A compromised large-scale neighborhood search heuristic for capacitated air cargo loading planning
Cost effectiveness is central to the air freight forwarders. In this work, we study how an air freight forwarder should plan its cargo loading in order to minimize the total freight cost given a limited number of rented containers. To solve the problem efficiently for practical implementation, we propose a new large-scale neighborhood search heuristic. The proposed large-scale neighborhood relaxes the subset-disjoint restriction made in the existing literature; the relaxation risks a possibility of infeasible exchanges while at the same time it avoids the potentially large amount of checking effort required to enforce the subset-disjoint restriction. An efficient procedure is then used to search for improvement in the neighborhood. We have also proposed a subproblem to address the difficulties caused by the fixed charges. The compromised large-scale neighborhood (CLSN) search heuristic has shown stably superior performance when compared with the traditional large-scale neighborhood search and the mixed integer programming model.

title: Meta-heuristic Algorithm for the Transshipment Problem with Fixed Transportation Schedules
abstract: In this work, we develop an efficient meta-heuristic genetic algorithm for a different type of transshipment problem with supplier and customer time windows, where flow through the crossdock (a kind of transshipment center) is constrained by fixed transportation schedules and crossdocks capacities, and which was proved to be NP -complete in the strong sense. And computational experiments are conducted to show the proposed heuristic outperforms CPLEX.

title: A stochastic beam search for the berth allocation problem
abstract: In this paper, the optimization of the Berth Allocation Problem (BAP) is transformed into a multiple stage decision making procedure and a new multiple stage search method, namely stochastic beam search algorithm, is proposed to solve it. New techniques such as an improved beam search scheme, a two-phase node goodness estimation, and a stochastic node selection criteria are proposed. Real-life information provided by Singapore Port was collected as our test data. Experimental results show that the proposed stochastic beam search is more accurate and efficient than both the state-of-the-art meta-heuristic and the traditional determinist beam search.

title: k-Center Problems with Minimum Coverage
abstract: The k-center problem is a well-known facility location problem and can be described as follows: Given a complete undirected graph G=(V,E), a metric d:V×V→ℝ + and a positive integer k, we seek a subset U ⊆ V of at most k centers which minimizes the maximum distances from points in V to U. Formally, the objective function is given by: 
 
$$ \textstyle\min_{U\subseteq V,|U|\leq k}\max_{v\in V}\min_{r\in U}d(v,r).$$ 
 
As a typical example, we may want to set up k service centers (e.g., police stations, fire stations, hospitals, polling centers) and minimize the maximum distances between each client and these centers. The problem is known to be \(\mathcal{NP}\)-hard .

title: Flexible Demand Assignment Problem
abstract: This paper proposed a state-of-the-art local search for solving Flexible Demand Assignment problem (FDA) which considers the balance between revenue and cost in demand assignment. Different than the published studies, our research splits the FDA problem into three core subproblems as operators for neighborhood construction. The three specified subproblems One Bin Repack, Two Bins Repack and Unpack are proposed completely based on mathematical modelling, computational complexity, executive conditions and greedy solving methods. Benchmark experimental results have shown that the proposed local search improved to the best published heuristics by 2.34%.

title: A Compromised Large-Scale Neighborhood Search Heuristic for Cargo Loading Planning
abstract: In this work, we propose a compromised large-scale neighborhood, which is embedded in simulated annealing to solve a cargo loading planning problem arising in logistics industry. It is "compromised" because it makes a tradeoff between the extensive backward checking work incurred in traditional subset-disjoint restriction and the possible infeasibility resulting from the relaxing the restriction. Extensive experiments have shown the competitive advantages of the heuristic approach. The proposed neighborhood search method is generally applicable.

title: Multi-channel spectrum-agile MAC protocol with adaptive load control
abstract: Spectrum-agile radios, also known as cognitive radios, have a great potential to improve spectrum utilization by enabling dynamic access to the spectrum. A key challenge in operating these radios is how to implement an efficient medium access control (MAC) mechanism that adaptively and efficiently allocates transmission powers and spectrum according to the surrounding environment. In this work, we propose a distributed MAC protocol for operating spectrum-agile radios in a multihop ad hoc network. Our protocol differs from previous designs in that it exploits the “dual-receive” capability of radios, thus overcoming various channel access problems that are common to multi-channel designs. We conduct theoretical analysis of the protocol, and study its performance via simulations. We show significant improvement in the system throughput under the proposed MAC design. To maximize this throughput, we propose a cross-layer framework for joint adaptive load and medium access controls. In this framework, the loads of individual nodes are adapted based on the values of local MAC parameters. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves more than 90% of the maximum (global) system throughput that is achieved at saturation, while guaranteeing low collision rates.

title: Spectrum Sharing in Cognitive Radio Networks
abstract: In this paper, we present a novel joint power/channel allocation scheme that uses a distributed pricing strategy to improve the network's performance. According to this scheme, the spectrum allocation problem is modeled as a non-cooperative game. A price-based iterative water-filling (PIWF) algorithm is proposed, which allows users to converge to the Nash Equilibrium (NE). This PIWF algorithm can be implemented distributively, with CRs repeatedly negotiating their best transmission powers and spectrum. We propose a protocol that implements our price- based resource allocation algorithm. The proposed MAC protocol allows multiple CR pairs to first contend through an admission phase, and then to iteratively negotiate their transmission powers and spectrum via control-packet exchanges. Subsequently, CRs proceed concurrently with their data transmissions. Simulations are used to study the performance of our protocol and demonstrate its effectiveness in improving the overall network throughput and reducing the average transmission power.

title: A Study on the Application of GA-BP Neural Network in the Bridge Reliability Assessment

title: A Bidirectional Adaptive Sequential Gaussian Approximation for MIMO Systems
abstract: A bidirectional adaptive detection method was proposed to prevent error propagation based on sequential Gaussian approximation algorithm for MIMO systems. Conventional sequential Gaussian approximation detection executes a tree search at the receiver, when the number of searching paths is large, error propagation is well prevented at the cost of high complexity, when few paths are searched, serious error propagation may occur. In the new method, transmitted symbols were estimated parallel both in sequential order and inverse order, and the number of searching paths was determined by comparing the results of bidirectional detection, which can effectively prevent error propagation at reduced complexity. The novel algorithm can be executed at low delay because of parallel computing, and shows good performance at low complexity.

title: A New Multi-view Learning Algorithm Based on ICA Feature for Image Retrieval
abstract: In content-based image retrieval (CBIR), most techniques involve an important issue of how to efficiently bridge the gap between the high-level concepts and low-level visual features. We propose a novel semi-supervised learning method for image retrieval, which makes full use of both ICA feature and general low-level feature. Our approach can be characterized by the following three aspects: (1) The ICA feature, as proved to be representative of human vision, is adopted as a view to describe human perception; (2) A multi-view learning algorithm is introduced to make the most use of different features and dramatically reduce human relevance feedback needed to achieve a satisfactory result; (3) A new semi-supervised learning algorithm is proposed to adapt to the small sample problem and other special constrains of our multi-view learning algorithm. Our experimental results and comparisons are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.