In our daily lives we assist to an exponential growth of mobile and fixed devices that surround us, though many of them having limited resources, and not even providing an interface screen. In this paper, we present remoteU¡, a middleware that allows the interaction of those devices with users, resorting to simple but expressive programming mechanisms, and providing efficient implementation and...

In the field of scheduling, the flowshop problems have been thoroughly studied over the last six decades. In this paper we propose a concise overview of flowshop scheduling techniques evolved during this period. We surveyed the exact, heuristics and metaheuristics methods for solving various flowshop scheduling problems. As a result various optimization techniques, solution procedures are avail...

We develop a Markov decision process formulation of a dynamic pricing problem for multiple substitutable flights between the same origin and destination, taking into account customer choice among the flights. The model is rendered computationally intractable for exact solution by its multidimensional state and action spaces, so we develop and analyze various bounds and heuristics. We first desc...

The permutation flow shop scheduling problem (PFSP) is one of the most well known and well studied production scheduling problems with strong industrial background. Most scheduling problems are combinatorial optimization problems which are too difficult to be solved optimally, and hence heuristics are used to obtain good solutions in a reasonable time. The specific goal of this paper is to inve...

In this paper, new multilevel heuristics are proposed for nding a balanced bipartition of a graph. Multilevel schemes have been recently introduced for quickly solving the problem on graphs with thousands of nodes, graphs often present in domain-decomposition techniques for parallel computing. These heuristics rstly reduce the original graph by collapsing its nodes and arcs, thus generating a h...

Various word-processing system have been developed to identify grammatical errors and mark learners’ essays. However, they are not specifically developed for Malaysian ESL (English as a second language) learners. A marking tool which is capable to identify errors in ESL writing for these learners is very much needed. Though there are numerous techniques adopted in grammar checking and automated...

There have been a lot of studies on distributed storage systems and peer-to-peer file systems based on distributed hash tables (DHTs), in which nodes have global unique identifiers generated by a hash function. Since such distributed systems are built on top of a heterogeneous and unreliable infrastructure, replication techniques are often used to improve object availability. However, typical c...

The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a famous NP-hard problem typically solved using various heuristics. One of popular heuristics class is k-opt local search. Though these heuristics are quite simple, combined with other techniques in an iterated local search (ILS) framework they show promising results. In this paper, we propose to combine the 2-opt, 3-opt and 4-opt local search algorithms ...