Given points in the plane, connect them using minimum ink. Though the task seems simple, it turns out to be very time consuming. In fact, scientists believe that computers cannot efficiently solve it. So, do we have to resign? This book examines such NP-hard network-design problems, from connectivity problems in graphs to polygonal drawing problems on the plane. First, we observe why it is so hard to optimally solve these problems. Then, we go over to attack them anyway. We develop fast algorithms that find approximate solutions that are very close to the optimal ones. Hence, connecting points with slightly more ink is not hard.

Algorithmic discrete mathematics plays a key role in the development of information and communication technologies, and methods that arise in computer science, mathematics and operations research – in particular in algorithms, computational complexity, distributed computing and optimization – are vital to modern services such as mobile telephony, online banking and VoIP. This book examines communication networking from a mathematical viewpoint. The contributing authors took part in the European COST action 293 – a four-year program of multidisciplinary research on this subject. In this book they offer introductory overviews and state-of-the-art assessments of current and future research in the fields of broadband, optical, wireless and ad hoc networks. Particular topics of interest are design, optimization, robustness and energy consumption. The book will be of interest to graduate students, researchers and practitioners in the areas of networking, theoretical computer science, operations research, distributed computing and mathematics.

The problem of designing a cost-efficient network that survives the failure of one or more nodes or edges of the network is critical to modern telecommunications engineering. The method developed in this book is designed to solve such problems to optimality. In particular, a cutting plane approach is described, based on polyhedral combinatorics, that is ableto solve real-world problems of this type in short computation time. These results are of interest for practitioners in the area of communication network design. The book is addressed especially to the combinatorial optimization community, but also to those who want to learn polyhedral methods. In addition, interesting new research problemsare formulated.

Network flow and network design problems arise in various application areas of combinatorial optimization, e.g., in transportation, production, or telecommunication. This thesis contributes new results to four different problem classes from this area, providing models and algorithms with immediate practical impact as well as theoretical insights into complexity and combinatorial structure of network optimization problems: (i) We introduce a new model for tactical transportation planning that employs a cyclic network expansion to integrate routing and inventory decisions into a unified capacitated network design formulation. We also devise several algorithmic approaches to solve the resulting optimization problem and demonstrate the applicability of our approach on a set of real-world logistic networks. (ii) We present approximation algorithms for combined location and network design problems, including the first constant factor approximation for capacitated location routing. (iii) We derive a max-flow/min-cut theorem for abstract flows over time, a generalization of the well-known work of Ford and Fulkerson that restricts to a minimal set of structural requirements. (iv) We devise algorithms for finding orientations of embedded graphs with degree constraints on vertices and faces, answering an open question by Frank.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th Algorithms and Data Structures Symposium, WADS 2009, held in Banff, Canada, in August 2009. The Algorithms and Data Structures Symposium - WADS (formerly "Workshop on Algorithms and Data Structures") is intended as a forum for researchers in the area of design and analysis of algorithms and data structures. The 49 revised full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 126 submissions. The papers present original research on algorithms and data structures in all areas, including bioinformatics, combinatorics, computational geometry, databases, graphics, and parallel and distributed computing.

Andreas Bärmann develops novel approaches for the solution of network design problems as they arise in various contexts of applied optimization. At the example of an optimal expansion of the German railway network until 2030, the author derives a tailor-made decomposition technique for multi-period network design problems. Next, he develops a general framework for the solution of network design problems via aggregation of the underlying graph structure. This approach is shown to save much computation time as compared to standard techniques. Finally, the author devises a modelling framework for the approximation of the robust counterpart under ellipsoidal uncertainty, an often-studied case in the literature. Each of these three approaches opens up a fascinating branch of research which promises a better theoretical understanding of the problem and an increasing range of solvable application settings at the same time.

Telecommunications - central to our daily lives - continues to change dramatically. These changes are the result of technological advances, deregulation, the proliferation of broadband service offers, and the spectacular popularity of the Internet and wireless services. In such adynamic technological and economic environment, competition is increasing among service providers and among equipment manufacturers. Consequently, optimization of the planning process is becoming essential. Although telecommunications network planning has been tackled by the Operations Research community for some time, many fundamental problems remain challenging. Through its fourteen chapters, this book covers some new and some still challenging older problems which arise in the planning of telecommunication networks. Telecommunications Network Planning will benefit both telecommunications practitioners looking for efficient methods to solve their problems and operations researchers interested in telecommunications. The book examines network design and dimensioning problems; it explores Operation Research issues related to a new standard Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM); it overviews problems that arise when designing survivable SDH/SONET Networks; it considers some broadband network problems; and it concludes with three chapters on wireless and mobile networks. Leading area researchers have contributed their recent research on the telecommunications and network topics treated in the volume.

One of the most frequently occurring types of optimization problems involves decision variables which have to take integer values. From a practical point of view, such problems occur in countless areas of management, engineering, administration, etc., and include such problems as location of plants or warehouses, scheduling of aircraft, cutting raw materials to prescribed dimensions, design of computer chips, increasing reliability or capacity of networks, etc. This is the class of problems known in the professional literature as "discrete optimization" problems. While these problems are of enormous applicability, they present many challenges from a computational point of view. This volume is an update on the impressive progress achieved by mathematicians, operations researchers, and computer scientists in solving discrete optimization problems of very large sizes. The surveys in this volume present a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in discrete optimization and are written by the most prominent researchers from all over the world.This volume describes the tremendous progress in discrete optimization achieved in the last 20 years since the publication of Discrete Optimization '77, Annals of Discrete Mathematics, volumes 4 and 5, 1979 (Elsevier). It contains surveys of the state of the art written by the most prominent researchers in the field from all over the world, and covers topics like neighborhood search techniques, lift and project for mixed 0-1 programming, pseudo-Boolean optimization, scheduling and assignment problems, production planning, location, bin packing, cutting planes, vehicle routing, and applications to graph theory, mechanics, chip design, etc.Key features:• state of the art surveys• comprehensiveness• prominent authors• theoretical, computational and applied aspects.This book is a reprint of Discrete Applied Mathematics Volume 23, Numbers 1-3

Reliability problems arise with increasing frequency as our modern systems of telecommunications, information transmission, transportation, and distribution become more and more complex. In December 1989 at DIMACS at Rutgers University, a Workshop on Reliability of Computer and Communications Networks was held to examine the discrete mathematical methods relevant to these problems. There were nearly ninety participants, including theoretical mathematicians, computer scientists, and electrical engineers from academia and industry, as well as network practitioners, engineers, and reliability planners from leading companies involved in the use of computer and communications networks. This volume, published jointly with the Association for Computing Machinery, contains the proceedings from this Workshop. The aim of the Workshop was to identify the latest trends and important open problems, as well as to survey potential practical applications. The Workshop explored questions of computation of reliability of existing systems and of creating new designs to insure high reliability, in addition to the closely related notion of survivability. Redundancy, single stage and multistage networks, interconnected networks, and fault tolerance were also covered. The Workshop emphasized practical applications, with many invited speakers from a variety of companies which are dealing with practical network reliability problems. The success of the Workshop in fostering many new interactions among researchers and practitioners is reflected in the proceedings, which provide an exciting look at some of the major advances at the forefront of this important field of research.

This well-written textbook on combinatorial optimization puts special emphasis on theoretical results and algorithms with provably good performance, in contrast to heuristics. The book contains complete (but concise) proofs, as well as many deep results, some of which have not appeared in any previous books.