Principles of network economics. (Q2569531)

The book provides an introduction to and overview on the area of transport network problems when looked at from an economical viewpoint. Throughout the book the author presents a large number of problems motivated by practical applications in the area of transports including road and railway traffic as well as data communication. All problems are formulated as network optimization problems and stated as mathematical programs (mainly linear programs). The author achieves to demonstrate the flexibility of the network and mathematical programming idioms to model a great variety of different problems and provide a unified approach towards solving them. Following a categorization of the problems along a line of criterias well known in network modeling (flow, cost, capacity, congestion, pricing) the book collects and presents specific properties of the particular problem formulations and their solutions. The range of problems under investigation spans classical static problems such as single and multi commodity flows or cost minimal trip assignments and also includes dynamic and stochastic aspects of network design and scheduling problems in the traffic and railway sector, especially precedence constraints and synchronizing tools. The book does not address particularly algorithmic aspects of the problems under investigation.