Selection procedures help identify the best of a finite set of simulated alternatives. The indifference-zone approach focuses on the probability of correct selection, but the expected opportunity cost of a potentially incorrect decision may make more sense in business contexts. This paper provides the first selection procedure that guarantees an upper bound for the expected opportunity cost, in...

Data compression is a fundamental problem in quantum and classical information theory. A typical version of the problem is that the sender Alice receives a (classical or quantum) state from some known ensemble and needs to transmit them to the receiver Bob with average error below some specified bound. We consider the case in which the message can have a variable length and the goal is to minim...

Consider a general path planning problem of a robot on a graph with edge costs, and where each node has a Boolean value of success or failure (with respect to some task) with a given probability. The objective is to plan a path for the robot on the graph that minimizes the expected cost till success. In this paper, it is our goal to bring a foundational understanding to this problem. We start b...

Classical facility location models like the P -median problem (PMP) and the uncapacitated fixed-charge location problem (UFLP) implicitly assume that once constructed, the facilities chosen will always operate as planned. In reality, however, facilities “fail” from time to time due to poor weather, labor actions, changes of ownership, or other factors. Such failures may lead to excessive transp...

BACKGROUND California Workers' Compensation (WC) system costs are under review. With recently approved California State Assembly Bill (AB) 749 and Senate Bill (SB) 228, an assessment of proposed pharmaceutical cost savings is needed. METHODS A large workers' compensation database provided by the California Workers' Compensation Institute (CWCI) and Medi-Cal pharmacy costs obtained from the St...

In this article, an imperfect vendor–buyer inventory system with stochastic demand, process quality control and learning in production is investigated. It is assumed that there are learning in production and investment for process quality improvement at the vendor’s end, and lot-size dependent lead-time at the buyer’s end. The lead-time for the first batch and those for the rest of the batches ...