Public inoculation centers are examples of facilities providing service to customers whose demand is elastic to travel and waiting time. That is, people will not travel too far, or stay in line for too long to obtain the service. The goal, when planning such services, is to maximize the demand they attract, by locating centers and staffing them so as to reduce customers' travel time and time spent in queue. In the case of inoculation centers, the goal is to maximize the people that travel to the centers and stay in line until inoculated. We propose a procedure for the allocation of multiple servers to centers, so that this goal is achieved. An integer programming model is formulated. Since demand is elastic, a supply-demand equilibrium equation must be explicitly included in the optimization model, which then becomes nonlinear. As there are no exact procedures to solve such problems, we propose a heuristic procedure, based on Heuristic Concentration, which finds a good solution to this problem. Numerical examples are presented.

We consider the NP Hard problems of online Bin Covering and Packing while requiring that larger (or longer, in the one dimensional case) items be placed at the bottom of the bins, below smaller (or shorter) items — we call such a version, the LIB version of problems. Bin sizes can be uniform or variable. We look at computational studies for both the Best Fit and Harmonic Fit algorithms for uniform sized bin covering. The Best Fit heuristic for this version of the problem is introduced here. The approximation ratios obtained were well within the theoretical upper bounds. For variable sized bin covering, a more thorough analysis revealed definite trends in the maximum and average approximation ratios. Finally, we prove that for online LIB bin packing with uniform size bins, no heuristic can guarantee an approximation ratio better than 1.76 under the online model considered.

Nous modélisons ici plusieurs problèmes de Transport et de Gestion de Flux à l'aide d'un flot entier et d'un multiflot fractionnaire couplés par une contrainte de capacité. Pour le problème ainsi obtenu, nous proposons différents schémas de résolution par relaxation et décomposition, qui induisent la recherche d'un flot auxiliaire dont la partie entière supérieure doit minimiser un certain coût, et qui requièrent la mise en œuvre d'un processus d'agrégation. Nous en déduisons diverses heuristiques que nous testons.