Re-entrant lines

Traditionally, manufacturing systems have mainly been treated as either job shops or flow shops. In job shops, parts may arrive with random routes, with each route having a low volume. In flow shops, the routes are fixed and acyclic, as in assembly lines. With the advent of semiconductor manufacturing plants, and more recently, thin film lines, this dichotomy needs to be expanded to consider another class of systems, which we call re-entrant lines. The distinguishing feature of these manufacturing systems is that parts visit some machines more than once at different stages of processing.Scheduling problems arise because several parts at different stages of processing may be in contention with each other for service at the same machine. There may be uncertainties in the form of random service or set-up times, as well as random machine failures and repairs. The goal of scheduling is to improve performance measures such as mean sojourn time in the system, which is also known as the mean cycle-time, or the variance of the cycle-time.In this paper we provide a tutorial account of some recent results in this field. We describe several scheduling policies of interest, and provide some results concerning their stability and performance. Several open problems are suggested.The research reported here has been partially supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. ECS-90-25007, and the Joint Services Electronics Program under Contract No. N00014-84-C-0149.  

Profit, Directional Distance Functions, and Nerlovian Efficiency

The directional technology distance function is introduced, given an interpretation as a min-max, and compared with other functional representations of the technology including the Shephard input and output distance functions and the McFadden gauge function. A dual correspondence is developed between the directional technology distance function and the profit function, and it is shown that all previous dual correspondences are special cases of this correspondence. We then show how Nerlovian (profit-based) efficiency measures can be computed using the directional technology distance function.  

Koszul Duality Patterns in Representation Theory

The aim of this paper is to work out a concrete example as well as to provide the general pattern of applications of Koszul duality to representation theory. The paper consists of three parts relatively independent of each other. The first part gives a reasonably selfcontained introduction to Koszul rings and Koszul duality. Koszul rings are certain -graded rings with particularly nice homological properties which involve a kind of duality. Thus, to a Koszul ring one associates naturally the dual Koszul ring. The second part is devoted to an application to representation theory of semisimple Lie algebras. We show that the block of the Bernstein-Gelfand-Gelfand category that corresponds to any fixed central character is governed by the Koszul ring. Moreover, the dual of that ring governs a certain subcategory of the category again. This generalizes the selfduality theorem conjectured by Beilinson and Ginsburg in 1986 and proved by Soergel in 1990. In the third part we study certain categories of mixed perverse sheaves on a variety stratified by affine linear spaces. We provide a general criterion for such a category to be governed by a Koszul ring. In the flag variety case this reduces to the setup of part two. In the more general case of affine flag manifolds and affine Grassmannians the criterion should yield interesting results about representations of quantum groups and affine Lie algebras.

  

Sensitivity analysis for variational inequalities

Sensitivity analysis results for variational inequalities are presented which give conditions for existence and equations for calculating the derivatives of solution variables with respect to perturbation parameters. The perturbations are of both the variational inequality function and the feasible region. Results for the special case of nonlinear complementarity are also presented. A numerical example demonstrates the results for variational inequalities.The author is indebted to A. V. Fiacco for many valuable suggestions and comments. This work was supported in part by funding from the Economic Regulatory Administration, US Department of Energy, under Contract No. W31109ENG38.  

A note on spherical summation multipliers

We give a new proof of a theorem of L. Carleson and P. Sj?lin onL ^p -boundedness of spherical summation operators in two variables.  

A Survey of Optimization by Building and Using Probabilistic Models

This paper summarizes the research on population-based probabilistic search algorithms based on modeling promising solutions by estimating their probability distribution and using the constructed model to guide the exploration of the search space. It settles the algorithms in the field of genetic and evolutionary computation where they have been originated, and classifies them into a few classes according to the complexity of models they use. Algorithms within each class are briefly described and their strengths and weaknesses are discussed.  

Solving large quadratic assignment problems on computational grids

The quadratic assignment problem (QAP) is among the hardest combinatorial optimization problems. Some instances of size n = 30 have remained unsolved for decades. The solution of these problems requires both improvements in mathematical programming algorithms and the utilization of powerful computational platforms. In this article we describe a novel approach to solve QAPs using a state-of-the-art branch-and-bound algorithm running on a federation of geographically distributed resources known as a computational grid. Solution of QAPs of unprecedented complexity, including the nug30, kra30b, and tho30 instances, is reported. Received: September 29, 2000 / Accepted: June 5, 2001?Published online October 2, 2001