Much entrepreneurial growth in the United States today emanates from technological advances that optimize through contextualization. Innovations as varied as Airbnb and Uber, fintech firms and precision medicine, are transforming major sectors in the economy by customizing goods and services as...

We apply duality methods of linear and convex programming to the problems of operation and rental valuation of facilities for conversion and storage of cyclically priced goods, e.g. , energy. Both problems are approached by shadow-pricing the stock (which is a purely intermediate commodity); and...

Duality methods of linear and convex programming are applied to impute definite marginal values to the fixed inputs of a hydroelectric plant from the operating profit. Our earlier analysis of pumped storage (of energy and other cyclically priced goods) is thus extended to valuation of an...

We study the problem of determining memberships to the groups in a Boolean algebra. The Boolean algebra is composed of basic groups (e.g., “J” and “K”) and the other groups that are derived from basic groups through the conjunction, disjunction, or negation operations (e.g., “J and...

A weighted game or a threshold function in general admits different weighted representations even if the sum of non-negative weights is fixed to one. Here we study bounds for the diameter of the corresponding weight polytope. It turns out that the diameter can be upper bounded in terms of the...

This paper proposes a novel method of global optimization based on cuckoo-host co-evaluation. It also develops a Fortran-77 code for the algorithm. The algorithm has been tested on 96 benchmark functions (of which the results of 30 relatively harder problems have been reported). The proposed...

This paper considers the dynamic lot sizing problem of H. M. Wagner and T. M. Whitin with the assumption that the total cost of n setups is a concave nondecreasing function of n. Such setup costs could arise from the worker learning in setups and/or technological improvements in setup methods....

The set covering problem is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem that arises in applications ranging from crew scheduling in airlines to driver scheduling in public mass transport. In this paper we analyze search space characteristics of a widely used set of benchmark instances through...