Academics research Alternative Minimum Cost Method

• Accounting forbenefitsandcostsof urban greenspace, McPherson, E. G. (1992). Accounting for benefits and costs of urban greenspace.Landscape and Urban Planning,22(1), 41-51. Urban greenspace provides many environmental and social services that contribute to the quality of life in cities. Economic approaches used to estimate value of greenspace services include travel cost, willingness to pay, hedonic pricing and tree valuation. These methods have limited utility for policy-makers, planners, and managers because the underlying values they estimate only indirectly reflect the flow of multiple benefits and costs. A greenspace accounting approach to partially address this deficiency is described using benefit-cost analysis for a proposed tree-planting project in Tucson. AZ. The approach directly connects vegetation structure with the spatial-temporal flow of functional benefits and costs. Prices are assigned to each cost (i.e. planting, pruning, removal, irrigation) and benefit (i.e. cooling energy savings, interception of particulates, stormwater runoff reduction) through direct estimation and implied valuation of benefits as environmental externalities. The approach can be used to evaluate net economic benefits associated with capital investments in urban forests vs. other investments in the urban infrastructure or traditional environmental control technologies.
• Optimal shortterm financingdecision, Robichek, A. A., Teichroew, D., & Jones, J. M. (1965). Optimal short term financing decision.Management Science,12(1), 1-36. The cash requirements of many firms follow a seasonal pattern. These firms may obtain short term cash to cover their seasonal needs from a variety of sources: e.g., lines of credit, delaying of accounts payable, term loans, pledging or factoring receivables, etc. Each of these alternative sources of cash may have different costs as well as special restrictions. Given the set of cash requirements and the costs and constraints relating to alternative sources of cash, it is often difficult to determine the optimum manner of meeting the short-term cash needs. In this paper, this short-term financing problem under certainty is formulated as a mathematical model and solved through the use of a general linear programming routine. Optimum solutions are determined for a number of cases and the general form of the solution is discussed. The paper includes an analysis based on marginal costs and a discussion of the short-term financing problem under uncertainty.   
• Aminimum costassessmentmethodfor composite generation and transmission system expansion planning, Wenyuan, L., & Billinton, R. (1993). A minimum cost assessment method for composite generation and transmission system expansion planning.IEEE Transactions on Power Systems,8(2), 628-635. Composite generation and transmission system expansion analysis should take into account both economic considerations and adequacy requirements. An optimum expansion plan should achieve the minimum total investment, operation and damage cost. A minimum cost assessment method for composite system expansion planning, which can be used to consider generation expansion and transmission expansion simultaneously, is presented. The minimization model proposed to incorporate both operating and outage costs can recognize different customer damage functions at different load buses and includes the duration of the simulated contingency system states . A computer program based on the presented method has been developed to provide a set of line, load bus, generator bus and system indices which can be used to select optimal expansion plans at different load growth levels. Case studies in which the method is applied to the IEEE Modified Reliability Test System indicate its effectiveness.<>     
• A global optimisationmethodfor robust affine registration of brain images, Jenkinson, M., & Smith, S. (2001). A global optimisation method for robust affine registration of brain images.Medical image analysis,5(2), 143-156. Registration is an important component of medicalimage analysisand for analysing large amounts of data it is desirable to have fully automaticregistration methods. Many different automatic registration methods have been proposed to date, and almost all share a common mathematical framework one of optimising a cost function. To date little attention has been focused on theoptimisationmethod itself, even though the success of most registration methodshingeson the quality of this optimisation. This paper examines theassumptions underlyingthe problem of registration forbrain imagesusing inter-modal voxelsimilarity measures. It is demonstrated that the use oflocal optimisationmethods together with the standard multi-resolution approach isnotsufficient to reliably find theglobal minimum. To address this problem, a global optimisation method is proposed that is specifically tailored to this form of registration. A full discussion of all the necessaryimplementation detailsis included as this is animportant partof any practical method. Furthermore, results are presented for inter-modal, inter-subject registration experiments that show that the proposed method is more reliable at finding the global minimum than several of the currently available registration packages in common usage.   
• Transmission network planning: Amethodfor synthesis ofminimum-costsecure networks, Sharifnia, A., & Aashtiani, H. Z. (1985). Transmission network planning: A method for synthesis of minimum-cost secure networks.IEEE Transactions on Power Apparatus and Systems, (8), 2025-2034. A new method is proposed for solving the problem of minimum-cost expansion of power transmission networks. The problem is formulated as a mixed-integer program that explicitly considers both the investment costs of new lines and the operating costs associated with the system. The d.c. load flow equations for the network are embedded in the constraints of the mathematical model to avoid sub-optimal solutions that can arise if the enforcement of such constraints is done in an indirect way. The solution of the model gives the best line additions, and also provides information regarding the optimum generation at each generation point. The security is attained by an iterative procedure using a concept similar to that of the Cutting Plane methods of integer programming. The "Security Cuts' successively exclude the insecure solutions from the solution space of the problem until the solution obtained by the cost minimizing algorithm is a secure one. The important feature of this procedure is that the added constraints never exclude any secure solutions, thus security is attained without losing optimality. It is shown that the model is applicable to both static and multi-stage planning cases, and an application of the method to a real-world example with 22 right-of-ways is given.