We study a class of procurement auctions with a budget constraint, where an auctioneer is interested in buying resources or services from a set of agents. Ideally, the auctioneer would like to select a subset of the resources so as to maximize his valuation function, without exceeding a given budget. As the resources are owned by strategic agents however, our overall goal is to design mechanism...

We study the controller synthesis problem under budget constraints. In this problem, there is a cost associated with making an observation, and a controller can make only a limited number of observations in each round so that the total cost of the observations does not exceed a given fixed budget. The controller must ensure some ω-regular requirement subject to the budget constraint. Budget con...

We use discrete event simulation to model and analyze a real-life emergency department (ED). Our approach relies on the appropriate integration of most real-life ED features to the simulation model in order to derive useful practical results. Data is supplied from the ED of the urban French hospital Saint Camille. Our purpose is to optimize the human resource staffing levels. We want to minimiz...

A soft budget constraint arises when a government is unable to commit to not 'bailout' a public hospital if the public hospital exhausts its budget before the end of the budget period. It is shown that if the political costs of a 'bailout' are relatively small, then the public hospital exhausts the welfare-maximising budget before the end of the budget period and a 'bailout' occurs. In anticipa...

We introduce and study four optimization problems that generalize the well-known subset sum problem. Given a node-weighted digraph, select a subset of vertices whose total weight does not exceed a given budget. Some additional constraints need to be satisfied. The (weak resp.) digraph constraint imposes that if (all incoming nodes of resp.) a node x belongs to the solution, then the latter comp...

To maximize sales or profit given a fixed budget, direct marketing targets a preset top percentage of consumers who are the most likely to respond and purchase a greater amount. Existing forecasting models, however, largely ignore the resource constraint and render sup-optimal performance in maximizing profit given the budget constraint. This study proposes a model of partial order constrained ...

This paper discusses a new approach to use a specially constructed social relation graph with high homophily to select a survey respondent group under a limited budget such that the result of the survey is biased to the minority opinions. This approach has a wide range of potential applications, e.g. collecting diversified complaints from the customers while most of them are satisfied, but is h...