The increased deployment of intermittent renewable energy generators opens up many new opportunities for grid-connected energy storage. Batteries offer significant flexibility compared with most other storage technologies, but are relatively expensive. The lifetime of the battery is a key factor in the business case. The lifetime depends on how the battery is used, but most techno-economic anal...

Understanding the process of software adoption is of paramount importance to software start-ups. We study a monopolistic seller’s optimal seeding, sequencing, and pricing strategies under network effects. We demonstrate the importance of adoption sequencing as well as controllability over the seeding process to seller’s profit, consumer surplus, and social welfare. Under multi-pricing, full inf...

We consider a fixed communication network where (software) agents can move freely from node to node along the edges. A black hole is a faulty or malicious node in the network such that if an agent enters this node, then it immediately “dies.” We are interested in designing an efficient communication algorithm for the agents to identify all black holes. We assume that we have k agents starting f...

Many auction settings implicitly or explicitly require that bidders are treated equally exante. This may be because discrimination is philosophically or legally impermissible, or because it is practically difficult to implement or impossible to enforce. We study so-called anonymous auctions to understand the revenue tradeoffs and to develop simple anonymous auctions that are approximately optim...

We consider an infinite-horizon linear-quadratic minimax optimal control problem for stochastic uncertain systems with output measurement. A new description of stochastic uncertainty is introduced using a relative entropy constraint. For the stochastic uncertain system under consideration, a connection between the worst-case control design problem and a specially parametrized risk-sensitive sto...

In this paper, we develop a new tube-based robust economic MPC scheme for linear systems subject to bounded disturbances with given distributions. By using the error distribution in the predictions of the finite horizon optimal control problem, we can incorporate stochastic information in order to improve the expected performance while being able to guarantee strict feasibility. For this new fr...

Title of thesis: TESTING FOR OPTIMAL LARGE-SCALE VEGETATION PROPERTIES FOR MAXIMUM TERRESTRIAL PRODUCTIVITY AND QUANTIFYING FUTURE UNCERTAINTY OF VEGETATION RESPONSE TO ANTICIPATED CLIMATE CHANGE Ryan Pavlick Master of Arts, 2007 Thesis directed by: Dr. Axel Kleidon Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry In this study, I present a new approach to quantifying a range of uncertainty associated ...

In this paper, we study the set cover problems, the minimum cardinality key problems and the optimal screen problems. We consider SET COVER-II, a variant of SET COVER, i.e., nding L sets among given n sets such that the cardinality of their union maximizes. We give both a lower bound and an upper bound to the approximation ratio of SET COVER-II and obtain a new result on SET COVER by approachin...

Rooted trees are usually drawn planar and upward i e without crossings and with out any parent placed below its child In this paper we investigate the area requirement of planar upward drawings of rooted trees We give tight upper and lower bounds on the area of various types of drawings and provide linear time algorithms for constructing optimal area drawings Let T be a bounded degree rooted tr...

In this paper, global optimisation and nonlinear simulation are used to search for the worst-case control demands which may be input by a pilot flying a modern high performance aircraft with a full authority flight control law. The flexibility of global optimisation is exploited to simultaneously search for worst-case pilot inputs and worst-case combinations of uncertain parameters in the nonli...