Brett Stevens 

(Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Simon Fraser University University) 

Resolutions and Resolvability: Substructures in combinatorial designs and their utility towards solving hard combinatorial optimization problems

Abstract

 
I will give a talk, accessible to a broad audience, describing 3 central research areas and a framework unifying them.  A resolution class in a design is a set of disjoint blocks whose union
is the entire set.  A design is resolvable if it can be partitioned into resolutions.  I will discuss the use of resolutions and resolvability to optimize the construction of covering and packing arrays, both hard combinatorial optimization problems with important industrial applications.  I will close with the use of resolvable designs to solve scheduling problems.  In all cases I will give background information, definitions and applications, state current results and discuss future directions.
 
Last updated by  am@charlie.iit.edu  on 02/07/01