Andreas Fink

Helmut Schmidt University | HSU · Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences

Carrying out complex projects often involves several collaborating parties (agents) with conflicting goals. We consider project scheduling problems, where each activity belongs to one of several agents, with a given deadline on the project completion while one aims at a schedule with an efficient use of resources. As there are precedence relations...

High Performance Business Computing (HPBC) is the application of models, methodologies, tools and technologies of High Performance Computing (HPC) (e.g., Hager and Wellein 2010) to business problems. While its neighbor discipline, High Performance Technical Computing, has already found entrance into a variety of scientific disciplines, including me...

Electric freight vehicles have the potential to mitigate local urban road freight transport emissions, but their numbers are still insignificant. Logistics companies often consider electric vehicles as too costly compared to vehicles powered by combustion engines. Research within the body of the current literature suggests that increasing the drive...

Realistic assessments of the energy consumption of medium-duty battery electric vehicles (BEV) are sparse in literature, but still pivotal for total cost of ownership calculations and ecological considerations. This paper reports on the real-world energy consumption of four types of medium-duty electric vehicles measured in a large German field tes...

Deutschland ist bestrebt, ein international führender Leitmarkt und Leitanbieter der Elektromobilität zu werden; bis 2020 sollen eine Million Elektrofahrzeuge auf deutschen Straßen fahren. Das sind die Ziele, die die deutsche Bundesregierung bezüglich der Elektromobilität verlautbart hat. Dem Expertenrat der Nationalen Plattform Elektromobilität (N...

Negotiation mechanisms have been proven useful for decentralized resource-constrained multi-project scheduling with self-interested parties (agents) that work together in completing a project. The current paper is concerned with such kinds of multi-agent problems, where each involved party pursues the individual goal of maximizing the discounted ca...

The market for battery electric freight vehicles is outperforming the market for battery electric passenger cars in Germany, although it has received much less stimulation by policies. This manuscript aggregates the companies' strategies to successfully employ electric freight vehicles; summarizes and compares policy options to further support succ...

Policies in Germany to support electric vehicles, which are free of exhaust emissions, mostly focus on urban road passenger transport. However, road freight vehicles are a main source of the traffic air pollutants and noise emissions in cities. Available vehicle types, tour planning and purchase decisions in urban road freight transport differ from...

This chapter is concerned with the decentralized resource-constrained multi-project scheduling problem (DRCMPSP), which is characterized in that individual involved decision makers pursue individual goals, whereas some overall coordination mechanism is needed to resolve conflicts due to the interdependencies between multiple projects. The connectio...

We consider a hard decentralized scheduling problem with heterogeneous machines and competing job sets that belong to different self-interested stakeholders (agents). The determination of a beneficial solution, i.e., a respective contract in terms of a common schedule, is particularly difficult due to information asymmetry and self-interested behav...

Electric vehicles (EVs) address the challenges global megatrends impose on freight transporting companies in urban areas. EVs decouple transport costs from depleting oil reserves and are free of tailpipe emissions. They are, technically, suitable for urban transport tasks which are often characterized by short, pre-planned tours and enable battery...

Collaborative interorganizational systems is a relevant and promising research domain. When autonomous agents associated with different enterprises negotiate about rival resources, coordination is a major challenge. As agents are driven by self-interest and try to maximize their very own objectives, collaborative planning has to account for some ch...

Nowadays, enterprises are more and more interconnected such that operational planning has to consider the different interests of the involved organizations. This may be a challenging and complex task as it is subject to strategic interactions and incomplete information. Automated negotiation by software agents is a powerful tool which can handle th...

This work focuses on the execution of knowledge-intensive business processes by harnessing collective intelligence without codification. Trying to automate processes that are neither completely predictable regarding pre-defined structure and activities but instead require the decisions of experts, traditional workflow management reaches its limits....

In this paper, we sketch some of the challenges that should be addressed in future research efforts for model-based decision support in manufacturing and service networks. This includes integration issues, taking into account the autonomy of the decision-making entities in face of information asymmetry, the modeling of preferences of the decision m...

In dem Artikel skizzieren wir einige der Herausforderungen, die in zukünftigen Forschungsaktivitäten für eine modellbasierte Entscheidungsunterstützung in Produktions- und Dienstleistungsnetzwerken zu adressieren sind. Das beinhaltet die Betrachtung von Integrationsaspekten, insbesondere auch unter Berücksichtigung der Autonomie von Entscheidungstr...

In the k-labeled Spanning Forest Problem (KLSF), given a graph G with a label (color) assigned to each edge, and an integer positive value kmax we look for the minimum number of connected components that can be obtained by using at most kmax different labels. The problem is strictly related to the Minimum Labelling Spanning Tree Problem (MLST), sin...

Decision making in operational planning is increasingly affected by conflicting interests of different stakeholders such as subcontractors, customers, or strategic partners. Addressing this, automated negotiation is a well-suited mechanism to mediate between stakeholders and search for jointly beneficial agreements. However, the outcome of a negoti...

Electric vehicles (EVs) decrease noise-, air pollutants- and greenhouse gas emissions of road freight transport in metropolitan areas. In companies’ fleets, EVs decouple mobility from fossil fuel shortage and impending fuel price increases. Despite these promising potentials, electric commercial vehicles only had a share of 0.09% of all commercial...

Electric vehicles (EVs) decrease noise-, air pollutants- and greenhouse gas emissions of road freight transport in metropolitan areas. In companies’ fleets, EVs decouple mobility from fossil fuel shortage and impending fuel price increases. Despite these promising potentials, electric commercial vehicles only had a share of 0.09% of all commercial...

Introduction DT Telecommunications Techno-Economics Minitrack.

The minimum weight vertex cover problem is a basic combinatorial optimization problem defined as follows. Given an undirected graph and positive weights for all vertices the objective is to determine a subset of the vertices which covers all edges such that the sum of the related cost values is minimized. In this paper we apply a modified reactive...

Automated negotiation is an efficient mechanism for the coordination of interests of heterogeneous agents. However, the negotiation procedure requires time which is a scarce resource in dynamic environments that are characterized by rapid and reoccurring changes of external circumstances. To ensure adaptivity, negotiation protocols are needed that...

We present a multi-agent variant of the Single Machine To-tal Weighted Tardiness Problem with Sequence-Dependent Setup Times. Since, i.a., agents have an incentive to lie, cen-tral planning is not feasible and decentralized methods such as automated negotiations are needed. Hereto, we propose and evaluate an iterative quota-based negotiation protoc...

We consider a multi-agent extension of the non-preemptive single-mode resource-constrained project scheduling problem with discounted cash flow objectives. Such a problem setting is related to project scheduling problems which involve different autonomous firms where project activities are uniquely assigned to the project parties (agents). Taking i...

Collaborative interorganizational systems is a relevant and promising research domain. When autonomous agents associated with different enterprises negotiate about rival resources, coordination is a major challenge. Information provided by the agents is a fruit of a poisonous tree because the selfish agents have an incentive to lie strategically wh...

The fitness landscape of the no-wait (continuous) flow-shop scheduling problem is investigated by examining the ruggedness of the landscape and the correlation between the quality of a solution and its distance to an optimal solution. The results confirm the presence of a big valley structure as known from other combinatorial optimization problems....

Reactive tabu search (RTS) aims at the automatic adaptation of the tabu list length. The idea is to increase the tabu list length when the tabu memory indicates that the search is revisiting formerly traversed solutions. Once too many repetitions are encountered, an escape mechanism constituting a random walk is an essential part of the method. We...

Information technology (IT) is a prerequisite for successful supply chain management today and will become even more so in near future. While IT systems are vital components in supply chains, their successful management rests on coordinated decision making throughout the logistics network. Data warehouses and data mining can be used to store and an...

Transaction costs in electronic business may become marginal, since negotiation processes can be assigned to software agents which act autonomously on behalf of their human principals. This advantage makes electronic negotiations highly appealing to actors in various e-business areas, including online auctions and product configuration negotiations...

Automated negotiation is regarded as an essential method for the coordination of software agents. However, without adequate protocols, negotiations are susceptible to malicious and strategic behavior of the agents - especially when interdependencies of contract items lead to complex contract spaces. In this study, we propose a mediator-based protoc...

Peer production uses the collaborative intelligence of its environment by relying on self-managed, decentralized coordination. Social software offers a broad variety of methods and applications for simplifying communication and harnessing collective intelligence. Status feeds, which are regularly used within social networks, may be considered as an...

This paper focuses on multi-agent contract formation by automated negotiation. Commonly individuals are not willing to share information or cooperate and negotiation protocols may give way to unwanted strategic behavior. Socially beneficial contract agreements require a lot of negotiation time. Furthermore, possible interdependencies of contract it...

Automated Negotiation is an emerging field of electronic markets and multi-agent system research. Market engineers are faced in this connection with computational as well as economic issues, such as individual rationality and incentive compatibility. Most literature is focused on autonomous agents and negotiation protocols regarding these issues. H...

The authors present and analyze a particle swarm optimization (PSO) approach for the resourceconstrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP). It incorporates well-known procedures such as the serial schedule generation scheme and it is hybridized with forward-backward improvement. The authors investigate the application of PSO in comparison to state...

Data Analysis, Data Handling and Business Intelligence are research areas at the intersection of computer science, artificial intelligence, mathematics, and statistics. They cover general methods and techniques that can be applied to a vast set of applications such as in marketing, finance, economics, engineering, linguistics, archaeology, musicolo...

Evolutionary computation (EC) techniques are e?cient, nature-inspired me- ods based on the principles of natural evolution and genetics. Due to their - ciency and simple underlying principles, these methods can be used for a diverse rangeofactivitiesincludingproblemsolving,optimization,machinelearningand pattern recognition. A large and continuousl...

Evolutionary algorithms are generally based on populations of solutions which are subject to the application of operators such as recombination, mutation, and selection in order to evolve the population and eventually obtain high-quality solutions. Different, yet often similar evolutionary algorithms are discussed in various research communities fr...

The fitness landscape of the resource constrained project scheduling problem is investigated by examining the search space position type distribution and the correlation between the quality of a solution and its distance to an optimal solution. The suitability of the landscape for search with evolutionary computation and local search methods is di...

The Push-Tree Problem is a recently addressed optimization problem, with the aim to minimize the total amount of traffic generated on information broadcasting networks by a compromise between the use of “push” and “pull” mechanisms. That is, the push-tree problem can be seen as a mixture of building multicast trees with respect to nodes receiving p...

Recently population-based meta-heuristics under the cover of swarm intelligence have gained prominence. This includes particle swarm optimization (PSO), where the search strategy draws ideas from the social behavior of organisms. While PSO has been reported as an effective search method in several papers, we are interested in the critical success f...

Evolutionary computation (EC) techniques are e?cient, nature-inspired pl- ning and optimization methods based on the principles of natural evolution and genetics. Due to their e?ciency and simple underlying principles, these me- ods can be used in the context of problem solving, optimization, and machine learning. A large and continuously increasin...

We analyze static and dynamic population topologies for a robust evolutionary computation algorithm, which is based on particle swarm optimization (PSO), for the resource constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP). The algorithm incorporates well-known procedures such as the serial schedule generation scheme and forward-backward improvement. We...

The book at hand presents a careful selection of relevant applications of CI methods for transport, logistics, and supply chain management problems. The chapters illustrate the current state-of-the-art in the application of CI methods in these fields and should help and inspire researchers and practitioners to apply and develop efficient methods. A...

This book constitutes the refereed joint proceedings of seven workshops on evolutionary computing, EvoWorkshops 2007, held in Valencia, Spain in April 2007. The 55 revised full papers and 24 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 160 submissions. In accordance with the seven workshops covered, the papers...

Logistics management in the car rental business involves short-term decisions about the transportation and deployment of cars with regard to optimizing fleet utilization while maintaining a high service level. We model and solve this problem by means of minimum cost network flow optimization under consideration of essential practical needs such as...

Just as metaheuristics provide flexible and extensible methods of solving optimization problems, class libraries provide flexible and extensible building blocks for creating software to implement metaheuristics. In this chapter we provide a brief introduction to the class libraries and object oriented programming techniques. We also provide a short...

In this paper we survey the design and application of HotFrame, a framework that provides reusable software components in the metaheuristics domain. After a brief introduction and overview we analyze and model metaheuristics with special emphasis on commonalities and variabilities. The resulting model constitutes the basis for the framework design....

In this paper we propose some extensions of the minimum labelling spanning tree problem. The main focus is on the minimum labelling Steiner tree problem: given a graph G G G with a color (label) assigned to each edge, and a subset Q Q Q of the nodes of G G G (basic vertices), we look for a connected subgraph of G G G with the minimum number of dif-...

Not Available

This chapter is concerned with coordination problems between firms which collaborate within supply chains. We consider coordination problems at the level of operations management and assume that potential decisions of the involved decision making units can be completely specified as formal contracts. The elements of the contract space are common kn...

The pilot method as a meta-heuristic is a tempered greedy method aimed at obtaining better solutions while avoiding the greedy trap by looking ahead for each possible choice. Repeatedly a master solution is modified; each time in a minimal fashion to account for best choices, where choices are judged by means of a separate heuristic result, the pil...

First Page of the Article

We study the Minimum Labelling Spanning Tree Problem: Given a graph G with a color (label) assigned to each edge (not necessarily properly) we look for a spanning tree of G with the minimum number of different colors. The problem has several applications in telecommunication networks, electric networks, multimodal transportation networks, among oth...

The coordination within supply chains depends on appropriate forms of distributed decision making. Considering joint decisions as formal contracts, the coordination problem may be regarded as a search process in a corresponding contract space. Automated negotiations, with firms or decision making units represented as software agents, can provide an...

Today, advanced heuristic approaches for discrete optimization are usually implemented from scratch. We discuss some crucial problems that have so far prevented us from having a "heuristics stockroom" with ready-to-use software components available. Then, we analyze the domain to be covered by reusable software and introduce and discuss a design fo...

Ring network design problems have many important applications, especially in the field of telecommunications and vehicle routing. Those problems generally consist of constructing a ring network by selecting a node subset and corresponding direct links. Different requirements and objectives lead to various specific types of NP-hard ring network desi...

This article describes applications of modern heuristic search methods to pattern sequencing problems, i.e., problems seeking for a permutation of the rows of a given matrix with respect to some given objective function. We consider two di#erent objectives: Minimization of the number of simultaneously open stacks and minimization of the average ord...

Application of metaheuristics within operations management — Potential and limitations of software reuse Business reality comprises a large variety of well structured problems (e.g. in production and logistics management), for which effective and efficient solution procedures are available from research. This includes metaheuristics such as iterati...

Continuous flow-shop scheduling problems circumscribe an important class of sequencing problems in the field of production planning. The problem considered here is to find a permutation of jobs to be processed sequentially on a number of machines under the restriction that the processing of each job has to be continuous with respect to the objectiv...

Introduction There are several strong arguments in favor of reusable software components for metaheuristics. First of all, mature scientific knowledge that is aimed to solve practical problems must also be viewed from the technology transformation point of view. If we consider the main metaheuristic concepts as su#ciently understood, we must strive...

In dem Beitrag werden Koordinationsmechanismen zur Ausgestaltung komplexer Verträge im Rahmen mediatisierter Verhandlungsprozesse beschrieben und experimentell untersucht. Unter der Annahme einer Formalisierbarkeit des Vertragsraums werden bilaterale Verhandlungsprozesse agentenbasiert vollautomatisiert durchgeführt. Hierbei entwickelt ein Mediator...

In diesem Beitrag wird ein Vorgehensmodell zur Konfiguration von Distributionslogistiknetzwerken vorgestellt. Ausgangspunkt bildet eine Methode zur kundenorientierten Erhebung von (relativen) Serviceanforderungen, auf deren Basis effektive Gestaltungs- und Bewertungskriterien abgeleitet werden können, die Eingang in Modelle zur Simulation und mathe...

In diesem Kapitel werden einige Grundlagen der Informatik und der Informations- und Kommunikationstechnik dargestellt. Entsprechende Erkenntnisse und Methoden stellen eine wesentliche Basis für die Wirtschaftsinformatik dar.

Modellierung ist der Prozess der Bildung eines Modells. Unter einem Modell versteht man eine im Hinblick auf einen Zweck vereinfachte Abbildung eines Realitätsausschnittes, wobei Modelle entsprechend des Zweckbezuges gewisse Ähnlichkeiten zur Realität (etwa hinsichtlich Struktur, Funktion oder Verhalten) besitzen müssen. Um die für den jeweiligen Z...

Versucht man, kurz die Geschichte der Wirtschaftsinformatik zu beschreiben, so stellt sich die Frage, wie weit man zurückgehen möchte. Im Bereich der Entwicklung des Computers mag man hier bereits im 17. Jahrhundert bei Pascal und Leibnitz einfache Rechenmaschinen finden; oder man denkt an die Lochkartenverarbeitung von Hollerith und die Entstehung...

Datenbanksysteme bilden einen zentralen Bestandteil typischer betrieblicher Anwendungssysteme. Im Folgenden werden zunächst die typische Architektur von Datenbanken bzw. Datenbanksystemen sowie das Transaktionskonzept erläutert. Daraufhin werden relationale Datenbanken sowie die hierauf basierende Datenbankabfragesprache SQL dargestellt. Abschließe...

Unter einem Anwendungssystem kann man eine Menge von Programmen (und teilweise die dazugehörigen Daten) verstehen, die als Anwendungssoftware für ein konkretes Anwendungsgebiet entwickelt, eingeführt und eingesetzt werden; vgl. Abschnitt 1.1. In diesem Kapitel werden überblicksartig einige Anwendungssysteme und zugehörige Einsatzgebiete diskutiert....

In der Unternehmenspraxis müssen ständig Entscheidungen getroffen werden. Beispielsweise müssen Unternehmen, die ihre Produkte nicht direkt kun-denauftragsorientiert fertigen, sondern (auf Basis von Absatzprognosen) für den Markt produzieren, entscheiden, wann welche Mengen welchen Produktes gefertigt werden sollen. Ein Ziel hierbei ist es, möglich...

Wie bereits in Kapitel 1 verdeutlicht wurde, besteht eine wichtige Aufgabe der Wirtschaftsinformatik in der Entwicklung von (betrieblichen) Informationsund Kommunikationssystemen. Hierfür relevante Methoden der Softwareentwicklung bilden eine wesentliche Grundlage der Wirtschaftsinformatik. Hierbei ist zu konstatieren, dass sich entsprechende Tätig...