The valuation of a real option is preferably done with the inclusion of uncertainties in the model, since the value depends on future costs and revenues, which are not perfectly known today. The usual value of the option is defined as the maximal expected (discounted) profit one may achieve under optimal management of the operation. … Read more
This paper develops an exact solution algorithm for the Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) problem. In the first step, we design a dynamic programming model and use it to construct a novel Multi-valued Decision Diagrams (MDD) representation of all pairwise sequence alignments (PSA). PSA MDDs are then synchronized using side constraints to model the MSA problem … Read more
Planning under uncertainty is a frequently encountered problem. Noisy observation is a typical situation that introduces uncertainty. Such a problem can be formulated as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). However, solving a POMDP is nontrivial and can be computationally expensive in continuous state, action, observation and latent state space. Through this work, we … Read more
Mathematical programming formulation to identify the optimal value function of a negative Markov decision process (MDP) is non-convex, non-smooth, and computationally intractable. Also note that other well-known solution methods of MDP do not work properly for a negative MDP. More specifically, the policy iteration diverges, and the value iteration converges but does not provide an … Read more
The minimum color-degree perfect b-matching roblem (Col-BM) is a new extension of the perfect b-matching problem to edge-colored graphs. The objective of Col-BM is to minimize the maximum number of differently colored edges in a perfect b-matching that are incident to the same node. We show that Col-BM is NP-hard on bipartite graphs by a … Read more
In this paper we provide a deterministic fully polynomial time approximation scheme (FPTAS) for counting two-rowed contingency tables that is faster than any either deterministic or randomized approximation scheme for this problem known to date. Our FPTAS is derived via a somewhat sophisticated usage of the method of K-approximation sets and functions introduced by Halman … Read more
As a consequence of the liberalisation of the European gas market in the last decades, gas trading and transport have been decoupled. At the core of this decoupling are so-called bookings and nominations. Bookings are special capacity right contracts that guarantee that a specified amount of gas can be supplied or withdrawn at certain entry … Read more
Finite horizon periodic review backlog models are considered in this paper for an inventory system that remanufactures two types of cores: buyback cores and normal cores. Returns of used products as buyback cores are modelled to depend on past demands and past sales. We obtain an optimal inventory policy for the model in which returns … Read more
We consider the problem of decision-making in Markov decision processes (MDPs) when the reward or transition probability parameters are not known with certainty. We consider an approach in which the decision-maker (DM) considers multiple models of the parameters for an MDP and wishes to find a policy that optimizes an objective function that considers the … Read more
We analyze a problem of dynamic logistics planning given uncertain demands for a multi-location production-inventory system with transportable modular production capacity. In such systems, production modules provide capacity, and can be moved from one location to another to produce stock and satisfy demand. We formulate a dynamic programming model for a planning problem that considers … Read more