We address the problem of designing optimal bu er management policies in shared memory switches when packets already accepted in the switch can be dropped pushed out Our goal is to maximize the overall throughput or equivalently to minimize the overall loss probability in the system For a system with two output ports we prove that the optimal policy is of push out with threshold type POT The sa...

n the past, monetary policy options were described in terms of a tradeoff between the unemployment rate and the inflation rate, the so-called Phillips curve. Macroeconomists no longer view the Phillips curve as a viable “policy menu” because its use as such is inconsistent with mainstream macroeconomic theory. In the late 1970s, John Taylor suggested an alternative set of options for policymake...

policy making in health is largely thought to be driven by three ‘i's namely ideas, interests and institutions. recent years have seen a shift in approach with increasing reliance being placed on role of evidence for policy making. the present arti­cle ascertains the role of ideas and ideologies in shaping evidence which is used to aid in policy decisions. the article dis­cusses different theor...

forest and colleagues have persuasively made the case that policy capacity is a fundamental prerequisite to health reform. they offer a comprehensive life-cycle definition of policy capacity and stress that it involves much more than problem identification and option development. i would like to offer a canadian perspective. if we define health reform as re-orienting the health system from acut...

We examine the scope of inquiry into the measurement and assessment of the state public health policy environment. We argue that there are gains to be made by looking systematically at policies both within and across health domains. We draw from the public health and public policy literature to develop the concepts of interdomain and intradomain policy comprehensiveness and illustrate how these...

We consider the Longest Queue Drop memory management policy in shared-memory switches consisting of N output ports. The shared memory of size M ≥ N may have an arbitrary number of input ports. Each packet may be admitted by any incoming port, but must be destined to a specific output port and each output port may be used by only one queue. The Longest Queue Drop policy is a natural online strat...

We study a two-echelon supply chain with one warehouse and N (nonidentical) retailers facing stochastic demand. An easy-to-implement inventory policy, the so-called power-of-two (POT) policy, is proposed to manage inventory for the system. To maintain a certain service level, safety stocks are kept at the warehouse and each retailer outlet to buffer random demand. Our analysis highlights the im...

In this paper we consider policies for scheduling cells in an input-queued multicast switch. It is assumed that each input maintains a single queue for arriving multicast cells and that only the cell at the head of line (HOL) can be observed and scheduled at one time. The policies are assumed to be work-conserving,which means that cells may be copied to the outputs that they request over severa...

Policy Iteration (PI) is a widely-used family of algorithms for computing an optimal policy for a given Markov Decision Problem (MDP). Starting with an arbitrary initial policy, PI repeatedly updates to a dominating policy until an optimal policy is found. The update step involves switching the actions corresponding to a set of “improvable” states, which are easily identified. Whereas progress ...