SCALABLE APPROXIMATE DYNAMIC PROGRAMMING MODELS WITH APPLICATIONS IN AIR TRANSPORTATION Poornima Balakrishna, PhD George Mason University, 2009 Dissertation Co-Director: Dr. Rajesh Ganesan Dissertation Co-Director: Dr. Lance Sherry The research objective of the dissertation is to develop methods to address the curse of dimensionality in the field of approximate dynamic programming, to enhance t...

A novel hardware architecture for performing the core computations required by dynamic programming (DP) techniques is introduced. The latter pertain to a vast range of applications that necessitate an optimal sequence of decisions to be obtained. An underlying assumption is that a complete model of the environment is provided, whereby the dynamics are governed by a Markov decision process. Exis...

This thesis presents the development and implementation of approximate dynamic programming methods used to manage multi-agent systems. The purpose of this thesis is to develop an architectural framework and theoretical methods that enable an autonomous mission system to manage real-time multi-agent operations. To meet this goal, we begin by discussing aspects of the real-time multi-agent missio...

The use of multimedia in distributed systems has begun to include such complex and mission-critical domains as digital television production, ‘video-ondemand’ services, medical and security systems. These applications impose more stringent requirements on the support mechanisms provided by underlying networks and operating systems than most currently deployed continuous media applications. This...

In this paper, we present a novel graph-oriented approach for architecting and modeling CORBA-based distributed applications. It provides higher-level abstractions for the architecture description of CORBA-based distributed applications. In the proposed model, the configuration of a CORBA-based distributed application is described as a logical graph separated from the programming of the constit...