Facility location and scale decision problem with customer preference

This paper addresses the facility location problem that aims to optimize the location and scale of a new facility in consideration of customer restrictions, including customer preference and the minimum number of customers required to open the facility. In a classic covering problem, the customer is assumed to be covered if he/she is located within the critical distance zone around the facility and is otherwise not covered. This problem is caused by customer facility selection, which differs from the classic covering problem in which services are determined only by proximity. This paper proposes a mixed integer programming formulation based on customer restrictions and also develops a heuristic solution procedure using Lagrangian relaxation. The suggested solution procedure is shown to yield acceptable results in a reasonable computation time.     

Facility location in anticipation of future competition

In this paper, we consider locating a new facility in a competitive environment. A future competitor is expected to enter the market and locate his facility at its best site. The best location for one's own facility is to be found such that the market share captured following the competitor's entry is maximized. The problem is complicated because the best location for the competitor depends on the selected location for one's own facility. The problem is formulated using the gravity model for the estimation of market share. Three heuristic solution procedures are proposed. Computational experiments with these heuristics are presented.     

需求与物流网络不确定下的应急救援选址问题

针对应急物流中需求与物流网络的不确定性特征,对应急救援中应急需求和物流网络均不确定条件下的应急配送中心选址问题进行研究,以成本最小化为目标,建立基于集合覆盖的应急救援设施选址的随机规划模型,采用期望值法和随机模拟两种方法处理数学模型中的不确定性。通过算例与仿真研究,获得应急救援下的配送中心选址最优方案。结果表明,相对于传统的期望值方法处理随机参数,随机模拟方法具有较明显优势。     

Facility location dynamics: An overview of classifications and applications

In order to modify the current facility or develop a new facility, the dynamics of facility location problems (FLPs) ought to be taken into account so as to efficiently deal with changing parameters such as market demand, internal and external factors, and populations. Since FLPs have a strategic or long-term essence, the inherited uncertainty of future parameters must be incorporated in relevant models, so these models can be considered applicable and ready to implement. Furthermore, due to largely capital outlaid, location or relocation of facilities is basically considered as a long-term planning. Hence, regarding the way in which relevant criteria will change over time, decision makers not only are concerned about the operability and profitability of facilities for an extended period, but also seek to robust locations fitting well with variable demands. Concerning this fact, a trade-off should be set between benefits brought by facility location changes and costs incurred by possible modifications. This review reports on literature pointing out some aspects and characteristics of the dynamics of FLPs. In fact, this paper aims not only to review most variants of these problems, but also to provide a broad overview of their mathematical formulations as well as case studies that have been studied by the literature. Finally, based on classified research works and available gaps in the literature, some possible research trends will be pointed out.     

Solving satisfiability problems with preferences

Propositional satisfiability (SAT) is a success story in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence: SAT solvers are currently used to solve problems in many different application domains, including planning and formal verification. The main reason for this success is that modern SAT solvers can successfully deal with problems having millions of variables. All these solvers are based on the Davis–Logemann–Loveland procedure (dll). In its original version, dll is a decision procedure, but it can be very easily modified in order to return one or all assignments satisfying the input set of clauses, assuming at least one exists. However, in many cases it is not enough to compute assignments satisfying all the input clauses: Indeed, the returned assignments have also to be “optimal” in some sense, e.g., they have to satisfy as many other constraints—expressed as preferences—as possible. In this paper we start with qualitative preferences on literals, defined as a partially ordered set (poset) of literals. Such a poset induces a poset on total assignments and leads to the definition of optimal model for a formula ψ as a minimal element of the poset on the models of ψ. We show (i) how dll can be extended in order to return one or all optimal models of ψ (once converted in clauses and assuming ψ is satisfiable), and (ii) how the same procedures can be used to compute optimal models wrt a qualitative preference on formulas and/or wrt a quantitative preference on literals or formulas. We implemented our ideas and we tested the resulting system on a variety of very challenging structured benchmarks. The results indicate that our implementation has comparable performances with other state-of-the-art systems, tailored for the specific problems we consider.     

Logic programming with solution preferences

Preference logic programming (PLP) is an extension of logic programming for declaratively specifying problems requiring optimization or comparison and selection among alternative solutions to a query. PLP essentially separates the programming of a problem itself from the criteria specification of its solution selection. In this paper we present a declarative method for specifying preference logic programs. The method introduces a precise formalization for the syntax and semantics of PLP. The syntax of a preference logic program contains two disjoint sets of definite clauses, separating a core program specifying a general computational problem from its preference rules for optimization; the semantics of PLP is given based on the Herbrand model and fixed point theory, where how preferences affects the least Herbrand model of a logic program is interpreted as a sequence of meta-level mapping operations. In addition, we present an operational semantics based on a new resolution strategy and a memoized recursive algorithm for computing strictly stratified logic programs with well-formed preferences, and further show that the operational semantics of such a preference logic program is consistent to its declarative semantics.     

Managing dynamic CSPs with preferences

We present a new framework, managing Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs) with preferences in a dynamic environment. Unlike the existing CSP models managing one form of preferences, ours supports four types, namely: unary and binary constraint preferences, composite preferences and conditional preferences. This offers more expressive power in representing a wide variety of dynamic constraint applications under preferences and where the possible changes are known and available a priori. Conditional preferences allow some preference functions to be added dynamically to the problem, during the resolution process, if a given condition on some variables is true. A composite preference is a higher level of preference among the choices of a composite variable. Composite variables are variables whose possible values are CSP variables. In other words, this allows us to represent disjunctive CSP variables. The preferences are viewed as a set of soft constraints using the fuzzy CSP framework. Solving constraint problems with preferences consists in finding a solution satisfying all the constraints while optimizing the global preference value. This is handled by four variants of the branch and bound algorithm, we propose in this paper, and where constraint propagation is used to improve the time efficiency in practice. In order to evaluate and compare the performance of these four strategies, we conducted an experimental study on randomly generated dynamic CSPs with quantitative preferences. The results are reported and discussed in the paper.     

Group recommendation with noisy subjective preferences

Social choice theory provides a principled framework for the aggregation of individuals' preferences in support of group decision‐making and recommendation. Much of this work, however, either assumes that individuals' subjective preferences (and thus, their votes) are correctly specified by the individuals themselves, or alternatively that the votes of individuals are noisy estimates of some underlying ground truth over rankings of alternatives. We argue that neither model appropriately addresses some of the issues which arise in the context of group‐recommendation domains where individuals have subjective preferences but for some reason (eg, the high cognitive burden, concerns about privacy, etc.) may instead vote using a noisy estimate of their subjective preference rankings. In this paper, we propose a general probabilistic framework for modeling noisy subjective preferences, and explore the accuracy and reliability of four well‐studied voting rules under various noise models. Our results demonstrate that there is no single reliable method amongst the examined methods. Specifically, we observe the change in noise distribution can flip one method from being the most reliable to the least.     

Logic modeling with partially ordered preferences

Logic modeling is the use of formal logic as a modeling tool for problems of interest to management science. Based on a review of the logic of preference literature this paper presents five axioms for reasoning about a decision maker's preferences. A semantics of situations is adopted for the symbols used. Both logical deduction and a modification of dynamic programming are proposed for the problem of selecting preferred states of affairs over time. Finally, a sketch of an implementation in Prolog is presented.     

Efficient location area planning for cellular networks with hierarchical location databases

Location area planning (LAP) is an important issue in the design of high-performance PCS networks. It could have a serious impact on the total mobility management cost of mobile terminals. Most of the previous works either explored the LAP problem as a 0–1 linear programming problem or used adopted techniques, such as simulated annealing, taboo search, and genetic algorithms [IEEE Trans. Vehicular Technol. 49 (2000) 1678; Proceedings of 1999 Vehicular Technology Conference, vol. 4, 1999, pp. 2119–2123; IEEE Vehicular Technol. Conf. 3 (1996) 1835; Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM'01, Anchorage, Alaska, April 2001; IEEE Trans. Vehicular Technol. 47 (1998) 987], to derive a solution to minimize the location update cost. In this paper, we model and resolve the LAP problem as a set-covering problem. The main advantage of this approach is that it can adapt to the changing mobility patterns of the mobile terminals. We propose the set-covering-based location area planning (SCBLP) algorithm to minimize the total number of location updates, in which the cost-benefit functions are defined based on the coupling and cohesive functions among neighboring cells. We then apply SCBLP to the location database system with a hierarchical structure to further improve the overall system performance in searching and updating the location databases. Extensive simulation experiments have been conducted, and the experimental results show that our proposed algorithms can significantly reduce the location management costs, compared to the greedy algorithm and the random algorithm.     

Kinetic Facility Location

We present a deterministic kinetic data structure for the facility location problem that maintains a subset of the moving points as facilities such that, at any point of time, the accumulated cost for the whole point set is at most a constant factor larger than the optimal cost. In our scenario, each point can change its status between client and facility and moves continuously along a known trajectory in a d-dimensional Euclidean space, where d is a constant.     

群体偏好增强的混合群推荐方法

为减少评分数据稀疏性造成的群推荐精度损失,借助用户生成的项目属性特征,提出一种增强群体偏好的混合群推荐方法。一方面,针对用户-项目评分信息,采用协同过滤手段产生群推荐项目候选子集。另一方面,利用群体生成的项目属性分布特征,挖掘群体对项目属性的偏好,并以项目属性权重的方式融入到项目相似性计算中。通过聚类,产生反映群体偏好的项目集,将群体喜好的集合扩充到用于推荐的项目候选集中,实现群推荐项目候选集中群体偏好的增强。最后,从项目候选集中生成群推荐结果。将该方法应用大众点评网上餐厅的推荐,验证了项目属性特征对群推荐结果的积极影响。实验结果表明该方法在准确率和召回率上较经典群推荐方法都有大幅度提高。     

Sequential decision making with partially ordered preferences

This paper presents new insights and novel algorithms for strategy selection in sequential decision making with partially ordered preferences; that is, where some strategies may be incomparable with respect to expected utility. We assume that incomparability amongst strategies is caused by indeterminacy/imprecision in probability values. We investigate six criteria for consequentialist strategy selection: Γ-Maximin, Γ-Maximax, Γ-Maximix, Interval Dominance, Maximality and E-admissibility. We focus on the popular decision tree and influence diagram representations. Algorithms resort to linear/multilinear programming; we describe implementation and experiments.     

Identifying user preferences with Wrapper-based Decision Trees

Wrapper feature selection approaches are widely used to choose a small subset of relevant features from a dataset. However, Wrappers suffer from the fact that they only use a single classifier. The downside to this is that each classifier will have its own biases and will therefore select very different features. To overcome the biases of individual classifiers, we propose a new data mining method called Wrapper-based Decision Trees (WDT). The WDT method uses multiple classifiers for selecting relevant features and decision trees to visualize relationships among the selected features. We use the WDT to investigate the influences of the levels of computer experience on users’ preferences for the design of search engines. The benefit of using WDT lies within the fact that it can uncover the most accurate set of relevant features to help differentiate the preferences of users with diverse levels of computer experience. The results indicate that the users with varied levels of computer experiences have different preferences regarding the following features: the number of icons, the arrangement of search results, and the presentation of error messages. Such findings can be used to develop personalized search engines to accommodate users’ different levels of computer experience.     

Optimizing railway crew schedules with fairness preferences

Railway crew scheduling deals with generating duties for train drivers to cover all train movements of a given timetable while taking into account a set of work regulations. The objective is to minimize the overall costs associated with a crew schedule, which includes workforce costs and hotel costs. A cost minimal schedule often contains duties that are unpopular to train drivers, and these unpopular duties are often unevenly distributed among crew depots. At the company that motivated our research, for example, train drivers dislike duties that start in the early morning hours. Currently, some crew depots operate large numbers of these unpopular duties, while others do not have any unpopular duties at all. The train drivers perceive this situation as unfair. They prefer schedules with fewer and more evenly distributed unpopular duties across crew depots. In this paper, we define and measure unpopularity and (un)fairness in a railway crew scheduling context. We integrate fairness conditions into a column generation-based solution algorithm and analyze the effect of increased fairness on cost. We also show how increased fairness affects the unpopularity of a schedule. Our method has been applied to test instances at a large European railway freight carrier. Compared to a standard approach that penalizes only the number of unpopular duties in a schedule, we were able to significantly improve schedule fairness with only marginal increases in schedule cost.     

Facility Layout Program

The Facility Layout (FACLO) program is an interactive micro-computer program based on the Computerized Relative Allocation of Facilities Technique (CRAFT). The program uses heuristics to determine the best relative location of areas and obtain a high level layout. A user interface creates the data file required to run the program, eliminating the need for intimate knowledge of program and database structure. The program is written in Turbo Pascal and provides print, plot, and screen output.     

Probabilistic planning with clear preferences on missing information

For many real-world problems, environments at the time of planning are only partially-known. For example, robots often have to navigate partially-known terrains, planes often have to be scheduled under changing weather conditions, and car route-finders often have to figure out paths with only partial knowledge of traffic congestions. While general decision-theoretic planning that takes into account the uncertainty about the environment is hard to scale to large problems, many such problems exhibit a special property: one can clearly identify beforehand the best (called clearly preferred) values for the variables that represent the unknowns in the environment. For example, in the robot navigation problem, it is always preferred to find out that an initially unknown location is traversable rather than not, in the plane scheduling problem, it is always preferred for the weather to remain a good flying weather, and in route-finding problem, it is always preferred for the road of interest to be clear of traffic. It turns out that the existence of the clear preferences can be used to construct an efficient planner, called PPCP (Probabilistic Planning with Clear Preferences), that solves these planning problems by running a series of deterministic low-dimensional A*-like searches.In this paper, we formally define the notion of clear preferences on missing information, present the PPCP algorithm together with its extensive theoretical analysis, describe several useful extensions and optimizations of the algorithm and demonstrate the usefulness of PPCP on several applications in robotics. The theoretical analysis shows that once converged, the plan returned by PPCP is guaranteed to be optimal under certain conditions. The experimental analysis shows that running a series of fast low-dimensional searches turns out to be much faster than solving the full problem at once since memory requirements are much lower and deterministic searches are orders of magnitude faster than probabilistic planning.     

Flexible integration of multimedia sub-queries with qualitative preferences

Complex multimedia queries, aiming to retrieve from large databases those objects that best match the query specification, are usually processed by splitting them into a set of m simpler sub-queries, each dealing with only some of the query features. To determine which are the overall best-matching objects, a rule is then needed to integrate the results of such sub-queries, i.e., how to globally rank the m-dimensional vectors of matching degrees, or partial scores, that objects obtain on the m sub-queries. It is a fact that state-of-the-art approaches all adopt as integration rule a scoring function, such as weighted average, that aggregates the m partial scores into an overall (numerical) similarity score, so that objects can be linearly ordered and only the highest scored ones returned to the user. This choice however forces the system to compromise between the different sub-queries and can easily lead to miss relevant results. In this paper we explore the potentialities of a more general approach, based on the use of qualitative preferences, able to define arbitrary partial (rather than only linear) orders on database objects, so that a larger flexibility is gained in shaping what the user is looking for. For the purpose of efficient evaluation, we propose two integration algorithms able to work with any (monotone) partial order (thus also with scoring functions): MPO, which delivers objects one layer of the partial order at a time, and iMPO, which can incrementally return one object at a time, thus also suitable for processing top k queries. Our analysis demonstrates that using qualitative preferences pays off. In particular, using Skyline and Region-prioritized Skyline preferences for queries on a real image database, we show that the results we get have a precision comparable to that obtainable using scoring functions, yet they are obtained much faster, saving up to about 70% database accesses.