Integrated Methods for Optimization: Edition 2
About this ebook
The book provides a unique resource for graduate students and practitioners who want a well-rounded background in optimization methods within a single course of study. Engineering students are a particularly large potential audience, because engineering optimization problems often benefit from a combined approach—particularly where design, scheduling, or logistics are involved. The text is also of value to those studying operations research, because their educational programs rarely cover CP, and to those studying computer science and artificial intelligence (AI), because their curricula typically omit MP and GO. The text is also useful for practitioners in any of these areas who want to learn about another, because it provides a more concise and accessible treatment than other texts.
The book can cover so wide a range of material because it focuses on ideas that arerelevant to the methods used in general-purpose optimization and constraint solvers. The book focuses on ideas behind the methods that have proved useful in general-purpose optimization and constraint solvers, as well as integrated solvers of the present and foreseeable future. The second edition updates results in this area and includes several major new topics:
- Background material in linear, nonlinear, and dynamic programming.
- Network flow theory, due to its importance in filtering algorithms.
- A chapter on generalized duality theory that more explicitly develops a unifying primal-dual algorithmic structure for optimization methods.
- An extensive survey of search methods from both MP and AI, using the primal-dual framework as an organizing principle.
- Coverage of several additional global constraints used in CP solvers.
The book continues to focus on exact as opposed to heuristic methods. It is possible to bring heuristic methods into the unifying scheme described in the book, and the new edition will retain the brief discussion of how this might be done.
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About the author
John Hooker is T. Jerome Holleran Professor of Business Ethics and Social Responsibility, and Professor of Operations Research, at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also part-time Visiting Professor at London School of Economics, 2009-2011. He holds doctoral degrees in philosophy and management science. His research interests include operations research, business ethics, and cross-cultural issues. He teaches courses in these fields at the undergraduate, postgraduate, and executive levels, and he has published over 130 articles and seven books. He is founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Business Ethics Education and an area editor for INFORMS Journal on Computing. He is founding director of the Center for International Corporate Responsibility at Carnegie Mellon. He was recently named an INFORMS Fellow for outstanding contributions to operations research and the management sciences. His recent book Integrated Methods for Optimization reflects his primary research interests in operations research. He developed the ethics curriculum, including course materials, used in CMU’s Tepper School of Business, and he has co-organized four conferences on international corporate responsibility. His book Working across Cultures is used as a text in cross-cultural business courses at several universities. He has lived and worked in Australia, China, Denmark, India, Qatar, Turkey, the United States, and Zimbabwe, and has extensive experie
nce in Germany, Mexico, and the United Kingdom. He has led professional workshops in several countries. He was head of Carnegie Mellon's undergraduate Business Administration Program 1996-2001. He reorganized the program, led the design of its curriculum, and received a distinguished service award from the Tepper School for his contributions. In 2009 he received an Award for Sustained Teaching Excellence in the program.
