Related papers: A Dynamic Model for Managing Volunteer Engagement

We study a make-to-order system with a finite set of customers. Production is stochastic with a nonlinear dependence between the ordered quantity and the production rate. Customers may have to queue until their turn arrives, and therefore…

This paper is based on a case study of an IT organization in a large, US-based healthcare provider, and develops simluation models to identify areas for performance improvement. These organizations are often grouped into departments by…

Mobile robot navigation in dynamic human environments requires policies that balance adaptability to diverse behaviors with compliance to safety constraints. We hypothesize that integrating data-driven rewards with rule-based objectives…

We consider the problem of designing an expected-revenue maximizing mechanism for allocating multiple non-perishable goods of $k$ varieties to flexible consumers over $T$ time steps. In our model, a random number of goods of each variety…

Dynamic decisions are pivotal to economic policy making. We show how existing evidence from randomized control trials can be utilized to guide personalized decisions in challenging dynamic environments with budget and capacity constraints.…

We investigate opportunities offered by telematics and analytics to enable better informed, and more integrated, collaborative management decisions on construction sites. We focus on efficient refuelling of assets across construction sites.…

The flocking motion control is concerned with managing the possible conflicts between local and team objectives of multi-agent systems. The overall control process guides the agents while monitoring the flock-cohesiveness and localization.…

Data-driven approaches for modelling contact-rich tasks address many of the difficulties that analytical models bear. For real-world scenarios, the hardware capabilities constrain the available measurements and consequently, every step of…

Unlimited access to a motorway network can, in overloaded conditions, cause a loss of capacity. Ramp metering (signals on slip roads to control access to the motorway) can help avoid this loss of capacity. The design of ramp metering…

We consider a meal delivery service fulfilling dynamic customer requests given a set of couriers over the course of a day. A courier's duty is to pick-up an order from a restaurant and deliver it to a customer. We model this service as a…

The rapid adoption of electric buses by transit agencies around the world is leading to new challenges in the planning and operation of bus networks. In particular, the limited driving range of electric vehicles imposes operational…

Classical queuing network control strategies typically rely on accurate knowledge of model data, i.e., arrival and service rates. However, such data are not always available and may be time-variant. To address this challenge, we consider a…

Motivated by the operational problems in click and collect systems, such as curbside pickup programs, we study a joint admission control and capacity allocation problem. We consider a system where arriving customers have preferred service…

We study transportation networks controlled by dynamic feedback tolls. We focus on a multiscale model whereby the dynamics of the traffic flows are intertwined with those of the routing choices. The latter are influenced by the current…

We consider a dynamic control problem associated with a generalized Brownian network, the objective being to minimize expected discounted cost over an infinite planning horizon. In this Brownian control problem (BCP), both the system…

Crowdsourcing refers to the arrangement in which contributions are solicited from a large group of unrelated people. Due to this nature, crowdsourcers (or task requesters) often face uncertainty about the workers' capabilities which, in…

In communication networks structure and dynamics are tightly coupled. The structure controls the flow of information and is itself shaped by the dynamical process of information exchanged between nodes. In order to reconcile structure and…

In this article, we employ an input-output approach to expand the study of cooperative multi-agent control and optimization problems characterized by mean-field interactions that admit decentralized and selfish solutions. The setting…

Network virtualization and programmability allow operators to deploy a wide range of services over a common physical infrastructure and elastically allocate cloud and network resources according to changing requirements. While the elastic…

We consider the problem of controlling the group behavior of a large number of dynamic systems that are constantly interacting with each other. These systems are assumed to have identical dynamics (e.g., birds flock, robot swarm) and their…