Related papers: The Snowblower Problem
Navigating a collision-free and optimal trajectory for a robot is a challenging task, particularly in environments with moving obstacles such as humans. We formulate this problem as a stochastic optimal control problem. Since solving the…
In the Demand Strip Packing problem (DSP), we are given a time interval and a collection of tasks, each characterized by a processing time and a demand for a given resource (such as electricity, computational power, etc.). A feasible…
Base placement optimization (BPO) is a fundamental capability for mobile manipulation and has been researched for decades. However, it is still very challenging for some reasons. First, compared with humans, current robots are extremely…
For a given polygonal region $P$, the Lawn Mowing Problem (LMP) asks for a shortest tour $T$ that gets within Euclidean distance 1 of every point in $P$; this is equivalent to computing a shortest tour for a unit-disk cutter $C$ that covers…
Train marshalling is the process of reordering the railcars of a train in such a way that the railcars with the same destination appear consecutively in the final, reassembled train. The process takes place in the shunting yard by means of…
Policy optimization is among the most popular and successful reinforcement learning algorithms, and there is increasing interest in understanding its theoretical guarantees. In this work, we initiate the study of policy optimization for the…
In a commonly-used version of the Simple Assembly Line Balancing Problem (SALBP-1) tasks are assigned to stations along an assembly line with a fixed cycle time in order to minimize the required number of stations. It has traditionally been…
We present a new perspective on the celebrated Sinkhorn algorithm by showing that is a special case of incremental/stochastic mirror descent. In order to see this, one should simply plug Kullback-Leibler divergence in both mirror map and…
This paper studies large scale instances of a fairly general arc-routing problem as well as incorporate practical constraints in particular coming from the scheduling problem of the winter road maintenance (e.g. different priorities for and…
TSP (Traveling Salesman Problem), a classic NP-complete problem in combinatorial optimization, is of great significance in multiple fields. Exact algorithms for TSP are not practical due to their exponential time cost. Thus, approximate…
Given a set of objects with durations (jobs) that cover a base region, can we schedule the jobs to maximize the duration the original region remains covered? We call this problem the sensor cover problem. This problem arises in the context…
For some weighted $NP$-complete problems, checking whether a proposed solution is optimal is a non-trivial task. Such is the case for the celebrated traveling salesman problem, or the spin-glass problem in 3 dimensions. In this letter, we…
In multi-robot multi-target tracking, robots coordinate to monitor groups of targets moving about an environment. We approach planning for such scenarios by formulating a receding-horizon, multi-robot sensing problem with a mutual…
In this paper we propose some novel path planning strategies for a double integrator with bounded velocity and bounded control inputs. First, we study the following version of the Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP): given a set of points…
Saddle point problems, ubiquitous in optimization, extend beyond game theory to diverse domains like power networks and reinforcement learning. This paper presents novel approaches to tackle saddle point problem, with a focus on…
We introduce and study a class of optimization problems we coin replenishment problems with fixed turnover times: a very natural model that has received little attention in the literature. Nodes with capacity for storing a certain commodity…
The Maximum Balanced Biclique Problem (MBBP) is a prominent model with numerous applications. Yet, the problem is NP-hard and thus computationally challenging. We propose novel ideas for designing effective exact algorithms for MBBP.…
In traditional assembly lines, it is reasonable to assume that task execution times are the same for each worker. However, in sheltered work centres for disabled this assumption is not valid: some workers may execute some tasks considerably…
The use of machine learning algorithms to address classification problems is on the rise in many research areas. The current study is aimed at testing the potential of using such algorithms to auto-select the best solvers for transport…
An important variant of the classic Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is the Dynamic TSP, in which a system with dynamic constraints is tasked with visiting a set of n target locations (in any order) in the shortest amount of time. Such…