In this paper we deal with the preemptive asymmetric stacker crane problem in a heuristic way. We first present some theoretical results which allow us to turn this problem into a specific tree design problem. We next derive from this new representation an integer linear programming model together with simple and efficient greedy and local search heuristics. We conclude by presenting experimental results which aim at both testing the efficiency of our heuristic and evaluating the impact of the preemption hypothesis.

A hypergraph is Helly if every family of hyperedges of it, formed by pairwiseintersecting hyperedges, has a common vertex. We consider the concepts ofbipartite-conformal and (colored) bipartite-Helly hypergraphs. In the same way asconformal hypergraphs and Helly hypergraphs are dual concepts, bipartite-conformal andbipartite-Helly hypergraphs are also dual. They are useful for characterizing bicliquematrices and biclique graphs, that is, the incident biclique-vertex incidence matrix andthe intersection graphs of the maximal bicliques of a graph, respectively. These conceptsplay a similar role for the bicliques of a graph, as do clique matrices and clique graphs,for the cliques of the graph. We describe polynomial time algorithms for recognizingbipartite-conformal and bipartite-Helly hypergraphs as well as biclique matrices.

In this paper, a single server finite buffer Markovian queuing system is analyzed with the additional restriction that customers may balk as well as renege. Reneging considered in literature is usually of position independent type where the reneging rate is constant irrespective of the position of the customer in the system. However there are many real world situations where this assumption does not hold. This paper is an attempt to model balking with position dependent reneging. Explicit closed form expressions of a number of performance measures are presented. A typical problem is discussed to demonstrate the usefulness of results derived in the paper.

This survey presents major results and issues related to the study of NPO problems in dynamic environments, that is, in settings where instances are allowed to undergo some modifications over time. In particular, the survey focuses on two complementary frameworks. The first one is the reoptimization framework, where an instance I that is already solved undergoes some local perturbation. The goal is then to make use of the information provided by the initial solution to compute a new solution. The second framework is probabilistic optimization, where the instance to optimize is not fully known at the time when a solution is to be proposed, but results from a determined Bernoulli process. Then, the goal is to compute a solution with optimal expected value.