Equitable Resource Allocation (eBook)

HANAN LUSS, PhD, serves as an Adjunct Professor, teaching operations research courses at Columbia University. Dr. Luss was at AT&T Bell Laboratories/AT&T Labs for twenty-five years, serving as technical manager of the Operations Research Studies Group, and at Telcordia Technologies for twelve years, serving as senior scientist. He led research activities and applied work with an emphasis on operations research methodologies for resource allocation, communication network design, capacity expansion, manufacturing, and related topics. A Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), Dr. Luss has published over seventy papers in major refereed journals and books and has been granted more than ten patents.

I am very pleased to have this book available. Algorithms for equitable resource allocation are extremely useful in a variety of practical application areas, but are not as widely known as they should be among engineering and operations research professionals. Much of the research has taken place in the last 20 years or so, and had been scattered among various journals. It has now been brought together into one coherent and convenient volume. Dr. Luss does an excellent job of motivating the various models and of describing the algorithms in a logical step-by-step fashion. The set of problems that can be solved using these lexicographic min-max algorithms is quite broad. Initially, they were developed to solve resource allocation problems in the manufacturing area. Specifically, they addressed the question of how to allocate electronic components to various product lines, when there was a shortage of components. This can be naturally extended to allocating other sorts of scarce resources (e.g. manpower, computing resources, funding). But what I find exciting is that these very same mathematical programming techniques can be directly applied to problems that seem totally unrelated. For example, they can be used to impute a traffic matrix for a packet communications network (such as the network operated by an Internet Service Provider). I wholeheartedly recommend this book to professionals - both in academia and in industry - in Operations Research, Management Science, Industrial Engineering, Telecommunications and Computer Science. -John G. Klincewicz