied to multi‐type requests and customer satisfaction‐aware algorithm design with the objective of maximizing net profit. This paper proposes an ant‐colony optimization‐based algorithm for maximizing SP's net profit (AMP) on geographically distributed data centers with the consideration of customer satisfaction. First, using model of customer satisfaction, we formulate the utility (or net profit) maximization issue as an optimization problem under the constraints of customer satisfaction and data centers. Second, we analyze the complexity of the optimal requests dispatchment problem and rigidly prove that it is an NP‐complete problem. Third, to evaluate the proposed algorithm, we have conducted the comprehensive simulation and compared with the other state‐of‐the‐art algorithms. Also, we extend our work to consider the data center's power usage effectiveness. It has been shown that AMP maximizes SP net profit by dispatching service requests to the proper data centers and generating the appropriate amount of virtual machines to meet customer satisfaction. Moreover, we also demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach when it accommodates the impacts of dynamically arrived heavy workload, various evaporation rate and consideration of power usage effectiveness. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

ADAPTIVE RANKS CLONE AND k‐NEAREST NEIGHBOR LIST–BASED IMMUNE MULTI‐OBJECTIVE OPTIMIZATION

Artificial immune systems (AIS) are computational systems inspired by the principles and processes of the vertebrate immune system. The AIS‐based algorithms typically exploit the immune system's characteristics of learning and adaptability to solve some complicated problems. Although, several AIS‐based algorithms have proposed to solve multi‐objective optimization problems (MOPs), little focus have been placed on the issues that adaptively use the online discovered solutions. Here, we proposed an adaptive selection scheme and an adaptive ranks clone scheme by the online discovered solutions in different ranks. Accordingly, the dynamic information of the online antibody population is efficiently exploited, which is beneficial to the search process. Furthermore, it has been widely approved that one‐off deletion could not obtain excellent diversity in the final population; therefore, a k‐nearest neighbor list (where k is the number of objectives) is established and maintained to eliminate the solutions in the archive population. The k‐nearest neighbors of each antibody are founded and stored in a list memory. Once an antibody with minimal product of k‐nearest neighbors is deleted, the neighborhood relations of the remaining antibodies in the list memory are updated. Finally, the proposed algorithm is tested on 10 well‐known and frequently used multi‐objective problems and two many‐objective problems with 4, 6, and 8 objectives. Compared with five other state‐of‐the‐art multi‐objective algorithms, namely NSGA‐II, SPEA2, IBEA, HYPE, and NNIA, our method achieves comparable results in terms of convergence, diversity metrics, and computational time.     

Greedy Algorithm for Set Cover in Context of Knowledge Discovery Problems

In the paper some problems connected with a process of knowledge discovery are considered. These problems are reduced to the set cover problem. It is known that under a plausible assumption on the class N P the greedy algorithm is close to best approximate polynomial algorithms for the set cover problem solving. Unfortunately, the performance ratio of this algorithm grows almost as natural logarithm on the cardinality of covered set. Instead of usual greedy algorithm we consider greedy algorithm with threshold. This algorithm constructs a partial cover, which covers at least a fixed part (for example, 90%) of the set. We prove that the cardinality of constructed partial cover is bounded from above by a linear function on the minimal cardinality of exact cover C_min. In the case of 90% -cover, for example, in the capacity of such function we can take the function 2.31,·,C_min+1. This bound is independent of the cardinality of covered set. Notice that the concept of partial cover in context of knowledge discovery problems is very close to the concept of approximate reduct.     

Data reduction and fast routing: A strategy for efficient algorithms for message-passing parallel computers

This paper presents several algorithms for solving problems using massively parallel SIMD hypercube and shuffle-exchange computers. The algorithms solve a wide variety of problems, but they are related because they all use a common strategy. Specifically, all of the algorithms use a divide-and-conquer approach to solve a problem withN inputs using a parallel computer withP processors. The structural properties of the problem are exploited to assure that fewer thanN data items are communicated during the division and combination steps of the divide-and-conquer algorithm. This reduction in the amount of data that must be communicated is central to the efficiency of the algorithm.This paper addresses four problems, namely the multiple-prefix, data-dependent parallel-prefix, image-component-labeling, and closest-pair problems. The algorithms presented for the data-dependent parallel-prefix and closest-pair problems are the fastest known whenN P and the algorithms for the multiple-prefix and image-component-labeling problems are the fastest known whenN is sufficiently large with respect toP.This work was supported in part by our NSF Graduate Fellowship.     

Iterative solvers for Tikhonov regularization of dense inverse problems

According to the special demands arising from the development of science and technology, in the last decades appeared a special class of problems that are inverse to the classical direct ones. Such an inverse problem is concerned with the opposite way, usually followed by a direct one: finding the cause of a given effect or finding the law of evolution given the cause and effect. Very frequently, such inverse problems are modelled by Fredholm first-kind integral equations that give rise after discretization to (very) ill-conditioned linear systems, in classical or least squares formulation. Then, an efficient numerical solution can be obtained by using the Tikhonov regularization technique. In this respect, in the present paper, we propose three Kovarik-like algorithms for numerical solution of the regularized problem. We prove convergence for all three methods and present numerical experiments on a mathematical model of an inverse problem concerned with the determination of charge distribution generating a given electric field.     

Most Relevant Explanation: computational complexity and approximation methods

Most Relevant Explanation (MRE) is the problem of finding a partial instantiation of a set of target variables that maximizes the generalized Bayes factor as the explanation for given evidence in a Bayesian network. MRE has a huge solution space and is extremely difficult to solve in large Bayesian networks. In this paper, we first prove that MRE is at least NP-hard. We then define a subproblem of MRE called MRE _k that finds the most relevant k-ary explanation and prove that the decision problem of MRE _k is NP^PPNP^{\it PP}-complete. Since MRE needs to find the best solution by MRE _k over all k, and we can also show that MRE is in NP^PPNP^{\it PP}, we conjecture that a decision problem of MRE is NP^PPNP^{\it PP}-complete as well. Furthermore, we show that MRE remains in NP^PPNP^{\it PP} even if we restrict the number of target variables to be within a log factor of the number of all unobserved variables. These complexity results prompt us to develop a suite of approximation algorithms for solving MRE, One algorithm finds an MRE solution by integrating reversible-jump MCMC and simulated annealing in simulating a non-homogeneous Markov chain that eventually concentrates its mass on the mode of a distribution of the GBF scores of all solutions. The other algorithms are all instances of local search methods, including forward search, backward search, and tabu search. We tested these algorithms on a set of benchmark diagnostic Bayesian networks. Our empirical results show that these methods could find optimal MRE solutions for most of the test cases in our experiments efficiently.