The problem of flow management for a class of flexible manufacturing cells is considered. The cell is designed for cyclic production of one product. This product is characterized by a sequence of operations of given length and each requiring a set of resources; the problem is therefore to...

Maintaining the natural variability of a river’s flow regime is one of the most critical strategies sustaining the ecological integrity of aquatic ecosystems. This research seeks to determine the ecological flow regime for management of streamflow existing reservoirs. The ecological flow...

We present a class of methods for distributed optimization with event-triggered communication. To this end, we extend Nesterov’s first order scheme to use event-triggered communication in a networked environment. We then apply this approach to generalize the proximal center algorithm (PCA) for...

A new algorithm for solving large-scale convex optimization problems with a separable objective function is proposed. The basic idea is to combine three techniques: Lagrangian dual decomposition, excessive gap and smoothing. The main advantage of this algorithm is that it automatically and...

Recent work has shown how information theory extends conventional full-rationality game theory to allow bounded rational agents. The associated mathematical framework can be used to solve distributed optimization and control problems. This is done by translating the distributed problem into an...

Airlines are continually faced with the challenge of efficient utilization of their cockpit crew resources. In addition to regular flying crews, airlines maintain significant reserve staffing levels to meet contractual obligations and provide smooth daily operations. Most airlines also depend on...

In the economics literature there are two dominant approaches for solving models with optimal experimentation (also called active learning). The first approach is based on the value function and the second on an approximation method. In principle the value function approach is the preferred...

When the Nelder-Mead method is used to optimize the expected response of a stochastic system (e.g., an output of a discrete-event simulation model), the simplex-resizing steps of the method introduce risks of inappropriate termination. We give analytical and empirical results describing the...

We study the fuel procurement problem for electrical utilities under uncertain demand and market price. Long-term contractual supply commitments are made at a set price with fuel suppliers at the beginning of each year. Each month the procurement planner can use fuel from these contracts or...