Monotonicity in Markov Reward and Decision Chains: Theory and Applications focuses on monotonicity results for dynamic systems that take values in the natural numbers or in more-dimensional lattices. The results are mostly formulated in terms of controlled queueing systems, but there are also applications to maintenance systems, revenue management, and so forth. The focus is on results that are obtained by inductively proving properties of the dynamic programming value function. A framework is provided for using this method that unifies results obtained for different models. The author also provides a comprehensive overview of the results that can be obtained through it, in which he discusses not only (partial) characterizations of optimal policies but also applications of monotonicity to optimization problems and the comparison of systems. Monotonicity in Markov Reward and Decision Chains: Theory and Applications is an invaluable resource for anyone planning or conducting research in this particular area. The essentials of the topic are presented in an accessible manner and an extensive bibliography guides towards further reading.

This book presents classical Markov Decision Processes (MDP) for real-life applications and optimization. MDP allows users to develop and formally support approximate and simple decision rules, and this book showcases state-of-the-art applications in which MDP was key to the solution approach. The book is divided into six parts. Part 1 is devoted to the state-of-the-art theoretical foundation of MDP, including approximate methods such as policy improvement, successive approximation and infinite state spaces as well as an instructive chapter on Approximate Dynamic Programming. It then continues with five parts of specific and non-exhaustive application areas. Part 2 covers MDP healthcare applications, which includes different screening procedures, appointment scheduling, ambulance scheduling and blood management. Part 3 explores MDP modeling within transportation. This ranges from public to private transportation, from airports and traffic lights to car parking or charging your electric car . Part 4 contains three chapters that illustrates the structure of approximate policies for production or manufacturing structures. In Part 5, communications is highlighted as an important application area for MDP. It includes Gittins indices, down-to-earth call centers and wireless sensor networks. Finally Part 6 is dedicated to financial modeling, offering an instructive review to account for financial portfolios and derivatives under proportional transactional costs. The MDP applications in this book illustrate a variety of both standard and non-standard aspects of MDP modeling and its practical use. This book should appeal to readers for practitioning, academic research and educational purposes, with a background in, among others, operations research, mathematics, computer science, and industrial engineering.

A unique treatment of evolutionary games, indirect reciprocity, sequential decision making, and application to wireless and social networks.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th European Performance Engineering Workshop, EPEW 2011, held in The English Lake District in October 2011. The 16 regular papers and 6 poster presentations papers presented together with 2 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on performance-oriented design and analysis methods, model checking and validation, simulation techniques and experimental design, performability modelling and performance and power consumption tradeoffs.

As computers continue to remain essential tools for the pursuit of physics, medicine, economics, social sciences, and more, supercomputers are proving that they can further extend and greatly enhance as-of-yet undiscovered knowledge and solve the world’s most complex problems. As these instruments continue to lead to groundbreaking discoveries and breakthroughs, it is imperative that research remains up to date with the latest findings and uses. The Handbook of Research on Methodologies and Applications of Supercomputing is a comprehensive and critical reference book that provides research on the latest advances of control flow and dataflow supercomputing and highlights selected emerging big data applications needing high acceleration and/or low power. Consequently, this book advocates the need for hybrid computing, where the control flow part represents the host architecture and dataflow part represents the acceleration architecture. These issues cover the initial eight chapters. The remaining eight chapters cover selected modern applications that are best implemented on a hybrid computer, in which the transactional parts (serial code) are implemented on the control flow part and the loops (parallel code) on the dataflow part. These final eight chapters cover two major application domains: scientific computing and computing for digital economy. This book offers applications in marketing, medicine, energy systems, and library science, among others, and is an essential source for scientists, programmers, engineers, practitioners, researchers, academicians, and students interested in the latest findings and advancements in supercomputing.

This book is dedicated to Jinhua Cao on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Jinhua Cao is one of the most famous reliability theorists. His main contributions include: published over 100 influential scientific papers; published an interesting reliability book in Chinese in 1986, which has greatly influenced the reliability of education, academic research and engineering applications in China; initiated and organized Reliability Professional Society of China (the first part of Operations Research Society of China) since 1981. The high admiration that Professor Cao enjoys in the reliability community all over the world was witnessed by the enthusiastic response of each contributor in this book. The contributors are leading researchers with diverse research perspectives. The research areas of the book iclude a broad range of topics related to reliability models, queueing theory, manufacturing systems, supply chain finance, risk management, Markov decision processes, blockchain and so forth. The book consists of a brief Preface describing the main achievements of Professor Cao; followed by congratulations from Professors Way Kuo and Wei Wayne Li, and by Operations Research Society of China, and Reliability Professional Society of China; and further followed by 25 articles roughly grouped together. Most of the articles are written in a style understandable to a wide audience. This book is useful to anyone interested in recent developments in reliability, network security, system safety, and their stochastic modeling and analysis.

World leading experts give their accounts of the modern mathematical models in the field: Markov Decision Processes, controlled diffusions, piece-wise deterministic processes etc, with a wide range of performance functionals. One of the aims is to give a general view on the state-of-the-art. The authors use Dynamic Programming, Convex Analytic Approach, several numerical methods, index-based approach and so on. Most chapters either contain well developed examples, or are entirely devoted to the application of the mathematical control theory to real life problems from such fields as Insurance, Portfolio Optimization and Information Transmission. The book will enable researchers, academics and research students to get a sense of novel results, concepts, models, methods, and applications of controlled stochastic processes.

The Wiley-Interscience Paperback Series consists of selected books that have been made more accessible to consumers in an effort to increase global appeal and general circulation. With these new unabridged softcover volumes, Wiley hopes to extend the lives of these works by making them available to future generations of statisticians, mathematicians, and scientists. "This text is unique in bringing together so many results hitherto found only in part in other texts and papers. . . . The text is fairly self-contained, inclusive of some basic mathematical results needed, and provides a rich diet of examples, applications, and exercises. The bibliographical material at the end of each chapter is excellent, not only from a historical perspective, but because it is valuable for researchers in acquiring a good perspective of the MDP research potential." —Zentralblatt fur Mathematik ". . . it is of great value to advanced-level students, researchers, and professional practitioners of this field to have now a complete volume (with more than 600 pages) devoted to this topic. . . . Markov Decision Processes: Discrete Stochastic Dynamic Programming represents an up-to-date, unified, and rigorous treatment of theoretical and computational aspects of discrete-time Markov decision processes." —Journal of the American Statistical Association

Continuous-time Markov decision processes (MDPs), also known as controlled Markov chains, are used for modeling decision-making problems that arise in operations research (for instance, inventory, manufacturing, and queueing systems), computer science, communications engineering, control of populations (such as fisheries and epidemics), and management science, among many other fields. This volume provides a unified, systematic, self-contained presentation of recent developments on the theory and applications of continuous-time MDPs. The MDPs in this volume include most of the cases that arise in applications, because they allow unbounded transition and reward/cost rates. Much of the material appears for the first time in book form.

This volume provides a general overview of discrete- and continuous-time Markov control processes and stochastic games, along with a look at the range of applications of stochastic control and some of its recent theoretical developments. These topics include various aspects of dynamic programming, approximation algorithms, and infinite-dimensional linear programming. In all, the work comprises 18 carefully selected papers written by experts in their respective fields. Optimization, Control, and Applications of Stochastic Systems will be a valuable resource for all practitioners, researchers, and professionals in applied mathematics and operations research who work in the areas of stochastic control, mathematical finance, queueing theory, and inventory systems. It may also serve as a supplemental text for graduate courses in optimal control and dynamic games.