Title Information
Title
Amsaa: An Anticipatory Algorithm for Online Stochastic Combinatorial Optimization
Name: Personal
Name Part
Mercier, Luc H.
Role
Role Term: Text
creator
Origin Information
Copyright Date (keyDate="yes", encoding="w3cdtf")
2009
Physical Description
Extent
xi, 115 p.
digitalOrigin
born digital
Note
Thesis (Ph.D.) -- Brown University (2009)
Name: Personal
Name Part
van hentenryck, pascal
Role
Role Term: Text
director
Name: Personal
Name Part
Mathieu, Claire
Role
Role Term: Text
reader
Name: Personal
Name Part
Ahmed, Shabbir
Role
Role Term: Text
reader
Name: Corporate
Name Part
Brown University. Computer Science
Role
Role Term: Text
sponsor
Genre (aat)
theses
Abstract
Online stochastic combinatorial optimization problems are problems in which a decision maker is trying to minimize or maximize an objective by making a sequence of discrete decisions, while acquiring information over time, and in face of an uncertain future. Two examples are: * the scheduling of drug development tasks in a pharmaceutical company, where a decision maker has to manage costly human and material resources in face of uncertainty regarding the efficiency of drugs; * the scheduling of polymerizations in a polystyrene factory, where reactors can be used to produce different varieties of polystyrene, and future demands are uncertain. We study decision making in limited time for such online stochastic combinatorial optimization problems, and focus on anticipatory algorithms, a class of algorithms that relaxes constraints due to the timing of information acquisition by the decision maker. A first question we investigate is why a specific heuristic based on this simplification perform sometimes very well. We then turn on to problems such as the two aforementioned ones on which this heuristic produces largely suboptimal decisions. To address these problems, we then propose Amsaa, the anytime multistep anticipatory algorithm, that in addition to attractive characteristics of previous anticipatory algorithms is guaranteed to produce optimal decisions with enough computation time. Empirical results show that Amsaa outperforms existing approaches on the stochastic project scheduling problem and on the polystyrene production planning problem. In particular, Amsaa scales thousands of time better than a stochastic programming approach in the project scheduling problem.
Subject (Local)
Topic
stochastic optimization
Subject (Local)
Topic
combinatorics
Subject (FAST) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/805020")
Topic
Algorithms
Subject (FAST) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/868961")
Topic
Combinatorial analysis
Record Information
Record Content Source (marcorg)
RPB
Record Creation Date (encoding="iso8601")
20091218
Language
Language Term: Code (ISO639-2B)
eng
Language Term: Text
English
Identifier: DOI
10.7301/Z0XS5SWF
Access Condition: rights statement (href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/")
In Copyright
Access Condition: restriction on access
Collection is open for research.
Type of Resource (primo)
dissertations