Background The dearth of health workers in rural settings in Lao People’s Democratic Republic (PDR) and other developing countries limits healthcare access and outcomes. In evaluating non-wage financial incentive packages as a potential policy option to attract health workers to rural settings, understanding the expected costs and effects of the various programs ex antecan assist policy-makers ...

A key question in stochastic planning is how to evaluate policies when a goal cannot be reached with probability one. Usually, in the Goal-Directed Markov Decision Process (GDMDP) formalization, the outcome of a policy is summarized on two criteria: probability of reaching a goal state and expected cost to reach a goal state. The dual criterion solution considers a lexicography preference, by p...

This paper presents a new formulation for warehouse inventory management in a stochastic situation. The primary source of this formulation is derived from FP model, which has been proposed by Fletcher and Ponnambalam for reservoir management. The new proposed mathematical model is based on the first and the second moments of storage as a stochastic variable. Using this model, the expected value...

Decision making is an important feature of design. Although engineering design refers to the design of products and technical systems, design activities occur in many other professions, including education. As education moves from teaching to learning, engineering faculty are becoming course designers who make many decisions when designing a course. Although many course design processes have be...

in a subclass of the scale-parameter exponential family, we consider the sequential pointestimation of a function of the scale parameter under the loss function given as the sum of the weightedsquared error loss and a linear cost. for a fully sequential sampling scheme, second order expansions areobtained for the expected sample size as well as for the regret of the procedure. the former resear...

Cost overruns are endemic in military procurement projects and pervasive in other areas. This paper studies a model in which the apparent cost overruns arise not as systematic expectational errors but as equilibrium phenomena. The possibility of renegotiating payments when cost overruns occur results in firms bidding below their true estimate of expected project costs. This can cause the initia...

We conduct laboratory experiments to investigate the effects of deterrence mechanisms under controlled conditions. The effect of the expected cost of punishment of an individual’s decision to engage in a proscribed activity and the effect of uncertainty on an individual’s decision to commit a violation are very difficult to observe in field data. We use a roadway speeding framing and find that ...

Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM) optimization using Proportional Hazards Model (PHM) is a kind of maintenance optimization problem in which inspections of a system relevant to its failure rate depending on the age and value of covariates are performed in time intervals. The general approach for constructing a CBM based on PHM for a system is to minimize a long run average cost per unit of time...

In this paper we focus on a continuously deteriorating two units series equipment which its failure can not be measured by cost criterion. For these types of systems avoiding failure during the actual operation of the system is extremely important. In this paper we determine inspection periods and maintenance policy in such a way that failure probability is limited to a pre-specified value and ...