Network Design Problems in the Multi-level Supply Chain and Communication
Jeong-Hun Lee Network optimization has always been a core problem domain in operations research, as well as in computer science, applied mathematics, and many fields of engineering and management. Network optimization problems arise in a variety of situations, and often in situations that apparently are quite unrelated to networks. For example, the physical networks such as vehicle roads, telephone lines, electric power systems, computer chips, water delivery systems, and rail lines, and many others, are familiar to all of us. In each of these problem settings, we often wish to send some good and information from one point to another, typically as efficiently as possible. Although these problems were studied great scientists of the last century, the topic of network optimization is more broadly as an independent field of scientific inquiry and with the parallel development of digital computers capable of performing massive computations. |