The application of stochastic heuristic, like tabu search or simulated annealing, to address hard discrete optimization problems has been an important advance for efficiently obtaining good solutions in a reasonable amount of computing time. A challenge when applying such heuristics is assessing...

An effective emergency medical service (EMS) response to emergency medical calls during extreme weather events is a critical public service. Nearly all models for allocating EMS resources focus on normal operating conditions. However, public health risks become even more critical during extreme...

To mitigate the threat of nuclear terrorism within the US using nuclear material that has been smuggled into the country, the US Bureau of Customs and Border Protection has expanded its cargo container detection capabilities at ports of entry into the US This paper formulates a risk-based...

This paper focuses on detecting nuclear weapons on cargo containers using port security screening methods, where the nuclear weapons would presumably be used to attack a target within the United States. This paper provides a linear programming model that simultaneously identifies optimal primary...

Steady-state simulation runs typically contain an initial transient phase that biases output performance measure estimators, unless the simulation observations at the beginning of the simulation runs are discarded. It is useful to understand the effect of this initial transient on output...

The National Collegiate Athletic Association׳s (NCAA) men׳s Division I college basketball tournament is an annual competition that draws widespread attention in the United States. Predicting the winner of each game is a popular activity undertaken by numerous websites, fans, and more recently,...

The simple assembly line balancing problem (SALBP) is a well-studied NP-complete problem for which a new problem database of generated instances was published in 2013. This paper describes the application of a branch, bound, and remember (BB&R) algorithm using the cyclic best-first search...

As of November 2008, the number of cell phone subscribers in the US exceeded 267 million, nearly three times more than the 97 million subscribers in June 2000. This rapid growth in cell phone use has led to concerns regarding their impact on driver performance and road safety. Numerous...