Location, scheduling, design and integer programming (Q1352556)

Location, scheduling and design problems are assignment type problems with quadratic cost functions. The area of their applications is stretching from spatial economics via plant and office layout planning to VLSI design problems in high-technology production settings. The presence of nonlinear interaction terms in the objective function makes these, otherwise simple, problems NP hard. The monograph provides first a survey of models of this type and gives a common framework for them as Boolean quadratic problems with special ordered sets (BQPSs). This survey is followed by a review of traditional solution approaches to BQPSs. In the main part of the book, the authors follow the polyhedral approach to combinatorial problem solving because of acknowledged algorithmic advantages of this approach. The book includes Fortran programs for small symmetric quadratic assignment problems.