In this paper, we investigate the information release and pricing strategies for a seller who can take customer pre-orders before the release of a product. The pre-order option enables the seller to sell a product at an early date when consumers’ valuations are relatively homogeneous. We find that the optimal pricing strategy is discontinuous with respect to the amount of information available ...

We consider inventory systems of “perishable” goods. Perishable goods cannot be carried from one period to another. Examples of perishable goods include newspaper, Christmas tree, and many grocery items like milk and banana. Here, a period could be one day, or one week, or any time frame that is appropriate in the application context. Suppose that a retailer sells a particular perishable produc...

In this paper we propose a new method to select the optimal model order for the initialization of Gaussian Mixture speaker Models (GMM) based on regression tree in text-independent speaker identification system. The objective is to choose the optimal number of components which is necessary to adequately model a speaker for a good speaker identification performance according to the Bayesian Info...

Design rules for optimal feedforward controllers with lead-lag structure in the presence of measurable disturbances are presented. The design rules are based on stable firstorder models with time delays, FOTD, and are optimal in the sense of minimizing the integratedsquared error. The rules are derived for an open-loop setting, considering a step disturbance. This paper also discusses a general...

We consider the optimal control of an assemble-to-order (ATO) system with m components, a single end-product, and n customer classes. Demand from each class occurs continuously over time according to a Poisson process. Components are produced in separate production facilities, each with a finite production rate and exponentially distributed production times. Components can be stocked ahead of d...

The analysis of the evolution of the chemical and biological characteristics of the Mediterranean marine ecosystem requires an integrated approach. Consistently, an ecosystem description, embedded in the MFSTEP one eighth degree threedimensional general circulation model, is tested and used following a twin experiment 5 approach. The ecosystem model is based on the NPZD trophic chain: inorganic...

Various existing techniques are discussed and combined to form a compound algorithm for the heuristic solution of large Travelling Salesman Problems. Improvements are then offered for two of its key components; one for general use and one for the Euclidean special case.

We consider two servers (server i, i-1, 2) in tandem for which the order of servers can be changed. Server 1 has a general service time distribution and server 2 has either its 'shifted' or 'truncated' distribution. This permits that the service times at the two servers are overlapping. An unlimited queue is allowed in front of the first server. For the systems having zero buffer capacity betwe...

A new multilevel preconditioner is proposed for the iterative solution of two dimensional discrete second order elliptic PDEs. It is based a recursive block incomplete factorization of the system matrix partitioned in a two-by-two block form, in which the submatrix related to the rst block of unknowns in approximated by a MILU(0) factorization, and the Schur complement computed from a diagonal ...

Abst rac t This paper presents a unified approach to designing reduced-order observer-estimators. Specifically, we seek to design a reduced-order estimator satisfying an observation constraint which involves a pre-specified, possibly unstable, subspace of the system dynamics and which also yields reduced-order estimates of the remaining subspace. The results are obtained by merging the optimal ...