The book presents new ideas to model and solve the flexible shift planning problem of personnel workers in the service industry. First, a new modeling approach is proposed that requires shifts to be generated implicitly rather than employing a predefined set of shift types like three 8-hour or two 12-hour shifts to cover varying forecast demand....

The goal of this Lecture Note is to prove a new type of limit theorems for normalized sums of strongly dependent random variables that play an important role in probability theory or in statistical physics. Here non-linear functionals of stationary Gaussian fields are considered, and it is shown that the theory of Wiener–Itô...

Over the last few decades, energy minimization methods have become an established paradigm to resolve a variety of challenges in the fields of computer vision and pattern recognition. While traditional approaches to computer vision were often based on a heuristic sequence of processing steps and merely allowed a very limited...

Search has been vital to artificial intelligence from the very beginning as a core technique in problem solving. The authors present a thorough overview of heuristic search with a balance of discussion between theoretical analysis and efficient implementation and application to real-world problems. Current developments in search such as...

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Solving scheduling problems has long presented a challenge for computer scientists and operations researchers. The field continues to expand as researchers and practitioners examine ever more challenging problems and develop automated methods capable of solving them. This book provides 11 case studies in automated scheduling, submitted by...

Immunoassays are among the most powerful and sensitive technologies now available for patient diagnosis and monitoring. This book is an indispensable guide to information on the theory and practice of immunoassays. It discusses the scientific basis of these technologies in a logical, organized, and heuristic manner and provides protocols for...