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Gap Reduction Techniques for Online Stochastic Project Scheduling

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 5015))

Abstract

Anticipatory algorithms for online stochastic optimization have been shown very effective in a variety of areas, including logistics, reservation systems, and scheduling. For such applications which typically feature purely exogenous uncertainty, the one-step anticipatory algorithm was shown theoretically to be close to optimal when the stochasticity of the problem, measured by the anticipatory gap, is small. This paper studies the behavior of one-step anticipatory algorithms on applications in which the uncertainty is exogenous but the observations are endogenous. It shows that one-step anticipatory algorithms exhibit a much larger anticipatory gap and proposes a number of gap-reduction techniques to address this limitation. The resulting one-step anticipatory algorithms are shown to outperform significantly the state-of-the-art dynamic-programming approach on an online stochastic resource-constrained project scheduling application.

This research is partially supported by NSF award DMI-0600384 and ONR Award N000140610607.

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Laurent Perron Michael A. Trick

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© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Dooms, G., Van Hentenryck, P. (2008). Gap Reduction Techniques for Online Stochastic Project Scheduling. In: Perron, L., Trick, M.A. (eds) Integration of AI and OR Techniques in Constraint Programming for Combinatorial Optimization Problems. CPAIOR 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5015. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-68155-7_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-68155-7_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-68154-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-68155-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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