This book addresses a seemingly simple question: Can a certain amount of gas be transported within a pipeline network? The question is difficult, however, when asked in relation to a meshed nationwide gas transportation network and when taking into account technical details and discrete decisions, as well as regulations, contracts, and varying demands involved. This book provides an introduction to the field of gas transportation planning and discusses in detail the advantages and disadvantages of several mathematical models that address gas transport within the context of the technical and regulatory framework. It shows how to solve the models using sophisticated mathematical optimization algorithms and includes examples of large-scale applications of mathematical optimization to this real-world industrial problem.

This book provides a thorough and up-to-date discussion of arc routing by world-renowned researchers. Organized by problem type, the book offers a rigorous treatment of complexity issues, models, algorithms, and applications.

Arc Routing: Problems, Methods, and Applications opens with a historical perspective of the field and is followed by three sections that cover complexity and the Chinese Postman and the Rural Postman problems, the Capacitated Arc Routing Problem and routing problems with min-max and profit maximization objectives, and important applications, including meter reading, snow removal, and waste collection.

The power grid can be considered one of twentieth-century engineering's greatest achievements, and as grids and populations grow, robustness is a factor that planners must take into account. Power grid robustness is a complex problem for two reasons: the underlying physics is mathematically complex, and modeling is complicated by lack of accurate data.

This book sheds light on this complex problem by

• introducing the engineering details of power grid operations from the basic to the detailed;

• describing how to use optimization and stochastic modeling, with special focus on the modeling of cascading failures and robustness;  

• providing numerical examples that show “how things work”; and

• detailing the application of a number of optimization theories to power grids.

Vehicle routing problems, among the most studied in combinatorial optimization, arise in many practical contexts (freight distribution and collection, transportation, garbage collection, newspaper delivery, etc.). Operations researchers have made significant developments in the algorithms for their solution, and Vehicle Routing: Problems, Methods, and Applications, Second Edition reflects these advances. The text of the new edition is either completely new or significantly revised and

• provides extensive and complete state-of-the-art coverage of vehicle routing by those who have done most of the innovative research in the area;

• emphasizes methodology related to specific classes of vehicle routing problems and, since vehicle routing is used as a benchmark for all new solution techniques, contains a complete overview of current solutions to combinatorial optimization problems;

• includes several chapters on important and emerging applications, such as disaster relief and green vehicle routing.