There are two conflicting trends to be considered when optimising crop cycles on a farm. While yield and quality increase as harvest age increases, longer crop cycles reduce the total annual area harvested, potentially reducing the farm's total production. Optimisation of crop cycles is a complex problem, which has to account for the dynamic impact of a multitude of agroclimatic and economic fa...

Despite the significant effects of agricultural pest management on crop yield, profit, environmental quality, and sustainability, farmers oftentimes lack datadriven decision support to help optimize pest management strategies. To address this need, we curated a comprehensive data set that consists of pest, pest management, and yield information from 1498 commercial cotton crops in California’s ...

Organizational Nimbleness and Operational Policies: The Case of Optimal Control of Maintenance Under Uncertainty ALI DOGRAMACI and SURESH SETHI Abstract The speed with which an organization takes action against unplanned failure and scrapping of its capital equipment is used as a measure of organizational nimbleness. Operational decisions at the plant level are studied in the setting of the opt...

In this paper we introduce the optimal solution for a simple and yet practical inventory policy with the important characteristic which eliminates the uncertainty in demand for suppliers. In this new policy which is different from the classical inventory policies, the time interval between any two consecutive orders is fixed and the quantity of each order is one. Assuming the fixed ordering cos...

Background: In the context of the recent Greek economic crisis and its detrimental impact on healthcare system as well as the complete absence of a mechanism to map and plan human resources, a need for rethinking healthcare workforce management at a national level was emerged. Objectives: The aim of the study was to identify factors that influence the current and future demand for and supply of...

This paper examines the conditions for which ramp metering can be bene®cial to the overall system in terms of travel time savings for a simple trac corridor that consists of a freeway and a set of parallel arterials connected by entrance ramps. The focus is on analyzing state and control relationships to arrive at general analytical results regarding optimal metering policies, rather than on e...

This paper studies the optimal level of discretion in policymaking. We consider a fiscal policy model where the government has time-inconsistent preferences with a present-bias towards public spending. The government chooses a fiscal rule to trade off its desire to commit to not overspend against its desire to have flexibility to react to privately observed shocks to the value of spending. We a...

The interaction of bondholder's conversion and issuer's call in a convertible bond leads to a game option model between the two counterparties. Like typical pricing models for corporate debts, the fair value of a convertible bond is highly dependent on issuer's credit risk, tax benefits of coupons and other structural features. The convertible bond pricing models in the literature can be catego...

This paper presents a motor control learning strategy in the presence of noise. Noise is important to consider as any real-world environment contain elements that cannot be accurately modeled. Learning is accomplished through analysis of control-response pairs. Policy parameters are sampled from multivariate normal distributions that slowly converge around the optimal policy, which can then be ...