Habitat protection has been identified as an important strategy for the conservation of woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus). However, because of the economic opportunity costs associated with protection it is unlikely that all caribou ranges can be protected in their entirety. We used an optimization approach to identify reserve designs for caribou in Alberta, Canada, across a range of potenti...

This study concentrates on designing a medical waste management system with a hierarchical structure, including a local government and a waste management planner. The upper-level seeks to design and control the waste management facilities by minimizing the environmental risks related to the disposal of medical waste. While the lower-level model is to determine the waste collection plans by only...

Whereas classical Markov decision processes maximize the expected reward, we consider minimizing the risk. We propose to evaluate the risk associated to a given policy over a longenough time horizon with the help of a central limit theorem. The proposed approach works whether the transition probabilities are known or not. We also provide a gradient-based policy improvement algorithm that conver...