Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) is a public transportation mode, in which small automated vehicles transport passengers on demand. Central control of the vehicles leads to interesting possibilities for optimized routings. The complexity of the involved routing problems together with the fact that...

We consider a production model with two facilities sharing a resource during a time horizon consisting of a number of time periods. Cumulative production levels at the ends of consecutive periods are linked with constraints of a general form. This allows us to give different interpretations...

We study the problems of scheduling jobs, with different release dates and equal processing times, on two types of batching machines. All jobs of the same batch start and are completed simultaneously. On a serial batching machine, the length of a batch equals the sum of the processing times of...

Multi-class service systems are of increasing importance in the practical modelling world but present a significant challenge for analysis. Most results to date concerning the optimal dynamic control of such systems have assumed holding cost rates to be linear in the number of customers present....

In this paper we apply a new framework for the study of monotonicity in queueing systems to stochastic scheduling models. This allows us a unified treatment of many different models, among which are multiple and single server models (with and without feedback), discrete and continuous time...

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...

We study the problem of optimally controlling a multiserver queueing system. Customers arrive in a Poisson fashion and join a single queue, served by N servers, S 1 ,S 2 ,… , S N . The servers have different rates. The service times at each server are independent and exponentially distributed....

The problem of a firm willing to optimally promote and sell a single product on the market is here undertaken. The awareness of such product is modeled by means of a Nerlove–Arrow goodwill as a state variable, differentiated jointly by means of time and of age of the segments in which the...

Demand and procurement planning for consumer electronics products must cope with short life cycles, limited replenishment opportunities and a willingness to pay that is influenced by past prices and decreases over time. We therefore propose the use of an integrated pricing and inventory control...

This paper addresses constrained Markov decision processes, with expected discounted total cost criteria, which are controlled by non-randomized policies. A dynamic programming approach is used to construct optimal policies. The convergence of the series of finite horizon value functions to the...