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Most textbooks on business process management focus on either the nuts and bolts of computer simulation or the managerial aspects of business processes. Covering both technical and managerial aspects of business process management, Business Process Modeling, Simulation and Design, Second Edition presents the tools to design effective business processes and the management techniques to operate them efficiently. Taking an analytical modeling approach to process design, this book illustrates the power of simulation modeling as a vehicle for analyzing and designing business processes. It teaches how to apply process simulation and discusses the managerial implications of redesigning processes. The ExtendSim software is available online and ancillaries are available for instructors.

This book, written in form of a set of tutorials, illustrates practical applications of metaheuristics in the area of business analytics. It addresses key problems in prescriptive analytics that can be be formulated as optimization models and describes how metaheuristic methods can be used to find high-quality solutions. Readers are introduced to decision-making problems for which metaheuristics are most effective. The book not only shows business problem modeling on spreadsheets but also provides a roadmap on how to developed metaheuristic solutions using Visual Basic for Applications code.

Scatter Search (SS) —together with its generalized form called Path Relinking— constitutes the only evolutionary approach that embraces a collection of principles from Tabu Search (TS), an approach popularly regarded to be divorced from evolutionary procedures. The TS perspective, which is responsible for introducing adaptive memory strategies into the metaheuristic literature (at purposeful level beyond simple inheritance mechanisms), may at first seem to be at odds with population-based approaches. Yet this perspective equips SS with a remarkably effective foundation for solving a wide range of practical problems. The successes documented by Scatter Search come not so much from the adoption of adaptive memory in the range of ways proposed in Tabu Search (except where, as often happens, SS is advantageously coupled with TS), but from the use of strategic ideas initially proposed for exploiting adaptive memory, which blend harmoniously with the structure of Scatter Search. .

Faced with the challenge of solving hard optimization problems that abound in the real world, classical methods often encounter great difficulty —even when equipped with a theoretical guarantee of finding an optimal solution. Vitally important applications in business, engineering, economics and science cannot be tackled with any reasonable hope of success, within practical time horizons, by solution methods that have been the predominant focus of academic research throughout the past three decades (and which are still the focus of many textbooks). The impact of technology and the advent of the computer age have presented us with the need (and opportunity) to solve a range of problems that could scarcely have been envisioned in the past.