The problem of finding an optimal location X* minimizing the maximum Euclidean distance to existing facilities is well solved by e.g. the Elzinga-Hearn algorithm. In practical situations X* will however often not be feasible. We therefore suggest in this note a polynomial algorithm which will find an optimal location X^F in a feasible subset F of the plane R^2

In this paper we consider the problem of finding in a given graph a minimal weight subtree of connected subgraph, which has a given number of edges. These NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems have various applications in the oil industry, in facility layout and graph partitioning. We will present different heuristic approaches based on spanning tree and shortest path methods and on an exact algorithm solving the problem in polynomial time if the underlying graph is a tree. Both the edge- and node weighted case are investigated and extensive numerical results on the behaviour of the heuristics compared to optimal solutions are presented. The best heuristic yielded results within an error margin of less than one percent from optimality for most cases. In a large percentage of tests even optimal solutions have been found.

The system of shallow water waves is one of the classical examples for nonlinear, twodimensional conservation laws. The paper investigates a simple kinetic equation depending on a parameter e which leads for e to 0 to the system of shallow water waves. The corresponding equilibrium distribution function has a compact support which depends on the eigenvalues of the hyperbolic system. It is shown that this kind of kinetic approach is restricted to a special class of nonlinear conservation laws. The kinetic model is used to develop a simple particle method for the numerical solution of shallow water waves. The particle method can be implemented in a straightforward way and produces in test examples sufficiently accurate results.

Based on normalized coprime factorizations with respect to indefinite metrics and the construction of suitable characteristic functions, the Ober balanced canonical forms for the classes of bounded real and positive real are derived. This uses a matrix representation of the shift realization with respect to a basis related to sets of orthogonal polynomials.

We consider wavelet estimation of the time-dependent (evolutionary) power spectrum of a locally stationary time series. Allowing for departures from stationary proves useful for modelling, e.g., transient phenomena, quasi-oscillating behaviour or spectrum modulation. In our work wavelets are used to provide an adaptive local smoothing of a short-time periodogram in the time-freqeuncy plane. For this, in contrast to classical nonparametric (linear) approaches we use nonlinear thresholding of the empirical wavelet coefficients of the evolutionary spectrum. We show how these techniques allow for both adaptively reconstructing the local structure in the time-frequency plane and for denoising the resulting estimates. To this end a threshold choice is derived which is motivated by minimax properties w.r.t. the integrated mean squared error. Our approach is based on a 2-d orthogonal wavelet transform modified by using a cardinal Lagrange interpolation function on the finest scale. As an example, we apply our procedure to a time-varying spectrum motivated from mobile radio propagation.