Optimization of Stochastic Models: The Interface Between Simulation and Optimization
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#1998 Operational Research Society Ltd. All rights reserved. 0160-5682/98 $12.00 http://www.stockton-press.co.uk/jor
Book Selection Edited by JM Wilson M Dell'Amico, F Maf®oli and S Martello (Eds): Annotated Bibliographies in Combinatorial Optimization G Ch P¯ug: Optimization of Stochastic Models: The Interface Between Simulation and Optimization K Evans: Rivers Statistical Compendium PJ Lederer and US Karmarkar (Eds): The Practice of Quality Management
Annotated Bibliographies in Combinatorial Optimization M Dell'Amico, F Maf®oli and S Martello (Eds) John Wiley and Sons, Chichester, 1997. xiii 495 pp. £60.00 ISBN 0 471 96574 This is a very useful book. The editors have collected 25 chapters together of about twenty pages each of which reviews the ®eld for a particular topic in combinatorial optimization. The style and layout of each chapter is uniformÐintroduction to the topic, review of major books and surveys of the ®eld and then a series of sections on the subdivisions of the topic where the major papers are identi®ed, described and assessed. The editors have chosen well for their set of contributors and many experts in the ®eld are involved: Roos and Terlaky cover LP with emphasis on interior point methods; Lenstra and his colleagues discuss sequencing and scheduling; Rinaldi and colleagues describe the travelling salesman problem; Ahuja et al. provide three chapters on network related issues; Laporte covers vehicle routing; Labbe and Louveaux describe location. All the chapters are written well and contain illuminating comments on the research they annotate, such as ` . . . heuristic is unrivalled among . . . ' and ` . . . implementation effort is substantial . . . '. This is a book that will rarely be read from cover to cover but is one to dip into to ®nd the necessary background. The book is aimed at researchers but will also provide a helpful introduction to a topic for anyone with an interest in a particular ®eld. I have already found several chapters particularly useful for ongoing work. The emphasis of the book is on work that has appeared over the last ten years or so, as it is intended that the book complements the earlier bibliography edited by O'hEigeartaigh et al.1 As is to be expected, much has been published since the earlier book appeared in 1985. Randomised algorithms, interior point methods, genetic algorithms, tabu
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search and simulated annealing provide examples of topics which scarcely existed in the mid 1980s. However, the book has not neglected older research and each chapter introduces ground-breaking research from the 1980s onwards in its introduction to the topic. Several disappointments are inevitable in a work of this kind. Firstly, it may not be possible to ®nd a key point regarding one of the topics, for example who ®rst established that a problem is NP-hard, and the reader may have to try the earlier bibliography.1 Secondly, there is not always an explicit section in a chapter covering applications or software. When there is a software section it is extremely
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