In this article, a free-time impulsive control problem with state constraints and equality and inequality constraints on the trajectory endpoints is considered. A weakened maximum principle is obtained for problems with data measurable in the time variable, being the time transversality conditions deduced with the help of some extra convexity assumption on the state constraints. In the case of ...

Time consistency is a crucial property for dynamic risk measures. Making use of the dual representation for conditional risk measures, we characterize the time consistency by a cocycle condition for the minimal penalty function. Taking advantage of this cocycle condition, we introduce a new methodology for the construction of time-consistent dynamic risk measures. Starting with BMOmartingales, ...

This paper presents a method for incorporating anatomical NMR boundary side information into penalized maximumlikelihood (PML) emission image reconstructions. The NMR boundary is parameterized as a periodic spline curve of fixed order and number of knots that is known a priori. Maximum Likelihood (ME) estimation of the spline coefficients yields an “extracted” boundary, which is used to define ...

We investigate the performance of the recently proposed Unified Particle Swarm Optimization method on constrained engineering optimization problems. For this purpose, a penalty function approach is employed and the algorithm is modified to preserve feasibility of the encountered solutions. The algorithm is illustrated on four well–known engineering problems with promising results. Comparisons w...

We study a joint inventory and pricing problem in a single-stage system with a positive lead time. We consider both additive and multiplicative demand forms. This problem is, in general, intractable due to its computational complexity. We develop a simple heuristic that resolves this issue. The heuristic involves a myopic pricing policy that generates each period’s price as a function of the in...

In this paper, we consider a fairly large class of dependent Sparre Andersen risk models where the claim sizes belong to the class of Coxian distributions. We analyze the Gerber-Shiu discounted penalty function when the penalty function depends on the deficit at ruin. We show that the system of equations needed to solve for this quantity is surprisingly simple. Various applications of this resu...

Since a few years there is an increasing interest in minimizing the energy consumption of computing systems. However in a shared computing system, users want to optimize their experienced quality of service, at the price of a high energy consumption. In this work, we address the problem of optimizing and designing mechanisms for a linear combination of weighted completion time and energy consum...

This paper discusses a new roughness penalty for use in estimation problems including image estimation problems. It is one of a new class of penalty functions for use in estimation and image regularization that has recently been proposed. These functions penalize the discrepancy between an image and a shifted version of itself; here the discrepancy measure is the I-divergence. This penalty is c...

The Bayesian approach to image segmentation defines a penalty function of image partitions such that the function’s minima correspond to perceptually salient segments. We extend previous approaches following this framework by requiring that our image model sharply decrease in probability as a segment’s boundary is perturbed from its true position. Instead of making segment boundaries prefer ima...

In this paper, we study the dividend payments prior to absolute ruin in a Markov-dependent risk process in which the claim occurrence and the claim amount are regulated by an external discrete time Markov chain. A system of integrodifferential equations with boundary conditions satisfied by the moment-generating function, the nth moment of the discounted dividend payments prior to absolute ruin...