The Cahiers du GERAD series is the witness of the strength and productivity of our group. It also shows the extent of GERAD researches and demonstrates the large range of research fields concerned by our researchers.

Since 1980, we have been publishing working papers, preprints, technical reports, conference papers of our members so that they can distribute their work rapidly in the standardized format offered by our series called Les Cahiers du GERAD. Legal deposits (federal and provincial) are requested to protect the copyright of our members. Once we edit a work in our standardized format, this preprint becomes available on our institutional website (www.gerad.ca). In order to comply with the self-archiving and copyright policies of scientific journals, only the most recent preprints (not yet published) are available for download. For the others, i.e., those published and for which the copyright has been transferred to the publisher, only the title is available on our website together with an hyperlink to the published version of the article.

The authors are exclusively responsible for the content of their research papers published in the series Les Cahiers du GERAD. Copyright and moral rights for the publications are retained by the authors and the users must commit themselves to recognize and abide the legal requirements associated with these rights. Thus, users:

• May download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research ;
• May not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain ;
• May freely distribute the URL identifying the publication.