This paper deals with an i * Corresponding author Email address:   nventory system with one central warehouse and a number of identical retailers. We consider perishable-on-the-shelf items; that is, all items have a fixed shelf life and start to age on their arrival at the retailers. Each retailer faces Poisson demand and employs (1, T) inventory policy. Although demand not met at a retai...

Lemma 1 In the (t, g) policy space: (i) The ideal policy of py is (t = 1, g = g∗(1)) and the ideal policy of ry is (t = 0, g = 0) if θ > w wh and otherwise it is (t = t ∗, g = t∗w θ ) for some t∗ ∈ (0, 1). The indifference curves of ry and py are weakly concave and differentiable. For all t0 ∈ [0, 1], an indifference curve of ry(py) that goes through (t0, 0) lies on or above a line that goes th...

INTRODUCTION Future physician leaders must be able to critically assess health care policy and patient advocacy issues. Currently, no nationally accepted, standardized curriculum to provide advocacy education during orthopedic residency training exists. We therefore developed an "Advocacy" curriculum for our orthopedic residents designed to direct particular attention to patient advocacy, speci...

let H denote the collection of all possible policy choice vectors. Then a sequence (h1, h2, . . .) of government policy choice vectors ht is said to be chosen in accordance with a (deterministic) policy rule if there exists some well-defined function g:I → H mapping information For simplicity of exposition, only deterministic policy rules are considered in this section, that is, policy rules th...

We present a new algorithm, incremental least squares policy iteration (ILSPI), for finding the infinite-horizon policy for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). The ILSPI algorithm computes a basis representation of the value function by minimizing the Bellman residual and it performs policy improvement in reachable belief states. A number of optimal basis functions are dete...

Let π be a nonidling fully collaborative policy. Under any fully collaborative policy, our model is equivalent to one where the service requirements of successive customers at station j ∈ {1, . . . , N} are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) with mean 1 αjγj , service rates of collaborating servers are additive, and the service rates depend only on servers, i.e., μij = μi for all ...