Animal epidemics can bring severe damage to the livestock sector as well as the whole society. In controlling animal epidemic, the selection of suboptimal control strategies may lead to unnecessary costs which should be avoided. This paper argues that uncertainties about the state of the epidemic, irreversible actions like culling and vaccination of animals, and the possibility of learning duri...

the hub location decision is a long term investment and any changes in it take considerable time and money. in real situations, some parameters are uncertain hence, deterministic models cannot be more efficient. the ability of two-stage stochastic programming is to make a long-term decision by considering effects of it in short term decisions simultaneously. in the two-stage stochastic programm...

in a managed floating exchange rate regime, one of the most important issues is the degree to which the monetary authorities intervene in the foreign exchange market.  the appropriate level of intervention in the foreign exchange market can be discussed in a framework which emphasizes the trade-off between changes in the country’s level of international reserves and minimizes the country’s real...

Successful deployment of cognitive radios requires efficient sensing of the spectrum and dynamic adaptation of the available resources according to the sensed (imperfect) information. While most works design these two tasks separately, in this paper we address them jointly. In particular, we investigate an overlay cognitive radio with multiple secondary users that access orthogonally a set of f...

Industrial equipment is usually repairable. Reliability of repairable systems depends on maintenance actions, and is characterized by mean cumulative function or failure intensity function of failure processes. Evolution trend of the failure intensity function is called the system-level failure pattern in the literature. The failure pattern plays an important role in preventive maintenance deci...

In this chapter we address dynamic decision mechanisms for composite web services. We represent the composite web-service as a (sequential) workflow of tasks. For each task within this workflow, a number of third-party service alternatives may be available. We assume that the third-party service (task) alternatives offer the same functionality at different price-quality levels. Before a task in...

We consider the stochastic optimal control problem of nonlinear mean-field systems in discrete time. We reformulate the problem into a deterministic control problem with marginal distribution as controlled state variable, and prove that dynamic programming principle holds in its general form. We apply our method for solving explicitly the mean-variance portfolio selection and the multivariate l...

We propose an algorithm that given a problem formulated as a Distributed Bayesian Network, finds a coordination strategy which minimizes the communication costs while achieving the desired confidence level of the global solution. We developed a system based on this algorithm which models the communication decision process for any given problem structure as a Markov Decision Process and use dyna...

cell formation problem mainly address how machines should be grouped and parts be processed in cells. in dynamic environments, product mix and demand change in each period of the planning horizon. incorporating such assumption in the model increases flexibility of the system to meet customer’s requirements. in this model, to ensure the reliability of the system in presence of unreliable machine...