The disparity in consumer and organization preferences of information channels is a major concern. Further, making decisions in the presence of a wide range of conflicting criteria through the use of a multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach has gained increased prominence in recent years and research in this area has become an important consideration for business operations that invo...

Clinical decision-making can be vastly improved with the availability of the right medical knowledge at the right time. This concept paper presents a knowledge management re-search program to (a) identify, capture and organize the tacit knowledge inherent within on-line problem-solving discussions between pediatric pain practitioners; (b) establish linkages between topic-specific pediatric pain...

Optimal decentralized decision making in a team of cooperative agents as formalized by decentralized POMDPs is a notoriously hard problem. A major obstacle is that the agents do not have access to a sufficient statistic during execution, which means that they need to base their actions on their histories of observations. A consequence is that even during off-line planning the choice of decision...

This paper compares technologies for a dynamic truckload pickup and delivery problem in a competitive environment using sequential auctions. In this environment, demands arrive randomly over time and are described by pick up, delivery locations and hard timewindows. Upon demand arrival, carriers compete for the loads in a second price auction. Four fleet assignment technologies with different d...

A classical problem in power systems is to allocate in-coming (elastic or inelastic) demands without violating the operating constraints of electric networks in an online fashion. Although online decision problems have been well-studied in the literature, a unique challenge arising in power systems is the presence of non-linear constraints, a departure from the traditional settings. A particula...

Online algorithms use a different model from what we’ve seen so far: the algorithm does not have the entire input at its beginning, but receives it piece by piece, sequentially, over time. After receiving each piece, the algorithm must immediately make a decision (updating a data structure, buying/selling stocks) which each have an associated cost. Ultimately, the goal of the algorithm is to mi...

Purpose of this paper: Online product recommendation mechanism (agents) are becoming increasingly available on websites to assist consumers with reducing information overload, provide advice in finding suitable products, and facilitate online consumer decisionmaking. Central of these services is consumers’ satisfaction with recommendation results. Traditional recommendation mechanism (TRM) is b...

In the online random-arrival model, an algorithm receives a sequence of n requests that arrive in a random order. The algorithm is expected to make an irrevocable decision with regard to each request based only on the observed history. We consider the following natural extension of this model: each request arrives k times, and the arrival order is a random permutation of the kn arrivals; the al...

A product warranty is an agreement offered by a producer to a consumer to replace or repair a faulty item, or to partially or fully reimburse the consumer in the event of a failure. Warranties are very widespread and serve many purposes, including protection for producer, seller, and consumer. They are used as signals of quality and as elements of marketing strategies. In this study we review t...

Developing scalable coordination algorithms for multi-agent systems is a hard computational challenge. One useful approach, demonstrated by the Coverage Set Algorithm (CSA), exploits structured interaction to produce significant computational gains. Empirically, CSA exhibits very good anytime performance, but an error bound on the results has not been established. We reformulate the algorithm a...