We consider the planning of production over the infinite horizon in a system with timevarying convex production and inventory holding costs. This production lot size problem is frequently faced in industry where a forecast of future demand must be made and production is to be scheduled based on the forecast. Because forecasts of the future are costly and difficult to validate, a firm would like...

This paper presents a receding horizon controller (RHC) that can be used to design trajectories for an aerial vehicle operating in an environment with disturbances. Various constraints are imposed in the problem, such as turning rate limits and bounds on the vehicle speed, and target regions and no-fly zones are included in the environment. The proposed algorithm modifies these constraints to e...

This thesis presents several trajectory optimization algorithms for a team of cooperating unmanned vehicles operating in an uncertain and dynamic environment. The first, designed for a single vehicle, is the Robust Safe But Knowledgeable (RSBK) algorithm, which combines several previously published approaches to recover the main advantages of each. This includes a sophisticated cost-to-go funct...

In this paper we show that the problem of optimal mine planning can be cast in the framework of receding horizon control. Traditional formulations of this problem have cast it in the framework of mixed integer linear programming. In this paper, we present an alternative formulation of the mine planning problem using the “language” of control engineering. We show that this alternative formulatio...

The requirement for adaptable and re-configurable systems for manufacturing has highlighted the inadequacies of traditional centralised control approaches. As a result, research in this area has focused on the decentralised approach, which involves the use of a number of interacting decision-makers in place of a single centralised one. The question of what are the appropriate control architectu...

Decentralized partially observable Markov decision processes (DEC-POMDPs) are used to plan policies for multiple agents that must maximize a joint reward function but do not communicate with each other. The agents act under uncertainty about each other and the environment. This planning task arises in optimization of wireless networks, and other scenarios where communication between agents is r...

When planning for a new manufacturing system to produce several products over a planning horizon, firms usually face an important decision regarding how to select the optimal quantity and portfolio of product-dedicated and flexible capacities. Flexible systems may alleviate the unfavorable effects of demand uncertainties, however they require higher investment costs compared to dedicated system...