The paper deals with the issue of budget setting to the divisions of a company. The approach is quantitative in nature both in the formulation of the requirements for the set-budgets, as related to different general managerial objectives of interest, and in the modelling of the inherent...

Inventory models need information about the demand distribution. In practice, this information is not known with certainty and has to be estimated with often relatively few historical demand observations. Using these estimates leads to underperformance. This paper focuses on gamma distributed...

Abstract: This paper determines the optimal timing of dike heightenings as well as the corresponding optimal dike heightenings to protect against floods. To derive the optimal policy we design an algorithm based on the Impulse Control Maximum Principle. In this way the paper presents one of the...

In this paper we show how techniques from response surface methodology and mathematical programming can be combined into a new sequential derivative-free approach for solving unconstrained deterministic black-box optimization problems.In this sequential derivative-free optimization approach...

Inventory models need some specification of the distribution of demand in order to find the optimal order-up-to level or reorder point.This distribution is unknown in real life and there are several solutions to overcome this problem.One approach is to assume a distribution, estimate its...

This paper advocates the use of methods based on global approximation models for optimization problems with time-consuming function evaluations and integer variables.We show that methods based on local approximations may lead to the integer rounding of the optimal solution of the continuous...

In this paper we analyze different schemes for obtaining gradient estimates when the underlying function is noisy.Good gradient estimation is e.g. important for nonlinear programming solvers.As an error criterion we take the norm of the difference between the real and estimated gradients.This...

In this paper we use Lagrange interpolation polynomials to obtain good gradient estimations.This is e.g. important for nonlinear programming solvers.As an error criterion we take the mean squared error.This error can be split up into a deterministic and a stochastic error.We analyze these errors...