Much of the production in firms takes place over time. This paper seeks to understand the value of interim performance information on long projects. In particular, the model explores the sorting effects of performance evaluations. Conducting an interim performance evaluation increases efficiency by providing the option to end projects with low early returns. The main result: It is efficient to ...

This paper is concerned with the modeling and simulation of extremely large networks. We derive a timedependent diffusion–convection partial differential equation, the solution of which captures the global characteristics of a stochastic network model. Continuum modeling provides a powerful way to deal with the number of components in large networks and opens up the use of highly sophisticated ...

We formalize a simple but natural subclass of service domains for relational planning problems with object-centered, independent exogenous events and additive rewards capturing, for example, problems in inventory control. Focusing on this subclass, we present a new symbolic planning algorithm which is the first algorithm that has explicit performance guarantees for relational MDPs with exogenou...

In the recent years the field of automated planing has significantly advanced and several powerful domain-independent planners have been developed. However, none of these systems clearly outperforms all the others in every known benchmark domain. This observation motivated the idea of configuring and exploiting a portfolio of planners to achieve better performances than any individual planner: ...

We describe a way to improve the performance of MDP planners by modifying them to use lower and upper bounds to eliminate non-optimal actions during their search. First, we discuss a particular state-abstraction formulation of MDP planning problems and how to use that formulation to compute bounds on the Q-functions of those planning problems. Then, we describe how to incorporate those bounds i...

organizations’ success depends on planning. today, this task iscarried out through a multi-stage process such as defining outlook, devisingstrategies, implementation, performance evaluation, and data analysis andplanning for improvement. on one hand, defining and devising goals, and onthe other hand, implementation and performance evaluation have become themain challenges of top managements. fo...

in a recent paper in this journal, yang et al. [feng yang, dexiang wu,liang liang, gongbing bi & desheng dash wu (2009), supply chaindea:production possibility set and performance evaluation model] definedtwo types of supply chain production possibility set which were proved to beequivalent to each other. they also proposed a new model for evaluatingsupply chains. there are, however, some short...