in today’s competitive transportation systems, passengers search to find traveling agencies that are able to serve them efficiently considering both traveling time and transportation costs. in this paper, we present a new model for the traveling salesman problem with multiple transporters (tspmt). in the proposed model, which is more applicable than the traditional versions, each city has diffe...

Motivated by many practical applications, in this paper we study budget feasible mechanisms where the goal is to procure independent sets from matroids. More specifically, we are given a matroid M = (E, I) where each ground (indivisible) element is a selfish agent. The cost of each element (i.e., for selling the item or performing a service) is only known to the element itself. There is a buyer...

We study a class of procurement auctions with a budget constraint, where an auctioneer is interested in buying resources or services from a set of agents. Ideally, the auctioneer would like to select a subset of the resources so as to maximize his valuation function, without exceeding a given budget. As the resources are owned by strategic agents however, our overall goal is to design mechanism...

We present a parallel evolutionary optimization algorithm that leverages surrogate models for solving computationally expensive design problems with general constraints, on a limited computational budget. The essential backbone of our framework is an evolutionary algorithm coupled with a feasible sequential quadratic programming solver in the spirit of Lamarckian learning.We employ a trust-regi...

W address the mechanism design problem for a market with multiple buyers and sellers. Each buyer demands some bundle(s) of various commodities, and each seller supplies multiple units of one commodity. To design truthful double-auction mechanisms, we propose a novel “padding” method that intentionally creates imbalances between the supply availability and demand requirement by introducing a pha...

The present chapter addresses some issues on survey design and sample design for household budget surveys. The focus is on surveys in developing countries. Problems of measuring consumption and income are discussed in some detail in section B. Section C contains a discussion on some crucial sample design issues, for example, stratification, and sample allocation in space (geographical) and in t...

Efficient allocation of scarce resources in networks is an important problem worldwide. In this thesis, we focus on resource allocation problems in a network of congested airports. The increasing demand for access to the world’s major commercial airports combined with the limited operational capacity at many of these airports have led to growing air traffic congestion resulting in several billi...