Motivated by an application to school funding, we introduce the notion of a robust decomposable Markov decision process (MDP). A robust decomposable MDP model applies to situations where several MDPs, with the transition probabilities in each only known through an uncertainty set, are coupled...

In this paper we examine the various effects that workstations and rework loops with identical parallel processors and stochastic processing times have on the performance of a mixed-model production line. Of particular interest are issues related to sequence scrambling. In many production...

Operational Research (OR) techniques have been applied, from the early stages of the discipline, to a wide variety of issues in education. At the government level, these include questions of what resources should be allocated to education as a whole and how these should be divided amongst the...

The increase in cost of supplies and services is outpacing the increase in revenues at many hospitals. To address this cost increase hospitals are seeking more efficient ways to store and manage vast inventories of medical supplies. A parsimonious and efficient inventory system which we call...

This paper studies the joint optimization problem of energy and delay in a multi-hop wireless network. The optimization variables are the transmission rates, which are adjustable according to the packet queueing length in the buffer. The optimization goal is to minimize the energy consumption of...

This paper provides a unified framework to study monotone optimal control for a class of Markov decision processes through D-multimodularity. We demonstrate that each system in this class can be classified as either a substitution-type or a complement-type system according to the possible...

This paper presents a methodology to find near-optimal joint inventory control policies for the real case of a one-warehouse, n-retailer distribution system of infusion solutions at a University Medical Center in France. We consider stochastic demand, batching and order-up-to level policies as...

This work proposes an algorithm that makes use of partial information to improve the convergence properties of the value iteration algorithm in terms of the overall computational complexity. The algorithm iterates on a series of increasingly refined approximate models that converges to the true...

We present a model for assigning server time slots to different classes of patients. The objective is to minimize the total expected weighted waiting time of a patient (where different patient classes may be assigned different weights). A bulk service queueing model is used to obtain the...

Recently an O∗(n4) volume algorithm has been presented for convex bodies by Lovász and Vempala, where n is the number of dimensions of the convex body. Essentially the algorithm is a series of Monte Carlo integrations. In this paper we describe a computer implementation of the volume...