Problem definition: Merchant commodity and energy production assets operate in markets with volatile prices and exchange rates. Plant closures adversely affect societal entities beyond the specific plant being shutdown such as the parent company and the local community. Motivated by an aluminum...

Storage assets are critical for temporal trading of commodities under volatile prices. State-of-the-art methods for managing storage such as the reoptimization heuristic (RH), which are part of commercial software, approximate a Markov decision process (MDP) assuming full information regarding...

Prominent hotel chains quote a booking price for a particular type of rooms on each day and dynamically update these prices over time. We present a novel Markov decision process (MDP) formulation that determines the optimal booking price for a single type of rooms under this strategy, while...

Less-Than-Truckload (LTL) carriers generally serve geographical regions that are more localized than the inter-city line-hauls served by truckload carriers. That localization can lead to urban freight transportation routes that overlap. If trucks are traveling with less than full loads, there...