We consider a production-inventory planning problem with time-varying demands, convex production costs and a warehouse capacity constraint. It is solved by use of the Lagrangian form of the maximum principle. The possible existence of strong decision and forecast horizons is demonstrated. When...

Optimal control theory is employed to derive explicitly the optimal (profit maximizing) price of a durable new product over time. The sales rate dynamics depends on the product price and on the unsold portion of the market. Specifically, the hazard rate (i.e. the probability of a purchase by a...

The paper is concerned with the reduction of a class of stochastic optimal control problems to simpler problems by using decomposition and aggregation. Decomposition is shown to provide a good approximation when the system dynamics involve nearly decomposable matrices or variables with strong...

This paper describes a maximum principle for distributed parameter systems, i.e. systems characterized by partial differential equations. The maximum principle is applied to solve the problem of a cattle rancher who must decide the number of cattle in different age groups to be bought and sold...

This paper constructs a unified framework to survey most of the work done to date on decision and forecast horizons in a stochastic environment. The paper is divided into sections by type of model. For each model type, the issues of existence of these horizons and of derivation of sufficient...

In this paper, we analyse a control theoretic model of a country possessing a finite amount of a nonrenewable resource. The country can both consume the indigenous resource and export it. Moreover, a substitute for the indigenous resource is available at a given backstop price. We obtain the...

In this paper, we identify a new class of stochastic Iinear convex optimal control problems, whose solution can be obtained by solving appropriate equivalent deterministic optimal control problems. The term 'linear convex' is meant to imply that the dynamics is linear and the cost function is...

This paper considers the problem of optimizing the institutional advertising expenditure for a firm which produces two products. The problem is formulated as a minimum-time control problem for the dynamics of an extended Vidale-Wolfe advertising model, the optimal control being the rate of...

This paper considers an optimal control problem for the dynamics of a contagion model, the optimal control being the rate of advertising expenditure that maximizes the present value of net profit streams over an infinite horizon. By using a Green's theorem approach, it is shown that there are...

This paper derives a maximum principle for dynamic systems with continuous lags, i.e., systems governed by integrodifferential equations, using dynamic programming. As a result, the adjoint variables can be provided with useful economic interpretations