Optimal flow control in queueing networks is a challenging problem occurring in many contexts, such as data centers, cloud computing, healthcare, revenue management, and distributed networks, etc. The traditional approach has been to adopt heuristic solutions or consider infinite-horizon...

Generalising the idea of the classical EM algorithm that is widely used for computing maximum likelihood estimates, we propose an EM-Control (EM-C) algorithm for solving multi-period finite time horizon stochastic control problems. The new algorithm sequentially updates the control policies in...

We revisit the comparison of mathematical programming with equilibrium constraints (MPEC) and nested fixed point (NFXP) algorithms for estimating structural dynamic models by Su and Judd (SJ, 2012). They used an inefficient version of the nested fixed point algorithm that relies on successive...

We combine a dynamic programming approach (stochastic optimal control) with a multi-stage stochastic programming approach (MSP) in order to solve various problems in personal finance and pensions. Stochastic optimal control produces an optimal policy that is easy to understand and implement....

Robust optimization (RO) is a young and active research field that has been mainly developed in the last 15 years. RO techniques are very useful for practice and not difficult to understand for practitioners. It is therefore remarkable that real-life applications of RO are still lagging behind;...

In this paper, we study the out-of-sample properties of robust empirical optimization and develop a theory for data-driven calibration of the “robustness parameter” for worst-case maximization problems with concave reward functions. Building on the intuition that robust optimization reduces...

We formulate a distributionally robust optimization problem where the deviation of the alternative distribution is controlled by a φ-divergence penalty in the objective, and show that a large class of these problems are essentially equivalent to a mean-variance problem. We also show that while...

Many paint producers in Nigeria do not lend themselves to flexible production process which is important for them to manage the use of resources for effective optimal production. These goals can be achieved through the application of optimization models in their resources allocation and...

This paper is concerned with analytical models and methods for reliability planning, optimization, and operation of telecommunication networks. The difference between classical models of reliability and models developed here is that the last ones take into account the economy is often an...

The goal programming (GP) is a well-known approach applied to multi-criteria decision making (M-DM). It has been used in many domains and the literature offers diverse extensions of this procedure. On the other hand, so far, some evident analogies between M-DM under certainty and scenario-based...