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This study presents a comprehensive approach to optimizing inventory management under stochastic demand by leveraging Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS) with grid search and Bayesian optimization. By using a business case of historical demand…
We consider a single-echelon inventory system under periodic review with two suppliers facing stochastic demand, where excess demand is backlogged. The expedited supplier has a shorter lead time than the regular supplier but charges a…
Inventory and queueing systems are often designed by controlling weighted combination of some time-averaged performance metrics (like cumulative holding, shortage, server-utilization or congestion costs); but real-world constraints, like…
We present an alternative view for the study of optimal control of partially observed Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs). We first revisit the traditional (and by now standard) separated-design method of reducing the problem to fully…
Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) provide a modeling framework for autonomous decision making under uncertainty and imperfect sensing, e.g. robot manipulation and self-driving cars. However, optimal control of POMDPs…
Motion generation in cluttered, dense, and dynamic environments is a central topic in robotics, rendered as a multi-objective decision-making problem. Current approaches trade-off between safety and performance. On the one hand, reactive…
This paper studies a {\it reversible} investment problem where a social planner aims to control its capacity production in order to fit optimally the random demand of a good. Our model allows for general diffusion dynamics on the demand as…
We tackle the issue of finding a good policy when the number of policy updates is limited. This is done by approximating the expected policy reward as a sequence of concave lower bounds which can be efficiently maximized, drastically…
We consider the following two deterministic inventory optimization problems over a finite planning horizon $T$ with non-stationary demands. (a) Submodular Joint Replenishment Problem: This involves multiple item types and a single retailer…
In this paper, we show the optimality of a certain class of disturbance-affine control policies in the context of one-dimensional, constrained, multi-stage robust optimization. Our results cover the finite horizon case, with minimax…
This research considers the ranking and selection with input uncertainty. The objective is to maximize the posterior probability of correctly selecting the best alternative under a fixed simulation budget, where each alternative is measured…
In this paper, we propose a unified stochastic optimal control framework that integrates time-optimal control problems with classical stochastic optimal control formulations. Unlike conventional deterministic time-optimal control models,…
It is well known that for any finite state Markov decision process (MDP) there is a memoryless deterministic policy that maximizes the expected reward. For partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), optimal memoryless policies…
We consider the problem of learning control policies that optimize a reward function while satisfying constraints due to considerations of safety, fairness, or other costs. We propose a new algorithm, Projection-Based Constrained Policy…
We study the problem of optimally managing an inventory with unknown demand trend. Our formulation leads to a stochastic control problem under partial observation, in which a Brownian motion with non-observable drift can be singularly…
One often encounters the curse of dimensionality in the application of dynamic programming to determine optimal policies for controlled Markov chains. In this paper, we provide a method to construct sub-optimal policies along with a bound…
In this study, we analyze and compare the performance of state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning algorithms for solving the supply chain inventory management problem. This complex sequential decision-making problem consists of…
We consider approximate dynamic programming for the infinite-horizon stationary $\gamma$-discounted optimal control problem formalized by Markov Decision Processes. While in the exact case it is known that there always exists an optimal…
One practical open problem is the development of a distributed algorithm that achieves near-optimal utility using only a finite (and small) buffer size for queues in a stochastic network. This paper studies utility maximization (or cost…
In this paper, we investigate the online allocation problem of maximizing the overall revenue subject to both lower and upper bound constraints. Compared to the extensively studied online problems with only resource upper bounds, the…