Territorial Power Sharing and the Regulation of Conflict in Africa

The article argues that there is a relative lack of territorial power sharing in sub-Saharan Africa, but that this should not surprise us given the socio-ethnic context of most African countries which lack both majoritarian ethnic groups and clear culturally based distinctions between contending groups. A comprehensive analysis of the various federal systems and of some decentralising countries reveals a sobering record of conflict management and discusses some explanatory variables. In this context, forms of power sharing that include provisions on territorial autonomy, amounting to full-fledged federalism or restricted to some degree of decentralisation, should be regarded with caution. Regional autonomy as a solution to civil war will not work in most cases.     

A competitive genetic algorithm for resource-constrained project scheduling

In this paper we consider the resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) with makespan minimization as objective. We propose a new genetic algorithm approach to solve this problem. Subsequently, we compare it to two genetic algorithm concepts from the literature. While our approach makes use of a permutation based genetic encoding that contains problem-specific knowledge, the other two procedures employ a priority value based and a priority rule based representation, respectively. Then we present the results of our thorough computational study for which standard sets of project instances have been used. The outcome reveals that our procedure is the most promising genetic algorithm to solve the RCPSP. Finally, we show that our genetic algorithm yields better results than several heuristic procedures presented in the literature. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 45: 733–750, 1998     

A self‐adapting genetic algorithm for project scheduling under resource constraints

This papers deals with the classical resource‐constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP). There, the activities of a project have to be scheduled subject to precedence and resource constraints. The objective is to minimize the makespan of the project. We propose a new heuristic called self‐adapting genetic algorithm to solve the RCPSP. The heuristic employs the well‐known activity list representation and considers two different decoding procedures. An additional gene in the representation determines which of the two decoding procedures is actually used to compute a schedule for an individual. This allows the genetic algorithm to adapt itself to the problem instance actually solved. That is, the genetic algorithm learns which of the alternative decoding procedures is the more successful one for this instance. In other words, not only the solution for the problem, but also the algorithm itself is subject to genetic optimization. Computational experiments show that the mechanism of self‐adaptation is capable to exploit the benefits of both decoding procedures. Moreover, the tests show that the proposed heuristic is among the best ones currently available for the RCPSP. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 49: 433–448, 2002; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/nav.10029