This paper deals with large-scale crew scheduling problems arising at the Dutch railway operator, Netherlands Railways (NS). NS operates about 30,000 trains a week. All these trains need a driver and a certain number of conductors. No available crew scheduling algorithm can solve such huge...

In this paper we propose and analyze a variant of the level method [4], which is an algorithm for minimizing nonsmooth convex functions. The main work per iteration is spent on 1) minimizing a piecewise-linear model of the objective function and on 2) projecting onto the intersection of the...

The sales force deployment problem arises in many selling organizations. This complex planning problem involves the concurrent resolution of four interrelated subproblems: sizing of the sales force, sales representatives locations, sales territory alignment, and sales resource allocation. The...

Minimizing two different upper bounds of the matrix which generates search directions of the nonlinear conjugate gradient method proposed by Dai and Liao, two modified conjugate gradient methods are proposed. Under proper conditions, it is briefly shown that the methods are globally convergent...

In this paper we study the problem of designing a survivable telecommunication network with shared-protection routing. We develop a heuristic algorithm to solve this problem. Recent results in the area of global re-routing have been used to obtain very tight lower bounds for the problem. Our...