We analyze licensing of a cost reducing innovation to an oligopolistic industry, and extend previous work by Kamien and Tauman (1986) and Katz and Shapiro (1986) in two directions. First, our analysis applies to a wider class of demand functions than linear ones. Second, we derive a simple optimal licensing mechanism for the patentee. We also examine three licensing mechanisms commonly discusse...

The industrialization of the world, increase in population and mismanagement of the available parking space has resulted in parking problems. There is a need for an intelligent and reliable system which can be used for searching the unoccupied parking facility, to reduce the cost of leasing people and for better use of resources for car-park owners. This paper introduces an algorithm to increas...

In this paper, we use integer programming approach for solving a hard combinatorial optimization problem, namely protein threading. For this sequence-to-structure alignment problem we apply costsplitting technique to derive a new Lagrangian dual formulation. The optimal solution of the dual is sought by an algorithm of polynomial complexity. For most of the instances the dual solution provides ...

We consider partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with a set of target states and every transition is associated with an integer cost. The optimization objective we study asks to minimize the expected total cost till the target set is reached, while ensuring that the target set is reached almost-surely (with probability 1). We show that for integer costs approximating the opti...

Symbolic search with binary decision diagrams (BDDs) often saves huge amounts of memory and computation time. In this paper we propose two general techniques based on transition relation trees to advance BDD search by refining the image operator to compute the set of successors. First, the conjunction tree selects the set of applicable actions through filtering their precondition. Then, the dis...

The cost of an optimal delete relaxed plan, known as h, is a powerful admissible heuristic but is in general intractable to compute. In this paper we examine the problem of computing h by encoding it as a MAXSAT problem. We develop a new encoding that utilizes constraint generation to supports the computation of a sequence of increasing lower bounds on h. We show a close connection between the ...