In this paper we consider a firm that employs heterogeneous workers to meet demand for its product or service. Workers differ in their skills, speed, and/or quality, and they randomly leave, or turn over. Each period the firm must decide how many workers of each type to hire or fire in order to...

Encouraging positive work team growth depends on, in part, the form and availability of organizational resources and support. Support systems have been found to be important for work team health and survival. However, managers are challenged to make resource decisions while working within...

Due to increasing interest in sustainable development, today s engineer is often tasked with designing systems that are environmentally benign over their entire life cycles. Unfortunately, environmental assessments commonly suffer from significant uncertainty due to lack of information,...

Increasingly often, problems in modern medicine, quantitative finance, or social-networking involve tens of thousands of variables that interact with each other and jointly evolve over time. The states of these variables may correspond to the phenotype of a particular individual, the price of a...

This dissertation consists of two distinct lines of research e orts. Chapter 2 proposes a general methodology to seek robust solution to multi-stage stochastic optimization problems. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 all deal with models that arise from inventory management and dynamic pricing. Chapter 2...

Revenue management (RM) problems with full probabilistic information are well studied. However, as RM practice spreads to new businesses and industries, there are more and more applications where no or only limited information is available. In that respect, it is highly desirable to develop...

ABSTRACTFILTER SCHEDULING FUNCTION MODEL IN INTERNET SERVER:RESOURCE CONFIGURATION, PERFORMANCE EVALUATION ANDOPTIMAL SCHEDULINGbyMINGHUA XUAugust 2010Advisor: Dr. Cheng-Zhong XuMajor: Computer EngineeringDegree: Doctor of PhilosophyInternet traffic often exhibits a structure with rich...

We consider a network in which several service providers offer wireless access service to their respective subscribed customers through potentially multi-hop routes. If providers cooperate, i.e., pool their resources, such as spectrum and base stations, and agree to serve each others' customers,...

As new network services emerge, questions about service deployment and network choices arise. Although shared networks, such as the Internet, offer many advantages, combining heterogeneous services on the same network need not be the right answer as it comes at the cost of increased complexity....

This thesis aims to fill the gaps in the literature of the theory of constraints (TOC) in publicly funded health systems. While TOC seems to be a natural fit for this resource-constrained environment, there are still no reported application of TOC’s drum-buffer-rope tool and inadequate...