We present a new approach for continuous-time portfolio strategies that relies on the principle of value preservation. This principle was developed by Hellwig (1987) for general economic decision and pricing models. The key idea is that an investor should try to consume only so much of his...

A symmetric Poissonian two-armed bandit becomes, in terms of a posteriori probabilities, a piecewise deterministic Markov decision process. For the case of the switching arms, only of one which creates rewards, we solve explicitly the average optimality equation and prove that a myopic policy is...

Consider a finite state irreducible Markov reward chain. It is shown that there exist simulation estimates and confidence intervals for the expected first passage times and rewards as well as the expected average reward, with 100% coverage probability. The length of the confidence intervals...

Global and mid-range approximation concepts are used in engineering optimisation in those cases were the commonly used local approximations are not available or applicable. In this paper the response surface method is discussed as a method to build both global and mid-range approximations of the...

We propose a path-following version of the Todd-Burrell procedure to solve linear programming problems with an unknown optimal value. The path-following scheme is not restricted to Karmarkar's primal step; it can also be implemented with a dual Newton step or with a primal-dual step. Copyright...

To compute the distribution of the downtime in a time interval [0,t] for a highly available monotone system, a Compound Poisson process (CP(t)) approximation is often used. In this paper we give sufficient conditions for when the distribution ofCP(t) is an asymptotic limit. We also study the...

Papers deals with multicriterion reliability-oriented optimization of truss structures by stochastic programming. Deterministic approach to structural optimization appears to be insufficient when loads acting upon a structure and material properties of the structure elements have a random...

Reliability of products is often determined by special technical or physical drift parameters. Suitable stochastic processes are applied to model such drift processes. An failure can be observed when the drift process leaves a given region at the first time. Then the lifetime is the random time...

For a controlled stochastic dynamic system with set-valued drift coefficient and a terminal cost functional we derive a necessary extremality condition in form of a minimum principle. Copyright Physica-Verlag 1997

Following a few words on multifunctions in the mathematical literature, a very brief recall on dual spaces, some preliminary notations and definitions in the introduction, we give some results on those functions in the second paragraph. In the third paragraph, a duality theory in...