| ORB Committee | |
| Xiaoqi Yang | |
| Xinmin Yang | |
| Liqun Qi, Wenyu Sun and Jianzhong Zhang | |
| R. Sarker | |
| I. Barrios-Kezic | |
| D. Panton | |
| D. Panton | |
| Liqun Qi, Xiaoqi Yang and Jianzhong Zhang | |
| POP Board | |
| David Gao | |
| T. Bardadym | |
| T. Bardadym | |
| A. Chikrii, B. Mel'nik and A. Rubinov | |
| A. Chikrii | |
| D.Pallaschke, Editor-in Chief of "Optimization" | |
| Masao Iri | |
| M. Fukushima | |
| Kazuo Murota | |
| Hiroshi Imai | |
| Takashi Tsuchiya | |
| I. Barrios-Kezic | |
| F. Giannessi | |
| Lou Caccetta | |
| Charles Pearce |
The ORB Committee decides that Alex Rubinov will be the ORB Committee chairman in 2002.
We expect ORB will further flourish in 2002.
Special Issues for ICOTA 2001:
1. There are two special issues for ICOTA 2001.
2. One special issue is for Annals of Operations
Research.
Its guest editors are: Kok Lay Teo, Edwin Cheng,
Xiaoqiang Cai and Xiaoqi Yang.
ICOTA 2001 participants who wish to submit their
papers to this special issue may submit the ps files of their
papers to
Dr. Xiaoqi Yang, mayangxq@polyu.edu.hk before or on
March 31, 2002.
3. Another special issue is for Journal of Global Optimization. Its guest editors are: Duan Li, Liqun Qi and Kok Lay Teo.
ICOTA 2001 participants who wish to submit their papers to this special issue may submit the ps files of their papers to
Professor Duan Li, dli@se.cuhk.edu.hk
or
Professor Liqun Qi, maqilq@polyu.edu.hk
before or on March 31, 2002.
4. All submitted papers should satisfy the requirements on contents, styles and others specified by these two journals.
Professor Do Sang Kim, Department of Applied Mathematics, Pukyong National University, Pusan, South Korea is currently visiting Professor Siegfried Schaible at the A.G.Anderson Graduate School of Management, University of California, Riverside, USA until January 2003.
"Annals of Operations Research 103: Optimization and Numerical Algebra" was published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2001, with Liqun Qi, Wenyu Sun and Jianzhong Zhang as guest editors.
This special volume was based upon The International Conference on Optimization and Numerical Algebra which was held during September 27-30, 1999 at the Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China. About 100 scholars from various countries and regions attended the conference. It consists of 23 invited talks and 62 contributed talks.
This special volume contains 24 papers which are divided into two parts. Part I Optimization has 14 papers. Part II Numerical Algebra has 10 papers. A wide spectrum of optimization and numerical algebra is covered in this special issue.
The contents of special volume, including the e-mail addresses of contacting authors, are as follows:
Preface
Part One, Optimization
1. Q. Chen, M. Ferris and J.T. Linderoth, "FATCOP 2.0:
Advanced features in an opportunitistic mixed integer
programming solver",
Contact Author: Michael Ferris, ferris@cs.wisc.edu.
2. Y. Dai and Y. Yuan, "An efficient hybrid conjugate
gradient method for unconstrained optimization",
Contact Author: Yuhong Dai, dyh@lsec.cc.ac.cn.
3. C. Kanzow and S. Engelke, "On the solution of
linear programs by Jacobian smoothing methods",
Contact Author: Christian Kanzow, kanzow@math.uni-hamburg.de.
4. D. Li and M. Fukushima, "Globally convergent
Broyden-like methods for semismooth equations and
applications to VIP, NCP and MCP",
Contact Author: Donghui Li, dhli@mail.hunu.edu.cn.
5. M.K. Ng and W.C. Kwan, "High-Resolution color image
reconstruction with Neumann boundary conditions",
Contact Author: Michael Ng, kkpong@hkusua.hku.hk.
6. J. Nie and Y. Yuan, "A predictor-corrector
algorithm for QSDP combining both Dinkin-type and Neweton
centering steps",
Contact Author: Yaxiang Yuan, yyx@lsec.cc.ac.cn.
7. J. Shi, "A combined algorithm for fractional
programming",
Contact Author: Jianming Shi, j.shi@ms.kuki.sut.ac.jp.
8. J. Stoer, "High order long-step methods for solving
linear complementary problems",
Contact author: Josef Stoer, jstoer@mathematik.uni-wuerzburg.de.
9. J. Sun and J.P. Zhang, "Global convergence of
conjugate gradient methods without line search",
Contact author: Jie Sun, jsun@nus.edu.sg.
10. W. Sun and Y. Yuan, "Conic trust region method for
solving nonlinearly constrained optimization",
Contact author: Wenyu Sun, wysun@pine.njnu.edu.cn.
11. S.-Y. Wu, S.-C. Fang and C.-J. Lin, "Solve the
general capacity problem by relaxed cutting plane
approach",
Contact author: Soon-yi Wu, soonyi@mail.ncku.edu.tw.
12. C. Xu and J. Zhang, "A Survey of quasi-Newton
equations and quasi-Newton methods for optimization",
Contact author: Jianzhong Zhang, MAZHANG@cityu.edu.hk.
13. X. Yang and K.L. Teo, "Nonlinear Lagrangian
functions and applications to semi-infinite programs",
Contact author: Xiaoqi Yang, mayangxq@polyu.edu.hk.
14. S. Zhang, "On a profit maximizing location
model",
Contact author: Shuzhong Zhang, zhang@se.cuhk.edu.hk.
Part Two, Numerical Algebra
15. Z. Bai, "Modified block SSOR preconditioners for
symmetric positive definite linear systems",
Contact author: Zhong-Zhi Bai, bzz@lsec.cc.ac.cn.
16. J. Ding and Z. Wang, "Parallel computation of
invariant measures",
Contact author: Jiu Ding, jding@yizhi.st.usm.edu.
17. S. Fodor, "Symmetric and non-symmetric ABS methods
for solving diophantine systems of equations",
Contact author: Szabina Fodor, szabina.fodor@cs.bke.hu.
18. E. Jiang, "An extension of the roots separation
theorem",
Contact author: Erxiong Jiang, ejiang@fudan.edu.cn.
19. C. Li, "An adaptive CGNR algorithm for solving
large linear systems",
Contact author: Chunguang Li, cglizd@hotmail.com.
20. L. Lin and Z. Liu, "On the square root of H-matrix
with positive diagonal elements",
Contact author: Lu Lin, wxchen@jingxian.xmu.edu.cn.
21. W. Niethammer, "The successive over relaxation
method (SOR) and Markov chains",
Contact author: Wilhelm Niethammer, niethammer@math.uni-karlsruhe.de.
22. Y. Song, "Comparisons of block iterative
methods",
Contact author: Yongzhong Song, yzsong@pine.njnu.edu.cn.
23. Y. Wei and H. Wu, "Challenging problems on the
Perturbation of Drazin inverse",
Contact author: Yiming Wei, ymwei@fudan.edu.cn.
24. Q.-F. Xu, W.-W. Lin and F.-B. Yeh, "Invariant
subspace approach to linear H_{infinity}-control via
measurement feedback",
Contact author: Wen-Wei Lin, wwlin@amhp2.am.nthu.edu.tw.
EVOLUTIONARY OPTIMIZATION
International Series in Operations Research and Management
Science
Volume: 48
Kluwer Academic Publishers, USA
edited by
Ruhul Sarker
University of New South Wales, ADFA Campus, Canberra,
Australia
Masoud Mohammadian
University of Canberra, Australia
Xin Yao
The University of Birmingham, UK
The use of evolutionary computation techniques has grown considerably over the past several years. Over this time, the use and applications of these techniques have been further enhanced resulting in a set of computational intelligence (also known as modern heuristics) tools that are particularly adept for solving complex optimization problems. Moreover, they are charac-teristically robust and based on formal logics or mathematical programming for many real world OR/MS problems. Clearly there is a need for a volume that both reviews state-of-the-art evolutionary computation techniques, and surveys the most recent developments in their use for solving complex OR/MS problems. This volume on Eolutionary Optimization seeks to fill this need.
Evolutionary Optimization is a volume of invited papers written by leading researchers in the field. All papers were peer reviewed by at least two recognized reviewers. The book covers the foundation as well as the practical side of evolutionary optimization. The book contains seventeen chapters categorized into the following seven parts:
- Introduction (Conventional Optimization &
Evolutionary Computation)
- Single Objective Optimization
- Multiobjective Optimization
- Hybrid Algorithms
- Parameter Selection
- Applications of EAs to Practical Problems
- Applications of EAs to Theoretical Problems
Hardbound, ISBN 0-7923-7654-4, January 2002, 432 pp.
EUR 150.00 / USD 136.00 / GBP 96.00
URL of this book: http://www.wkap.nl/book.htm/0-7923-7654-4
Osyczka, A., Cracow University of Technology, Cracow, Poland
Evolutionary Algorithms for Single and Multicriteria Design Optimization
Springer-Verlag
GmbH & Co. KG
2002. XIV, 218 pp. 76
figs., 24 tabs. Hardcover
3-7908-1418-0
Recommended Retail
Price: EUR 54,95 *
Many design optimization problems are of a very complex nature and quite hard to solve by conventional optimization techniques. Genetic and evolutionary algorithms have recently received considerable attention because of their potential of being a very effective design optimization technique. The book starts with an introduction to design optimization which is followed by a description of genetic and evolutionary algorithms. Then the advanced evolutionary algorithm techniques are provided. These techniques are used in the single and multicriteria optimization methods described in this book. Finally three real-life design optimization problems are formulated and solved by means of these methods. The book is designed as a self-study guide for researchers and students in all engineering departments, especially in mechanical, civil and industrial engineering. The book may also be useful as a comprehensive text for operations researchers, artifical intelligence researchers.
Keywords: Design Optimization, Nonlinear Programming, Genetic and Evolutionary Algorithms, Single and Multicriteria Optimization
URL of this book is:
http://www.springer.de/cgi-bin/search_book.pl?isbn=3-7908-1418-0#english
The Australian Mathematics-in-Industry Study Group (MISG) was formed in 1984 and the first MISG Workshop was held that year in Melbourne. Nine industry projects were considered. The original workshop was based on the successful Oxford Model developed in the UK. Since then the Australian MISG Workshop has evolved in its own right as an important, innovative and internationally recognised annual event. Nevertheless the basic format has been retained. Projects are proposed by industry for presentation and solution at the Workshop. Participating companies are currently charged $4,400 per project for the service provided by MISG.
Since 1984 a total of 18 MISG Workshops have been conducted. During that time over 80 companies have participated with over 120 individual projects. The MISG Workshop was organised by CSIRO from 1984 to 1993 but was nevertheless staged at a University Campus. Since then the Workshop has been organised and staged by the University of Melbourne from 1994 to 1997, the Queensland University of Technology in 1998 and 1999 and by the University of South Australia in 2000, 2001 and 2002. Testimony to the success of the MISG Workshop is that 30% of companies have returned to the Workshop in future years.
The Workshop operates in the following way. On day one the participating Companies present their projects to all delegates. Days two to four are taken up with intensive brainstorming and analysis of each individual project within separate groups. Finally on the last day the project moderators present their findings. Depending on the outcomes within the week, additional work is carried out beyond MISG. This can be done via consulting, ARC or Linkage Research Grants, or via student projects. MISG publishes an "Equation Free Summary" a month or two after the event together with a full Mathematical description of the outcomes in the Proceedings.
There is no registration fee for MISG, however our delegates provide their services for free during the week, and are attracted by the unique and challenging nature of the projects presented.
The annual Mathematics-in-Industry Study Group Workshop (MISG) was once again held in Adelaide from February 11-15. This year six projects were presented from a range of Companies and Organisations, and the Workshop was attended by over 100 delegates from Universities in Australia, New Zealand, the UK the USA and Hong Kong. Included in these delegates were a number of Postgraduate and Undergraduate students, who, apart from using this as an excellent learning experience, made some significant contributions to the outcomes.
The projects considered this year were:
- Modelling the red wine cap in open vat fermenters
(Beringer Blass)
- Risk Analysis in supply delivery for the Electricity market
(ETSA Utilities)
- Scheduling the charging of batteries (Exide
Technologies)
- Identification of future ADF vehicles and trailer fleets
for project Overlander (DSTO)
- Grease recovery and dirt removal in wool scouring (GH
Michell)
- Terrain induced Slugging (Santos)
Significant progress was made on all projects. Equation free summaries will be published in May with the full Proceedings available later in the year.
The First Sino-Japan Optimization Meeting (SJOM 2000) was
held during October 26-28, 2000 in Hong Kong, China. It was
organized jointly by the City
University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Polytechnic
University. The Mathematical Programming Society (MPS), the
Chinese Mathematical Programming
Society, and the Research Association of Mathematical
Programming (RAMP) of Japan all endorsed the conference.
About 120 scholars from as many as 16
countries and regions attended the conference. It consisted
of 17 plenary talks, 37 invited talks and 60 contributed
talks.
A special issue of Journal of Computational and Applied
Mathematics (JCAM) is devoted to SJOM 2002 and will be
published later this year. This special
issue is edited by us. It contains 14 papers. The titles
and authors of these 14 papers are attached. All
papers were presented at the conference and were reviewed by
at least two independent referees.
In addition to the two organizing universities, the conference was also sponsored by the K.C. Wong Foundation which, in fact, constantly supports our efforts in promoting scientific exchange and advancement. We wish to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to all conference organizing, steering and local committee members, plenary and invited speakers, and session organizers for their contribution to the success of the conference. We greatly appreciate the support from the referees of all submissions to this issue for their careful and insightful review. Special thanks also go to Peggy Chan for her managerial work throughout the whole review period in preparing this issue.
We are very happy to see that this meeting has actually triggered a series of such academic events. Just now, when we just have finalized this special issue, the second meeting has been announced and will be held in Kyoto, Japan in September of this year. We believe that it will also be a successful meeting.
In February 2002, the POP Board discussed with the ICOTA
(The International Conference on Optimization: Techniques and
Applications) Steering Committee
and the SJOM (JSOM) (Sino-Japanese Optimization Meeting)
Steering Committee separately. They agreed that these two
conference series will be official
conference series of POP.
The first five conferences of ICOTA have been held in Singapore (1987 and 1992), Chendu, China (1995), Perth, Australia (1998), and Hong Kong (2001). The sixth ICOTA will be held in Victoria, Australia in 2004. It is held every three years since 1992.
The First SJOM was held in Hong Kong in 2000. The second JSOM will be held in Kyoto, Japan, in September this year. It will also be held every three years from now on.
In this way, we will have SJOM(JSOM) in 2002, 2005, etc,
ISMP in 2003, 2006, etc, ICOTA in 2004, 2007, etc. ICOTA and
SJOM(JSOM) series are run by their steering committees. The
lists of these two steering committees and their chairmen
will be on the POP webpage. People or institutions which are
interested in
organizing next ICOTA or SJOM conferences may contact their
corresponding steering committee chairmen.
The name for Huainan Institute of Technolog has been changed to the Anhui University of Science and Technology. It is located in Huainan City, Anhui Province, China. Anhui University of Science and Technology, The Institute of System Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing Normal University, and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University are organizing The Second International Conference on Optimization and Control with Applications (OCA 2002), which will be held in the Yellow Mountain Hotel, Tunxi City, Anhui Province, during August 18-22, this year. The webpage of OCA 2002 is
http://www.polyu.edu.hk/~ama/events/conference/OCA2002/an1.html
or
http://www.math.vt.edu/people/gao/conference/oca2002.html
Jan. 1, 2002 is 65th birthday of Academician of the Ukrainian Academy of Science, Professor Naum Z. Shor.
Professor Shor has worked and made outstanding contributions in nonlinear and stochastic programming, numerical techniques for nonsmooth optimization, discrete optimization problems, matrix optimization, dual quadratic bounds in multi-extremal programming problems.
Professor Shor's long professional life is tied to the V.M.Glushkov Institute of Cybernetics in Kiev, Ukraine. He started to work there in 1958 after graduating from the Kiev National Taras Shevchenko University by the invitation of Professor V.M.Glushkov, the supervisor of his diploma in differential algebra. He never changed his place of work. In this Institute he made his career from an engineer (1959) to the head of Department "Methods for solving complex optimization problems" (1983, till date).
Professor Shor is well known not only for the method of generalized gradient descent which he proposed in 1962, but also for the family of methods which involve space transformation:
(a) with space dilation in the direction of a subgradient;
(b) with space dilation in the direction of the difference of two succesive subgradients (the so-called r-algorithm).
It is interesting to note that well known ellipsoid method independently proposed by A.S.Nemirovsky and D.B.Yudin is a special case of Shor's subgradient type methods with the space dilation in the direction of a subgradient. The ellipsoid method enabled Khachiyan to construct the first polynomial-time linear programming algorithm and made a revolution in the computational complexity theory developed by M.Grotschel, M.Lovasz and A.Schrijver.
Professor Shor is the author and co-author of 180 research papers and 9 monographs. His last book "Nondifferentiable optimization and polynomial problems" (Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 1998) became a considerable scientific event. It contains the detailed review of non-differentiable optimization methods and its use in solving polynomial problems, great number of applications to discrete optimization problems, graph optimization problems, etc. Perhaps the most unexpected result is the links between non-convex polynomial problems with Hilbert's 17th problem regarding the representation of a nonnegative rational form as sum of squares of rational forms.
It is curious to note that in the recent years he did not touch the computer at all. Great experience in numerical methods and deep intuition permits him to fill all the details and guide the work of qualified programmers with fantastic professionalism. (It is worth to mention at least some of the members of Shor's team: Nicolai Zhurbenko, Petro Stetsyuk, Alexei Lykhovyd, Farid Sharifov, Oleg Berezovskii.)
Professor Shor had won several awards including the USSR (1981) and Ukrainian (1973, 1993, 2000) State Prize for science and technology, and he received the Glushkov and Michalevich Prizes for his recent and continuing work to develop numerical methods for solving large-scale problems.
In recognition of his fundamental contributions, Professor Shor was elected as Associate member of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences in 1990, and became a full member in 1998.
He holds professorships at the Kiev Branch of Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and National Technical University (Kiev Polytechnical Institute). It should be mentioned that he always helped young scientists by attentive and benevolent scientific consultations and recommendations. He never limited the field of their researches by the main direction of the works accomplished in the department. Now Professor Shor's 35 Ph.D. students are successfully working on different continents in different fields of applied mathematics.
He is admired and respected by all who had a chance to work with him throughout these forty four years of his career.
We are happy on occasion of his 65th anniversary to wish him a fruitful continuation of his rich scientific work.
Professor B. N. Pshnechnyi was one of the outstanding
Ukranian mathematicians in the second half of the 20th
Century. He was born in 1937 in the city of Kiev , the
capital of Ukraine. He graduated from Lviv University in the
year 1959. Then began his long and illustratious career in
mathematics in the Glushkov Institute of
Cybernetics in Kiev, where he was the chief of the
Department of Computational Methods in Optimization. He
remained in this institute for 37 years till 1996. Numerical
Optimization was one of the areas where Pshnechnyi made deep
and profound contributions. His linearization method
remains to be one of the most famous contributions to the
area of numerical optimization.
He had a wide range of mathematical interests which spanned from numerical optimization to convex analysis in Banach spaces and related topics. In his PhD dissertation he studied the distribution of the gas and water pipe networks in Kiev, which is a testimony of his ability to put theoretical mathematics to practical use. He also made deep contributions to optimization theory which he summed up in his first book entitled "Necessary Conditions for Extremum" ( 1969), which is a benchmark for the experts in the area of optimization theory. Using these theoretical ideas he developed numerical methods for solving general problems of mathematical programming with smooth data, methods for minimization of non-smooth functions with the fast converges and derivative-free methods. These important contributions appeared again in the form of a book entitled "Numerical Methods in Extremal Problems"( 1975) jointly with Danilin.
Pshnechnyi was one of the pioneer in applying the analysis of set-valued mappings in the study of convex optimization problems. His monograph entitled "Convex Analysis and Extremal Problems"(1980) is a one of the few monographs till date dealing with such a deep subject matter in optimization theory.
Apart from his wide ranging contributions to both numerical and theoretical optimization he also contributed to such diverse fields as Nonlinear Differential Games, Mathematical Economics and Optimal Control theory. He proposed a new approach to Nonlinear Differental Games which extended some of Pontryagin s ideas from the linear to the non-linear case. This approach is now called Pontryagin-Pshnechnyi method. He also published a book entitled "Differential Games" (1992) with Ostapenko.
He was a bright mathematician with a tremendous ability to produce simple solutions to seemingly very difficult problems. His outstanding intuition combined with rare analytical abilities allowed him to reach deep into the heart of a mathematical problem and to solve many dead end problems.
On the personal side he was a kind person with a charming personality. He was a very good singer and a very good friend who was widely loved and respected by the scientific community. He never accepted very high administrative posts which he thought would take away from him the freedom to do his science. On the other hand he liked the freedom, which his science can give him.
He had supervised more than fifty Ph.D. students and seven Doctors of Science and he was the founder and the head of a big scientific school in the field of optimization. He passed away in October 17th 2000 and with him ended one of the glorious periods in the history of Ukranian Mathematics.
(The French translation of this obituary was published in
MATAPLI (Publications of French Applied and Industrial
Mathematic Society) , No 66 October 2001).
About 20 years ago, the journal "Optimization" was founded by Professor Karl-Heinz Elster from the University of Technology Ilmenau (Germany) as a journal of mathematical programming and operations research. Today "Optimization" has been established as one of the leading journals in mathematical optimization.
The editors of Optimization welcome the submission of papers on a high mathematical level, which contain essential contributions to the current research directions in mathematical programming and operations research. Particulary papers on nonsmooth optimization, convex analysis, generalized convexity, game theory and discrete optimization are welcome.
All submitted papers will be strictly refereed. The editors of "Optimization" try to speed up the time of the refereeing process in order to keep the time from submission to the publication of an accepted paper as short as possible.
It should be pointed out that the level of papers in "Optimization" improved essentially in the last years and waiting time till publication became drastically shorter. The editors of "Optimization" invite the members of POP to submit high quality papers to "Optimization". Contributions from Asia-Pacific region should be sent to:
Professor Alex M. Rubinov
School of information Technology and Mathematical
Sciences
University of Ballarat
POB 663
Ballarat Victoria 3353
Australia
**********************************
Interviewee: Masao Iri
Interviewer: Masao Fukishima
Interview Date: January 2002
**********************************
1. Your full name, address and e-mail address:
IRI (family name) Masao (given name)
Department of Information and System Engineering,
Faculty of Science and Engineering, Chuo
University
1-13-27 Kasuga, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 112, Japan
iri@ise.chuo-u.ac.jp
2. Your highest degree, awarding institution and year:
Doctor of Engineering, The University of Tokyo,
1960
3. How many research papers have you published (including papers accepted for publication) in optimization?
About sixty to seventy papers. However, the number
depends on the definition of "optimization". I have about
220 research papers in all, and I presume one
third of them to have something to do with optimization.
This ambiguity, I think, comes from my tendency to like
interdisciplinary problems very much.
4. Your research interests:
Many! Including
Application of tensor analysis and differential geometry
to engineering system problems;
Topological theory of electric circuits;
Transportation and scheduling in operations
research;
Graphs, networks and matroids and their
applications;
Numerical methods including numerical quadrature and
solution of differential equations;
Structural analysis of large physical systems;
Automatic differentiation;
Linguistics and phonetics;
Computational geometry;
Geographic information systems (GIS); etc.
5. 3-5 of your most representative papers or books:
M. Iri: Network Flow, Transportation and Scheduling --- Theory and Algorithms. Academic Press, New York and London, 1969.
M. Iri: On the synthesis of loop and cutset matrices and the related problems. RAAG Memoirs, Vol.4 (1968), A-XIII, pp.4--38.
M. Iri: Maximum-rank minimum-term-rank theorem for the pivotal transforms of a matrix. Linear Algebra and Its Applications, Vol.2 (1969), pp.427--446.
M. Iri: On an extension of the maximum-flow
minimum-cut theorem to multicommodity flows. Journal of the
Operations Research Society of Japan, Vol.13,
No.3 (1971), pp.129--135.
M. Iri: Theory of uncontrollable flows --- A new type
of network- flow theory as a model for the 21st century of
multiple values. Computers and Mathematics
with Applications, Vol.35, No.10 (1998),
pp.107--123.
6. Please describe your major contributions in optimization.
I think I am not in the position of doing this kind of
evaluation but should entrust it to others. However, I could
say, what excited me most in my research career
was the exploitation of a number of applications of the
theory and techniques related to matroids to electric
networks and other physical systems.
7. Names of your Ph.D. students.
Since I am going to retire from the university
professorship in a year, I have no Ph.D. student now.
However, I am proud and pleased to have had a number of
excellent Ph.D. students during my university life. If
I were to mention only three names among them in the
optimization field, I think the following names should
be included:
Prof. Kazuo MUROTA of the University of Tokyo,
Prof. Hiroshi IMAI of the University of Tokyo
and
Prof. Takashi TSUCHIYA of the Research Institute of
Mathematical Statistics.
8. What are the most important recent development in the optimization branch you are working on? Please specify the name of the branch.
I have no definite idea about this inquiry.
Something comes to my mind at one time and another at another
time.
9. What are the most interesting unsolved problem in the optimization branch you are working on?
I prefer "unexpected" interesting problems to
"unsolved" problems. Although I have been committed to
solution of several unsolved problems such as graph
realizability problem, extension of max-flow min-cut
theorem to multicommodity flows, etc., I am always more
excited to know of, find or mould for myself a
novel problem theoretically interesting and practically
important.
I met Professor Iri twenty-five years ago, when I was a sophomore at University of Tokyo and he was a teacher in charge of a course named "theory of linear systems." This course covered mathematical treatments of various kinds of engineering systems such as electrical networks that can be modelled as linear systems. As I see now, this single course determined my future career.
Being an innocent and sceptical student, I asked a critical question about the way he proved the equivalence of two properties characterizing trees in a graph. Of course, I was ignorant that he was an expert in graphs. Instead of arguing the technicalities he encouraged me by saying "It is a good point!" and mentioned his book
M. Iri: Network Flow, Transportation and Scheduling --- Theory and Algorithms. Academic Press, New York and London, 1969
as a possible further reference. I read this, and was seduced to his discipline, called mathematical engineering.
For me Professor Iri has been the supervisor in mathematical engineering. It is, therefore, somewhat strange to me to categorize him as an optimizer --- I am pretty sure he agrees. As he says in the Interview, his research activities have had a lot to do with optimization, but never been confined in the "current" paradigms of optimization. It seems that he does not like to play games of others' invention, but he wants to play by making games for others.
The first game he offered to me was a numerical quadrature formula, the IMT (Iri-Moriguti-Takasawa) formula that he invented in 1970. This was the topic of my Bachelor's thesis, in which I struggled for an "optimal" quadrature formula.
The biggest game I enjoyed was the Dulmage-Mendelsohn type decompositions of matrices like in:
M. Iri: Maximum-rank minimum-term-rank theorem for the pivotal transforms of a matrix. Linear Algebra and Its Applications, Vol.2 (1969), pp.427--446.
This establishes a min-max duality of matroid-theoretic nature, but purely in linear-algebraic terms. What is surprising is that he derived this result from scratch without using machinery of matroid theory. This is possible in principle, but would be almost impossible without strong motivations and insights from applications.
Professor Iri knew a lot. Not always could I understand what he said. In such cases I remembered what he said as bit strings in the hope that I would be able to understand someday, maybe several years later. Here I would like to mention a paper that fascinated me:
M. Iri: "Dualities" in graph theory and in the
related fields viewed from the metamathematical
standpoint.
In "Graph Theory and Algorithms," Lecture Notes in
Computer Science, 108, Springer, 1981, pp. 124-136,
although some bit strings still remain with me.
What did I learn from Professor Iri after all? Matching?
Voronoi diagram? Matroids? Invariance? Certainly yes, but I
would say I also learned something more
fundamental or spiritual, something that may be denoted as
"aesthetics" in mathematical engineering.
I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Professor Iri for being the everlasting "father image" to me.
As you all would know, research fields of Professor Masao
Iri are very wide and deep, and in this regard he would show
his different face, among many faces, to each of his
colleagues and students. I was very lucky to have a chance
to be involved in optimizing pen movements of a plotter by
reducing wasteful movements when I was an undergraduate
student. The problem is theoretically the well-known Chinese
postman problem, but a point here is to find an good
approximate Chinese postman tour by approximately solving the
planar weighted matching problem using planar structure.
Even from this beginning, my luck was to see his
combinatorial optimization aspect and also geometric aspect
both. Both strongly attracted me, and this made me write my
Master's Thesis on Network-Flow Approaches to Lower-Truncated
Matroids, and my Doctoral Thesis on Computational Geometry,
both under the supervision of Professor Iri. Surely, he was
a pioneer of algorithmic combinatorial optimization through
network flow theory and further matroid theory with
applications to engineering problems, and also a
pioneer of computational geometry, and I really learned so
many things from his leadership and research establishments
in both fields.
His network flow theory stresses both algorithmic part and duality. He is the first person who gave a polynomial-time graph realization problem in mid-1960's. His theorem on the optimality of multi-commodity flow based on linear programming theory is often cited as a Japanese theorem in literatures on multi-commodity flows. His algorithmic matroid theory has fruitful applications in circuit analysis, and clarifies the most beautiful structure in combinatorial optimization. He also emphasizes experimental analyses of developed combinatorial algorithms. He encourages us to use real data, so that near us we had a real road network of Tokyo and Kanto district even in early 1980's, and performed computational experiments, say of maximum flow algorithms and shortest path algorithms, on those real graphs.
He introduced us a new field, computational geometry, in early 1980's, and pushed us to work on Voronoi diagrams, convex hulls, etc. I strongly realize that all of my research stems from his inspiration and deep insight for new fields. One of big motivations for him to put emphasis on computational geometry is its connection with Geographical Information System, GIS for short. As a professor in the University of Tokyo, he has been involved in so many governmental committees, and one of his main themes there is developments of GIS in Japan. With his leadership, the first book on computational geometry with applications to GIS was published in 1980's, and even now its updated version has been sold well. Concerning GIS, he devoted himself to standardization work, about which I have been working with him nowadays.
Professor Iri thus always points research directions, gives nice guidance to his research group members, and points out what the essence of research profoundly. Now I am working as a professor, and I eagerly wish I could act as Professor Iri to my colleagues near myself, although this would be an unfinished dream.
It is my great honor to contribute an article dedicated to Prof. Masao Iri to POP News Letter. It was 1984 when I joined the laboratory of Prof. Iri at the Department of Mathematical Engineering of University of Tokyo as a master student. At that time, Prof. Iri was early fifties, and I was twenty three. It has passed almost twenty years since then. Time passes so quickly!
In 1984, Prof. Iri was getting involved in the research of fast automatic differentiation. The topic he gave to me was numerical experiments of this algorithm in a simulation of a real-world chemical plant. I was quite slow in progress, and he was quite patient but tough with me. I remember that the first version of the manuscript of my paper on fast automatic differentiation got completely red with full of his corrections and suggestions. It was very hard for me to be supervised by a professor whose standard I could hardly meet. But I should say still it was lucky to me, even though it was bad luck to him! Throughout the two years of my master course, I learned many things from him, in particular, the basic attitudes as a scholar, how seriously and carefully we should conduct research, other than mathematics and mathematical engineering. Since then, he provided many opportunities and chances explicitly and implicitly for me.
After graduating my master course, I joined the Institute
of Statistical Mathematics (ISM) in 1986. In my master
course, I made acquaintance with Prof. Kunio
Tanabe of ISM who was interested in fast automatic
differentiation. Prof. Tanabe gave me a chance to give a
talk at ISM, and I got interested in working at the
institute. Prof. Iri supported me to get a position at ISM
as an assistant professor under Prof. Tanabe. ISM seemed to
be a very nice place, but just as a master course student, I
was not confident on my ability in research. One day I
expressed my hesitation to Prof. Iri. Then Prof. Iri said
"you can do something if you work hard" I still recall this
word of Prof. Iri once in a while.
Prof. Iri also helped me with his work and the environments he provided. After a while since I joined the institute, I started working on interior-point algorithms under the guidance of Prof. Tanabe. At that time, there was no Web, no e-mail, and it was much more difficult to know what is going on in the forefront of the field. Even though it was not his main business, Prof. Iri made an important contribution to this field with Prof. Hiroshi Imai by proposing a potential reduction algorithm. This algorithm is now called Iri and Imai's algorithm. Because of this work, many researchers sent their technical reports on interior-point algorithms to him. Prof. Iri used to leave all technical reports in his laboratory which he received. Therefore, these reports were systematically available to the members of his laboratory. So, I had chances to know many interesting papers on interior-point algorithms when I visited his laboratory once in a while. Some of these papers were quite inspiring to me and they played fundamental roles in my research.
Local convergence of Iri and Imai's algorithm is one of the first topics I studied. As a young researcher, I learned many things from their algorithm --- not only the theory of interior-point algorithms but also basic subjects such as linear algebra and linear programming. Through this research, I became interested in boundary behavior of interior-point algorithms, and further continued to study global convergence of Dikin's affine scaling algorithm. Without Iri and Imai's algorithm, my career would have been completely different.
However, interior-point algorithm is just a small portion of Prof. Iri's research, though it is a main subject to me. Even "optimization" would not be enough as a word to describe his area of research. In order to give an overview of his work and his career, I would like to quote the foreword of the special issue of "Optimization Method and Software" celebrating Prof. Iri's 65th birthday in the end of this article. The issue was published in 1999 as Optimization Methods and Software, Vol.10, No.2. I served as a co-editor with Prof. Masao Fukushima for this special issue.
Prof. Iri is going to be seventy next year. I would like to express my cordial thanks to him for all what he did for us. I wish his health, and hope that his ever lasting activity continues long!
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Foreword
This special issue of Optimization Methods and Software is to commemorate the 65th birthday of Professor Masao Iri. He had made significant contributions to the journal, principally as the Regional Editor for Asia since its inception in 1992.
Professor Iri was born in Tokyo on January 7, 1933. His interest in science probably stems in part from his desire for invariant truth during the drastic change of societal, political and economic systems of Japan after World War II. He entered the University of Tokyo in 1951, and chose Mathematical Engineering as his major. After finishing his undergraduate work in the Department of Applied Physics (Mathematical Engineering Section) in 1955, he continued his graduate study under the supervision of Professor Kazuo Kondo, and was engaged in graph and network theory research with applications to industrial problems. He obtained his Doctor of Engineering in 1960; the title of his thesis was "On the Basic Theory of General Information Networks and its Applications."
After finishing his doctorate, he was immediately employed as a research assistant of the Department of Communication Engineering at Kyushu University, where he was quickly promoted to associate professor. Two years later, he returned to Tokyo as an associate professor in the Department of Mathematical Engineering and Instrumentation Physics, the same department which he had graduated from, but now under a new name. He became a full professor in 1973, continuing to teach and supervise a large number of undergraduate and graduate students until his retirement at age 60 in 1993. In his last seven years at the University of Tokyo, he became involved in administrative work, serving as Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and as Vice-President of the University. After retirement from the University of Tokyo, he became a professor of the Department of Information and Systems Engineering at Chuo University in Tokyo, where he continues his research and teaching.
He has written more than two hundred papers and is the author of more than ten distinguished books in various fields of operations research, applied mathematics and computer science. He has served in an editorial capacity on a number of domestic and international journals including the Journal of Operations Research Society of Japan, Optimization Methods and Software and Mathematical Programming. He organized a number of domestic and international academic meetings including the 13th International Symposium on Mathematical Programming held in Tokyo in 1988 where he took the role of chairman of the organizing committee. He has been elected as the president of several academic societies such as the Japan Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and the Operations Research Society of Japan. He has also worked for the government as a chairman and a member of several important committees.
For these long-time invaluable contributions to scientific research and education, Professor Iri has received several lifetime achievement awards including "Purple Medal Award" from the prime minister of Japan, which is one of the most distinguished awards in the fields of liberal arts, social and natural sciences and technology in Japan.
At the start of his research career in 1955, one of his main interests was to establish a foundation of graph and network theory applicable to industrial problems, particularly the analysis of electric circuits. Professor Iri culminated this work in 1969 by publishing (in English) the book "Network Flow, Transportation and Scheduling" (Academic Press). His research interest shifted to the development of matroid theory from an application viewpoint. He worked extensively on this topic, till the early 1980's often collaborating with younger colleagues. In the 11th International Symposium on Mathematical Programming held in Bonn in 1982, he delivered a state-of-the-art tutorial lecture on applications of matroid theory. The survey paper "Applications of matroid" published in the proceedings of the symposium "Mathematical Programming --- The State of the Art of Mathematical Programming, Bonn 1982" (Springer--Verlag) is a clear exposition of how he developed his ideas in one of the main streams of his research.
From the early 1980's, he started working on a new field, computational geometry which was still in its infancy. Together with his young laboratory colleagues, he developed the idea of bucketing methods with successful applications to many practical problems such as Voronoi diagrams and point location problems. During this research he had close contact with many people from industry and government, explaining to them his vision of this technology. While this research started nearly twenty years ago, it is only recently that these technologies have really been implemented as a fundamental infrastructure under the name of GIS (Geographic Information Systems).
Another indication of Professor Iri's vision is his research into automatic differentiation. Although this method is now very popular and is known as a standard method for computing derivatives of complicated functions, only a few people appreciated potentiality of this idea during the l980's. He is well known in this field as one of those who proposed the so-called reverse mode. Together with his young colleagues, he demonstrated the significance of this method by applying it to real world problems and by conducting software development to utilize this technology.
His research covers a broad area of operations research, applied mathematics and computer science. Apart from the work described above, Professor Iri left a number of important contributions such as Iri's coordinate in phonetics (1959), IMT (Iri-Moriguti-Takasawa) quadrature formula (1970), Matsui and Iri's floating-point representation of numbers in numerical analysis (1980) and Iri and Imai's interior-point algorithm for linear programming (1986).
This issue contains 19 papers contributed from those who have had some interaction with Professor Iri, some as students and some as research collaborators. The topics were restricted to the scope of this journal, but the themes of the papers remain widespread --- graph theory, matroid theory, combinatorial linear algebra, computational complexity, combinatorial optimization, computational geometry, interior-point algorithms, enumeration algorithms, automatic differentiation, chemical engineering, financial engineering, urban engineering, and DNA sequence analysis. This truly reflects Professor Iri's wide interests in many fields of mathematical engineering.
We would like to sincerely thank all of the contributors and the referees for their efforts and collaboration to bring this issue to fruition, and would like to close this foreword with the following words to Professor Iri ---
It is our great pleasure to express our deep respect and thanks to you on this occasion of the publication of a special issue celebrating your 65th birthday. We wish you, your wife Yumi and your family continued health and happiness. We are very confident that your research, that has guided and inspired us all for so long, will also continue well into the next millennium.
Masao Fukushima
Takashi Tsuchiya
Ehrgott, M., University of Auckland, New Zealand
Multicriteria Optimization
Springer-Verlag Heidelberg
Series: Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems,
vol. 491
2000. VIII, 243 pp. Softcover
Written for students
Recommended Retail Price: EUR 45,95 *
The book provides an introduction to multicriteria optimization. It covers theoretical topics such as existence of optimal solutions as well as methodological issues. A classification of multicriteria optimization problems is developed and used as a guideline throughout the book. First, fundamental solution concepts are defined and their properties and relations discussed. Then a variety of methods to find optimal solutions is described. Chapters on multicriteria linear optimization, uncommon solution concepts, and combinatorial problems conclude the book. The text contains material which cannot be found in other textbooks on the subject, because several chapters are based on new research results. It is suitable for a mathematically oriented course on multicriteria optimization. The material can be covered in the order in which it is presented, but it is also possible to select topics from various chapters. The exercises at the end of each chapter provide possibilities to practice as well as some outlooks to more general settings, when appropriate.
URL of this book is:
http://www.springer.de/cgi-bin/search_book.pl?isbn=3-540-67869-7#english
According to a legend, Erice, son of Venus and Neptune, founded a small town on the top of a mountain more than three thousand years ago. Notwithstanding the several changes, the small town Erice maintains an old, fascinating structure made by bricks and stones.
On 1963, a group of scientists founded in Erice an international Centre for the development of culture and science. Within the Centre, the School of Mathematics has carried out several international meetings, both in pure and applied areas. In about 30 years, the School has realized 37 meetings with the participation of more than 2,000 scholars (not only mathematicians) from many countries. Some of the meetings have been devoted to the theory and applications of Optimization. For instance, Conferences on Nonlinear Optimization and related fields have been organized by Profs. V.F.Dem'yanov, G.Di Pillo, F.H.Clarke, R.Conti, L. Qi, K. L. Teo, X. Q.Yang, F.Maffioli, A.Maugeri, E.De Giorgi since the year 1984. Many prominent experts in the field delivered their lectures on these conferences.
Last year it was two meetings:
1) High performance algorithms and software for nonlinear
optimization, directed by G. Di Pillo and A. Murli;
2) Optimization and Control with Applications directed by
L.Qi and K.L. Teo
This year, on June 18-25, there will be two meetings (in
parallel):
1) "Mathematical diagnostics" directed by V.F.Dem'yanov and
M.Gaudioso;
2) "Stochastic methods in decision and game theory with
applications" directed by M. Scarsini.
Both of these meetings closely related to optimization. In particular, mathematical diagnostics includes application of different nonsmooth and global optimization methods to data classification and clustering. The workshop "Mathematical diagnostics" is endorsed by POP.
Next year, there will be also two meetings:
1) "Variational analysis and Applications" directed by F.
Giannessi and A. Maugeri
2) "Mathematical models in aerospace engineering" directed by
A. Fradiani and A. Miele
For details, please click here.
Optimization Day is an annual event of growing popularity and is proving to be the premier optimization gathering in Australia. Last year it was held just out of Adelaide in McLaren Vale, one of South Australia's premier wine producing districts, which is renowned for its natural beauty. It was held on September 27, 2001 and was back-to-back with the 16th national conference of the Australian Society for Operations Research.
A refereed proceedings is being published by Kluwer in its Applied Optimization Series, as was done for the Melbourne, Perth and Ballarat Optimization Day meetings. The editors are Emma Hunt and Charles Pearce, the organisers of the meeting.
Optimization Day 2001 involved about 20 talks on a variety of topics. Alex Rubinov was a sparkling guest speaker.
Arrangements proved a little more turbulent than expected as a result of the meeting being only two weeks after September 11 and the closely following collapse of Ansett, one of Australia's two major airlines. A number of participants, both from inside and outside Australia, were unable to come as a result. Many Australian delegates drove distances up to 3000 km when they couldn't obtain replacement flight tickets. Their efforts went a long way to ensuring the success of the event. Those who came by car from interstate included our guest speaker and members of his group. Particular thanks are due also to Andrew Gill, Liz Cousins, Jadranka Sunde and Rowland Dickinson for valuable help in organising the meeting.
Optimization Day 2002 will be held in Perth on October 3,
2002 in conjunction with the Industrial Optimization
Symposium (Sept. 30--Oct. 2). It is being
organised by Louis Caccetta through the Western Australian
Centre of Excellence in Industrial Optimization.
