Managers wish to motivate workers to exert effort. There is large literature on the use of wages and monetary incentives for this purpose, but in practice the “honor” or “prestige” of an award can be a significant motivator as well, unless the award is given so often that its prestige is...

We analyze the connection between the optimal solutions of minimum time and fixed final time optimal control problems. We discuss some controllability conditions which guarantee the equivalence of the two problems. In fact, under such conditions, not only does an optimal control...

In this paper, we study a scheduling problem of jobs from two different queues on several parallel servers. Jobs have exponentially distributed processing times, and incur costs per unit of time, until they leave the system, and there are no arrivals to the system at any time. The objective is...

We study the classical real option problem in which an agent faces the decision if and when to invest optimally into a project. The investment is assumed to be irreversible. This problem has been studied by Myers and Majd (Adv Futures Options Res 4:1–21, 1990) for the case of a complete...

We consider the fluid model of a controlled birth-and-death process with an absorbing state. Instead of analyzing the trajectories, we investigate the performance functionals of the underlying process by considering algebraic equations of the dynamic programming type. We provide the accuracy of...

The paper deals with the assignment of a single server to two retrial queues. Each customer reapplies for service after an exponentially distributed amount of time. The server operates at customer dependent exponential rates. There are holding costs and costs during service per customer and per...

We are interested in structures and efficient methods for mixed-integer nonlinear programs (MINLP) that arise from a first discretize, then optimize approach to time-dependent mixed-integer optimal control problems (MIOCPs). In this study we focus on combinatorial constraints, in particular on...

This paper addresses an optimal inventory control in a supply chain in which customers arrive at a facility according to a Poisson process and the facility provides service which takes exponential amounts of time, using items supplied by an outside supplier with exponential lead time process....

We consider Markov Decision Processes under light traffic conditions. We develop an algorithm to obtain asymptotically optimal policies for both the total discounted and the average cost criterion. This gives a general framework for several light traffic results in the literature. We illustrate...

We consider the optimal control problem of certain batch service queueing systems with compound Poisson arrivals and linear holding costs. The control problem involves the determination of the epochs at which the service is initiated as well as the sizes of the batches served. The service times...