Frank Kwang-ming Hwang

The need for optimal partition arises from many real-world problems involving the distribution of limited resources to many users. The “clustering” problem, which has recently received a lot of attention, is a special case of optimal partitioning. This book is the first attempt to collect all theoretical developments of optimal partitions, many of them derived by the authors, in an accessible place for easy reference. Much more than simply collecting the results, the book provides a general framework to unify these results and present them in an organized fashion.Many well-known practical problems of optimal partitions are dealt with. The authors show how they can be solved using the theory — or why they cannot be. These problems include: allocation of components to maximize system reliability; experiment design to identify defectives; design of circuit card library and of blood analyzer lines; abstraction of finite state machines and assignment of cache items to pages; the division of property and partition bargaining as well as touching on those well-known research areas such as scheduling, inventory, nearest neighbor assignment, the traveling salesman problem, vehicle routing, and graph partitions. The authors elucidate why the last three problems cannot be solved in the context of the theory.

The need of optimal partition arises from many real-world problems involving the distribution of limited resources to many users. The “clustering” problem, which has recently received a lot of attention, is a special case of optimal partitioning. This book is the first attempt to collect all theoretical developments of optimal partitions, many of them derived by the authors, in an accessible place for easy reference. Much more than simply collecting the results, the book provides a general framework to unify these results and present them in an organized fashion.Many well-known practical problems of optimal partitions are dealt with. The authors show how they can be solved using the theory — or why they cannot be. These problems include: allocation of components to maximize system reliability; experiment design to identify defectives; design of circuit card library and of blood analyzer lines; abstraction of finite state machines and assignment of cache items to pages; the division of property and partition bargaining as well as touching on those well-known research areas such as scheduling, inventory, nearest neighbor assignment, the traveling salesman problem, vehicle routing, and graph partitions. The authors elucidate why the last three problems cannot be solved in the context of the theory.

Pooling designs have been widely used in various aspects of DNA sequencing. In biological applications, the well-studied mathematical problem called “group testing” shifts its focus to nonadaptive algorithms while the focus of traditional group testing is on sequential algorithms. Biological applications also bring forth new models not previously considered, such as the error-tolerant model, the complex model, and the inhibitor model. This book is the first attempt to collect all the significant research on pooling designs in one convenient place.The coverage includes many real biological applications such as clone library screening, contig sequencing, exon boundary finding and protein-protein interaction detecting and introduces the mathematics behind it.

The first edition of this book covered in depth the mathematical theory of nonblocking multistage interconnecting networks, which is applicable to both communication and computer networks. This comprehensively updated version puts more emphasis to the multicast and multirate networks which are under fast development recently due to their wide applications. This comprehensively updated new edition not only introduces the classical theory of the fundamental point-to-point network but also has a renewed emphasis on the latest multicast and multirate networks. The book can serve as either a one- or two-semester textbook for graduate students of information science, (electronic) communications, and applied mathematics. In addition, as all the relevant literature is organized and evaluated under one structured framework, the volume is an essential reference for researchers in those areas.

Group testing has been used in medical, chemical and electrical testing, coding, drug screening, pollution control, multiaccess channel management, and recently in data verification, clone library screening and AIDS testing. The mathematical model can be either combinatorial or probabilistic. This book summarizes all important results under the combinatorial model, and demonstrates their applications in real problems. Some other search problems, including the famous counterfeit-coins problem, are also studied in depth.There are two reasons for publishing a second edition of this book. The first is the usual need to update the text (after six years) and correct errors. The second — and more important — reason is to accommodate the recent sudden growth of interest in applying the idea of group testing to clone library screening. This development is much more than just a new application, since the new application brings with it new objectives which require a new twist of theory. It also embraces the growing importance of two topics: nonadaptive algorithms and error tolerance. Two new chapters, one on clone library screening and the other on error tolerance, have been added. Also included is a new chapter on counterfeit coins, the most famous search problem historically, which recently drew on an unexpected connection to some deep mathematical theory to yield new results. Finally, the chapters have been reorganized into parts to provide focuses and perspectives.

This book is a collection of surveys and exploratory articles about recent developments in the field of computational Euclidean geometry. Topics covered include the history of Euclidean geometry, Voronoi diagrams, randomized geometric algorithms, computational algebra, triangulations, machine proofs, topological designs, finite-element mesh, computer-aided geometric designs and Steiner trees. This second edition contains three new surveys covering geometric constraint solving, computational geometry and the exact computation paradigm.

Group testing was first proposed for blood tests, but soon found its way to many industrial applications. Combinatorial group testing studies the combinatorial aspect of the problem and is particularly related to many topics in combinatorics, computer science and operations research. Recently, the idea of combinatorial group testing has been applied to experimental designs, coding, multiaccess computer communication, clone library screening and other fields. This book is the first attempt to cover the theory and applications of combinatorial group testing in one place.