Computational-Operational Challenges

Solving large combinatorial optimization problems is a ubiquitous task across multiple disciplines. Developing efficientprocedures for solving these problems has been of great interest to both researchers and practitioners. Over the last half century, vast amounts of research have been devoted to studying various methods in tackling these problems. These methods can be divided into two categories, heuristic methods and exact algorithms. Heuristic methods can often lead to near optimal solutions in a relatively time efficient manner, but provide no guarantees on optimality. Exact algorithms guarantee optimality, but are often very time consuming.