Ant Colony Optimization is a relatively new meta-heuristic that has proven its quality and versatility on various combinatorial optimization problems such as the traveling salesman problem, the vehicle routing problem and the job shop scheduling problem.(...)

In this paper we analyze the evolution of output decisions of adaptive firms in an environment of oligopolistic competition. The firm might either choose to produce one of several existing product variants or try to establish a new product variant on the market....

The Ant System is a new meta-heuristic method particularly appropriate to solve hard combinatorial optimization problems. It is a population-based, nature-inspired approach exploiting positive feedback as well as local information and has been applied successfully to a variety of combinatorial...

In this paper we propose a hybrid approach for solving vehicle routing problems. The main idea is to combine an Ant System (AS) with a problem specific constructive heuristic, namely the well known Savings algorithm. This differs from previous approaches, where the subordinate heuristic was the...

We introduce a very simple but efficient idea for branch & bound (B&B) algorithms in global optimization (GO). As input for our generic algorithm, we need an upper bound algorithm for the GO maximization problem and a branching rule....

Following [10] we continue the study of the problem of expected utility maximization in incomplete markets. Our goal is to find minimal conditions on a model and a utility function for the validity of several key assertions of the theory to hold true....

This paper presents first results from research into open source projects from a software engineering perspective. The research methodology employed relies on public data retrieved from the CVS-repository of the GNOME project and relevant discussion groups.(...)

Okun's Law postulates an inverse relationship between movements of the unemployment rate and the real gross domestic product (GDP). Empirical estimates for US data indicate that a two to three percent GDP growth rate above the natural or average GDP growth rate causes unemployment to decrease by...

In this paper we investigate the potential of the analysis of noisy non-stationary time series by quantizing it into streams of discrete symbols and applying finite-memory symbolic predictors. The main argument is that careful quantization can reduce the noise in the time series to make model...

In this paper we propose an unsupervised voting-merging scheme that is capable of clustering data sets, and also of finding the number of clusters existing in them. The voting part of the algorithm allows us to combine several runs of clustering algorithms resulting in a common partition.(...)