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...

Along with increasing the warranty period for complex systems, reducing the warranty servicing costs has become an issue of great importance to the manufacturers. One possible way to reduce the expected warranty servicing cost is by making sound decision on the product warranty and maintenance...

Offering warranty for a second-hand item stimulates the sales of the item, but at the same time, it accumulates additional warranty servicing cost. This additional cost can be reduced through actions that improve the reliability of the item, such as overhaul and upgrade. An upgrade action brings...

In this paper, we consider a two-server finite capacity queuing model in which messages should leave the system in the order in which they entered the system. Messages arrive according to a Markovian arrival process (MAP) and any message finding the buffer full is considered lost....

In this paper we focus on two types of risks, the risk of malfunctioning of a product quantified by its reliability, and the risk of misunderstanding the features and qualities of a product while deciding whether to buy it. The later risk is caused by the information asymmetry, which is a...

Two renewal processes, known in reliability maintenance as minimal repair and replacement policy, are considered. Their properties are studied in the case where the generating random sequence has a distribution with periodic failure rate. A characterization theorem establishes necessary and...

No abstract received.

This literature review summarizes the results from a collection of research papers that relate to modeling insurance claims and the processes associated with them. We consider work by more than 55 authors, published or presented between 1971 and 2008.

In this paper, we generalize the Symmetric Weight Assignment Technique to incorporate all managerial preferences in Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). This is a method that promotes managerial preferences, while not changing the feasibility region of the nominal DEA model, unlike standard...