This paper considers a repairable system which undergoes preventive maintenance (PM) periodically and is minimally repaired at each failure. Mostpreventivemaintenancemodelsassumethat thesystemimprovesateachPMsothat thehazardrate isreducedtothatofanewsystemortosome specified level. In this paper, we consider the situation where each PM relieves stress temporarily and hence slows the rate of syst...

This paper proposes a new integrative view of manufacturing cell formation and both inter-cell and intra-cell layout problems. Cells formation and their popular bi-directional linear layout are determined simultaneously through a Dynamic Programming algorithm (with the objective of minimizing the inter-cell flow cost under a cell size constraint). This Dynamic Programming algorithm is implement...

Abstract: This study is concerned with replenishment decision making with repairable nonconforming products, backordering and random equipment failure during production uptime. In real world manufacturing systems, due to different factors generation of nonconforming items and unexpected machine breakdown are inevitable. Also, in certain business environments various situations between vendor an...

We show that the optimal decision policy for several types of Bayesian sequential detection problems has a threshold switching curve structure on the space of posterior distributions. This is established by using lattice programming and stochastic orders in a partially observed Markov decision process (POMDP) framework. A stochastic gradient algorithm is presented to estimate the optimal linear...

We show that the optimal decision policy for several types of Bayesian sequential detection problems has a threshold switching curve structure on the space of posterior distributions. This is established by using lattice programming and stochastic orders in a partially observed Markov decision process (POMDP) framework. A stochastic gradient algorithm is presented to estimate the optimal linear...

Like classical block codes, a locally repairable code also obeys the Singleton-type bound (we call a locally repairable code optimal if it achieves the Singleton-type bound). In the breakthrough work of [14], several classes of optimal locally repairable codes were constructed via subcodes of Reed-Solomon codes. Thus, the lengths of the codes given in [14] are upper bounded by the code alphabet...

If the prospective evaluation of all feasible strategies of patient management is not possible or efficient then this poses a number of questions: (i) which clinical decision problems will be worth evaluating through prospective clinical research; (ii) if a clinical decision problem is worth evaluating which of the many competing alternatives should be considered "relevant" and be compared in t...

Time dependent availability is an important index used for evaluation of operational performance of repairable industrial systems. Traditionally, Markov analysis procedures are carried out for such studies. This becomes mathematically intensive when applied for larger systems. Moreover, this method does not indicate at what time a system reaches its steady state. However, in practice it is impo...

This note comments on a paper published by Wagner and Davis ( Decision Sciences (2001), 32(4), 557–573 ) . These authors present an integer-programming model for the single-item discrete sequential search problem with group activities. Based on their experiments, they conjecture that the problem can be solved as a linear program. In this note, we provide a counterexample for which the optimal v...

We consider information filtering, in which we face a stream of items too voluminous to process by hand (e.g., scientific articles, blog posts, emails), and must rely on a computer system to automatically filter out irrelevant items. Such systems face the exploration vs. exploitation tradeoff, in which it may be beneficial to present an item despite a low probability of relevance, just to learn...